Category Blog

Well, we knew this day would come and lo and behold it is finally here.  For those who don’t know Tech Field Day is an event which brings together Independent Industry Thought Leaders with IT Vendors with interesting, innovative or otherwise compelling products to discuss.   The Delegates are bloggers, speakers, writers, podcasters and otherwise those who have a social presence with great influence on the products and companies as perceived by IT Practitioners.

We never knew if I’d ever make it as a Delegate because one of the ‘rules’ since its inception is simply… You cannot be a vendor.   Well, with the exception of the past two years in Afghanistan (couldn’t get away to delegate, so to speak :)) I was as Vendor as you could get with NetApp and EMC.   So finally, It’s here! I’m not only officially a delegate but I’m officially back into the game of an independent thought leader… The kind who likes to take things to the EXTREME to understand them and ensure I’m providing the most accurate picture of whatever I am talking about!

What are the details for Virtualization Tech Field Day 4?!

This ought to be fun.  January 14th through the 16th in Austin, TX we will be going toe to toe with numerous vendors!

I’ll be honest… the capturing of these company images kind of sucks, but it is what it is. At least they’re clickable! <3

But the best part, next to the vendors themselves honestly, has to be the various Delegates. I mean c’mon these are rockstars in their own right and it’s not a companies product which is as valuable as the insight these Delegates offer.

	Amit Panchal	@AmitPanchal76	Technical IT Manager and blogger at apanchal.com.
	Amy Manley	@WyrdGirl	12 years in IT, vExpert and an automation junkie
	Christopher Kusek	@cxi	CTO at @Xiologix – EVP of Engineering, Technology Evangelist, vExpert, EMC Elect, BDA, CISSP, MCT, Cloud, Ninja, Vegan, Single, Father, Cat, Humorist, Author
	Emad Younis	@Emad_Younis	Emad is a datacenter enthusiast, 2 x vExpert, and blogger @ emadyounis.com.
	James Green	@JDGreen	James is an independent blogger at www.virtadmin.com, a 2014 vExpert, and works as a virtualization consultant in the Midwest.
	Jeff Wilson	@Agnostic_Node1	Passionate yet disciplined virtualization & storage engineer in the SME market.
	Julian Wood	@Julian_Wood	Julian is a London based enterprise infrasstructure architect and blogger.
	Justin Warren	@JPWarren	Justin is a consultant and freelance journalist who enjoys coding in Python and words that are fun to say, like ‘llama’ and ‘shenanigans’.
	Larry Smith	@MrLESmithJr	19 yrs. in IT | 11 yrs. VMware virtualization | VMware NSX Nut
	Marco Broeken	@MBroeken	Dutch Virtualization Admirer and DaaS Lover, Blogger at www.vClouds.nl
	Matt Simmons	@StandaloneSA	Small Infrastructure IT Administrator in Academia
	Mike Preston	@MWPreston	3 x vExpert, blogger @ mwpreston.net and typical Canadian eh!

It will be a pretty busy schedule, but we’ll stay on top of it!

• Wednesday, Jan 14 – 09:30 – 11:30 –SimpliVity Presents at Virtualization Field Day 4
• Wednesday, Jan 14 – 13:00 – 15:00 – Platform9 Systems Presents at Virtualization Field Day 4
• Wednesday, Jan 14 – 15:30 – 17:30 – VMTurbo Presents at Virtualization Field Day 4
• Thursday, Jan 15 – 08:00 – 10:00 – StorMagic Presents at Virtualization Field Day 4
• Thursday, Jan 15 – 10:30 – 12:30 – SolarWinds Presents at Virtualization Field Day 4
• Thursday, Jan 15 – 13:30 – 15:30 – CommVault Presents at Virtualization Field Day 4
• Friday, Jan 16 – 08:00 – 12:00 – Dell Presents at Virtualization Field Day 4
• Friday, Jan 16 – 13:00 – 15:00 – Scale Computing Presents at Virtualization Field Day 4

And of course a hearty thanks go out to the Event Staff who make this possible, the beautiful Stephen Foskett @SFoskett and the dashing Tom Hollingsworth @NetworkingNerd 

So check it out as I know you will, not to mention the deeply grueling and intensive times I know I’ll be giving the vendors because I’ve been one and I know what it’s like ;) And be sure to check out the numerous blogs coming!

So you login to your website only to find OMG WE’VE BEEN HAXX0RED!@#!@! Which quite frankly sucks.   It could be any number of issues, but let’s say you suffer from the condition where someone has inserted some encrypted block of txt at the top of each PHP file to execute when you launch the files.

You can fix it, one by one but that’s annoying as all hell and lengthy… going into vi for each file, deleting the first line, rinse, repeat, AHHHH!!!!

So you search the internet with various phrases like “remove text from php file” “how to strip txt out of files” “recursively fix hacked php worpress” I mean the list can and DOES go on, but the point is you end up on Forums and blogs where people are like LET ME SHOW YOU HOW IT’S DONE, resulting in them basically telling you to read the Man Pages.  Hey douche-bag, be a MAN and tell me exactly what I need to do.  The time to ‘learn’ how to do it is all fine and dandy for AFTER I have the problem resolved!   It’d be like going to the Mechanic to get your car fixed and having him laugh at you for not knowing what is wrong, and not fixing it until you can explain how you’d fix it yourself.  Guess what, you’re a dick and this is not a time for a learning lesson!

This is a time for a learning lesson!

If you happen to find yourself in the position to needing to ‘strip’ an arbitrary string of information from one or more files, here’s a way to do it, with an explanation of what each line of this means!

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i ‘s/.*zend.*//g’ *.php

So, some of you may be wondering, “Well, crap that works! I fixed it! but what does it mean and how do I use this to my benefit in the future?!” Here is a breakdown of the syntax and some alternative selections you can choose, and I’ll be explaining it in ‘reverse’ because that’s sort of how it is executing.

sed -i ‘s/.*zend.*//g’ *.php

    sed is a stream editor which with the –i flag is telling the system to edit files “in place” saving out to the original file as opposed to saving to another file name or type. You’ll notice that it calls “’s/” which is to “substitute” the contents of the following which is a search string, in this case *zend.* and what follows the “/g’” helps you choose what to replace the contents with, and in this case, the content will be nothing, e.g. truncate the line.

And lastly the “*.php” at the end specifies on what file types we want to perform this command against.  We could easily choose “*.htm” or even “*”

xargs –0

     What exactly does this mean? Well, this tells the system to expect a ‘null’ character, this is often used in accord with find and –print0 as below

find . –type f –print0

   What is going on here, is the system is going ‘find’ based upon the parameters we specified in the other areas (e.g. *.php) initiating at the current directory of “.”   But then what we get is “-type f” basically tells the system to indicate that a host has been identified as having that ‘string’ of text to replace, and “-print0” will then print out what the “filename” was.

How this basically sums up is the system starting at a base directory starts searching through all subdirectories looking for files which have a certain string of text in them.  When it finds that string of text the print0 will tell xargs to print the name of the file which HAD the string of text.  With the filename identified then sed will step in an execute the ‘replacement’ of the string of text, which in this case basically deletes it.   It continues searching through the directory structure until it has exhausted the criteria of finding .php files which have the data in mind.

Now, you’re not limited to using ‘sed’ for this, you could just as easily run with using “grep –Ev” to find and replace the string of text for you, it really comes down to what you’re comfortable with and how you want to cut it.

Hopefully the lesson here is… Here is a solution to a problem that some of you WILL suffer from in your life and hell, I can go back to use this script again in the event that one of my sites I manage gets screwed up again.    Respectively with a little effort you can use this to find and replace text in files in your environment, say modifying host files en-masse or changing DNS in resolv.conf throughout your environment… Whatever floats your boat!

Special thanks to my twitter friends who tossed out VARIOUS ways to do this!   @Fr3d_org @davidchapa @cody_bunch

Hopefully you found this useful, I sure as hell did!

We all know how these things go, content creators create content, votes happen whether strictly or arbitrarily and then BAM! You get placed on a list!

It’s kind of interesting, kind of flattering, and well, I’m sharing it here because it happened! Here is the snippet of me, and behind the more there are the 99 other blogs mentioned and referenced! I do wish you the best in finding good content here and without! :)

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There you are, sitting there posting an absolutely awesome blog post which is getting a LOT of attention. OMG THE HITS JUST KEEP COMING IN! EVERYONE KEEPS SAYING HOW AWESOME IT IS. Yet no one is commenting on it on the blog. WTF is going on here!   So you take a moment to browse over to your blog post everyone is so enamored with only to find in the comments section.

And you start freaking out. WTF IS GOING ON HERE!?!? I DIDN’T CLOSE COMMENTS.   It’s strongly possible, that you didn’t.  But you can fix this.

When this happened to me just the other day I immediately started doing searches for “Wordpress Comments are closed” “Wordpress comments disabled” “disabled comments” and every other iteration of it, only to find… a whole REAM of absolutely useless and piece of crap posts and forum conversations which did NOT help.   A lot of them refer to checking the “Discussions” area in the control panel of wordpress… Yea, that doesn’t change over night.

But I also recall some time ago having made a change from using Twitter Tools to “Social” because they claimed the tools I PREFERRED were no longer supported or would function, so upgrades will need to be done.

Here is the kicker, if you are using Social by MailChimp that could be the cause of your problem, so next steps involve visiting your WordPress Control Panel

And you may come across this little gem:

Turns out that Social has integrated it’s own Comment Display system… which I’ve never seen and could give a damn for since it essentially BROKE my comments.   So by taking the next step and by checking the box….

All of a sudden my blog went from “Comments are closed.” to enabled and allowing people to COMMENT again! Hooray, right!

If you find this benefits or is useful to you, feel free to COMMENT and let me and everyone else know :)  Also if you do come across other solutions you wish to share in the comments, don’t hesitate to make it known!  Good luck and good commenting!

Okay, I was partly holding off on publishing this because at first I thought it expired REAL fast, but apparently, that’s changed! so here you go! It’s good until June 30th, 2010! woohoo!

If you guys remember my original post Certification and MeasureUp Discounts 20% off Certs! that story is still true – so the ‘approved’ countries will still be able to get 20% off which can make your exam costs as little as $100 USD! (Fill in the blank of your respective country :)) However, if you don’t want to get money off and instead want to take your chances at the exam at full price YET if you happen to fail (No one ever fails, right? Especially not ME?!? :)) This will give you a second chance at the exam for free then!

So, in USD terms, here’s a breakdown of the values!

So, by looking at that, wow! There is a definite value in taking advantage of this Second Shot Program! However, if you KNOW you’ll pass the first time and you live in an ‘approved’ country, then the 20% off voucher is definitely valuable.  Otherwise though, jump all over this Second Shot offer, as far as I know it’s available in EVERY country, which is great, and the fact it ALSO run’s until June 30th, 2010 – means you’re all winners all around!

So, just like before, feel free to email me, contact me on facebook, twitter @CXI, even linkedin (or you can comment here) – Whatever means is comfortable for you to get these vouchers.  I don’t have any limits, and I want you to pay as LITTLE as possible for your certification! (In the event you didn’t catch it, this is all free :))