AVEROFT JOB SCAM

August 9 2021 by admin in SCAMS |Comments Off on AVEROFT JOB SCAM

The scammers are getting more and more resourceful.  Here is one of the most complex scamms I have ever seen.  I got a text message from AVEROFT Limited company through carrerbuilder that they liked my resume and wanted to talk to me about a job position.  I replied back and they set up a skype interview for an IT Director/Project Manger position and said they were looking to open offices in the US Specifically in the major cities (Cali, Texas, NYC, etc. etc.)  (This part is normal for me, as I have done many major build out projects in oil and gas including three multi million dollar projects building out refinerys in Canada with each project having a budjet being excess of 300 Million dollars each for SHELL UA(Upstream America) and BAKER HUGHES.  Since completeling thos projects have routinely been reached out from head hunters for Major Program/project Mangement positions.  The hourly rate was normal for the role, but what really got me were the benefits (Full employer paid healthcare for me and my entire family, three weeks paid vacation in the first year.  45% company matching 401K, stock options, signup bonuses, and the ability to work from home. These benefits are much better than what a US based company would offer, but are spot on for EU based companies.  (I worked as a contractor for an EU based company and got pretty much the same benefits a few years back so it didn’t seem like a scam at first.)  Where it started to go of the rails was when they said they would pay for all the equipment needed for me to work from home.  (Even though I didn’t need anything as I already had it all.)  I already had Dual internet connections, a 3 in one printer/scanner/fax, laptop, desktop, etc, etc.  They said they would purchase a mac book pro for me (First red flag) [I get that some executives might want a mac, but there is no way a large company (as averoft claimed to be) is going to run their employee platform on macs. And as a Program/Project manger one would most likely be working 100% in a windows environment.  They asked for bank account info for direct deposit so I gave them an account tied to a side hustle business that I rarely use…  (Mostly for ebay and marketplace sales) that way…I could just transfer any money they sent me to my main account and they wouldn’r be able to withdraw anything after that. They then proceeded wired me 5 grand.  Then they immediately wanted me to wire 4550.00 to their “vendor” to pay for the equipment that I didn’t need. (second red flag).  I did it reluctantly, as this had all the makings of a “money mule scheme” but again, I was really hoping this was legit opportunity and when I asked why they didn’t just pay the vendor directly they said that Because they were based out of Australia, if I had any problem with the equipment I would need to deal with the vendor directly (that they really couldn’t do anything for me out in Australia).  This made logical sence but still seemed highly irregular.  Next they told me that they would pay for my internet and cell phone bills if I provided them account access.  I have a backup AT&T internet which is “internet only” so I gave them access to that.  I told them I couldn’t give them access to my Verizon account since it was a family plan and also contained my wife and kids phone.  Also, I was concerned that they could SIM swap if they had access to my account  (i was concerne about their ability to defeat any 2FA that I had on several crypto wallets, and my coinbase account.  I told them I could call Verizon and set up a new account (one that didn’t have any 2FA attached to it) and have Verizon send me a SIM card to use in one of my spare cell phones ( should mention that I owned and ran a small cell phone store for a while so still ahd plenty of spare sim cards and cell phones in storage..  I figured that the worse that could happen was that they never paid the bill and I could just cancel the account Since I was using a spare phone and not financing anything thru Verizon, I assumed I was safe to do so.  They seemed irritated that I didn’t have anything but internet on my AT&T account (No cell plan or cell phones).  The next thing that happened was that they proceeded to order three brand new iphones on my account.  When I questiond them about it they claimed that it was going to be used for my staff (for a project that they hadn’t even given me any details about yet).  I told them that I did not give them permission to order equipment on my account and that they were financially obligating me to the purchase of the three iphones (over $3500).  They claimed that they had paid for the phones in full, but one quick call to Verizon proved otherwise.  Fortunately Verizon fraud caught it and held the shipment until I was able to confirm the fraud, so I then cancelled the order and the account.  The next day I got an email from USPS that I had put in  change of address, most likely the scammers did this to intercept the illegally ordered iphones.  In the end, I had to sign up with Life Lock and lock down my credit files so these assholes couldn’t try to open bogus credit accounts with my info (since they gave me w2 forms to fill out they effectively had my SSN and other info…(so it looks like I’ll be paying for Lifelock out of the $450 windfall I got from this scam.  IT really makes me sick that these bastards are preying on folks out of work due to covid and I hope there is a special place in hell for these people.  In the mean time, I have learned that scammers are really working hard to pull this stuff off, complete with fake websites, fake facebook pages, even folks that reply back via chat to mesgaes left at both places. They have highly trained social engineers working with them.  I know that the guy that was skyping with me had several other suckers on skype at the same time as he kept mixing up my name in the replies and when I asked about it said he was “interviewing” others for different roles with the company.  I feel like a fool, but hopefully if you have read this far you won’t make the same mistake I did.

Here is some more info in this particular scam

UPDATE: So it looks like the actual scam is they wire money to your account then get you to pay for your own equipment using their vendor and then file FRAUD and try to get the bank to reverse the original wire.  They tried this with me, but I had closed the account immediately after they wired me the money so they were not able to reverse the wire transfer.

Crypto Currency Pit Falls – Read up and Avoid These Costly and Time Consuming Mistakes!

December 10 2017 by admin in I.T. Knowledgebase |Comments Off on Crypto Currency Pit Falls – Read up and Avoid These Costly and Time Consuming Mistakes!

A lot of folks are making money in crypo currency.  Some by trading it (the same way one would day trade stocks), some buy buying and holding it to sell later (same as investing in stocks), and some by mining it (although the ship as mostly sailed on this one) and then either doing one or both of the the previous two things.

I have tried all three and here is what I’ve learned. 

A little history first. I started messing with crypto back in 2014 when Bitcoin was making the news for breaking $1200 a coin and alt-coins like Litecoin, Dogecoin, Quark, and many others were popping up all over the place. I jumped in by buying some miners and using graphic cards to generate coins as I figured the worse that could happen is that I would end up with high end video cards for my PC’s if the whole thing tanked. My whole family plays PC games and we have a mini LAN center at our house so it was a no brainer.  I made a few grand (under 5K) mining, trading, and holding, but in the end after the price of bit coin crashed down to $280 a coin I figured the cost of electricity and cooling my house was more than the profit I made mining, so I shut down my machines and exchanged all my alt coins for Bit Coin and called it a day. With a full time job and other business ventures starting, I just didn’t have the time to devote to day trading crypto.  I figured I would be safe just holding for some future point in time when the value of Bit coin rose to where it is now… and here is where we pick up the story.

Pitfall #1 leaving coins in exchanges: I had accounts on multiple exchanges and would frequently leave small amounts of coins in their accounts so I could trade at a moments notice. So now that the price of Bitcoin has gone thought the roof I figured I would log into all my old exchange accounts and see if there was any alts scraps I left behind (that I could exchange for Bit Coin). Keep in mind 10 Litecoins had dropped to under $3 each back then so $40 bucks worth wasn’t anything to care about…. but now that same amount of coins is worth over 2 thousand dollars (Litecoin is currently hovering at $151 a coin as I write this).  Low and behold all of the exchanges (except Coinbase) I previously used had completely disappeared or shut down (crypsty – GONE,  CoinMKT – GONE,  Cryptrush – GONE, etc. etc.) and with them over 10 grand in crypto cash by today’s standards. Lesson: Don’t leave coins in exchanges.

Pitfall #2 leaving coins in pools: Same as the above. (Tomspool – GONE, MultiPool – Account deleted due to being inactive for over 18 months, Hypernova – GONE, Cleverming – GONE) etc. etc. Lesson: Don’t leave coins in pools.

Pitfall #3 Paper crypto and paper wallets: I was so into Crypto that I bought real coins (ie minted coins like THIS that was supposed to be pre-loaded with a digital version in a paper wallet. Again, I paid about $30 dollars each for these to give as gifts to friends and help get them into crypto (Litecoin was valued at around the same price when these were purchased). I gave out a bunch of these back in the day. So now that Litecoin is at $150 a coin I go to redeem the few I had left only out now that I need the public and private keys to actually move the digital version into the Litecoin core wallet. So basically they are worthless and now it’s almost four years after the original ebay purchase, so fat chance at getting a refund or even finding the original seller who is long gone. Lesson: Make sure you get public and private keys for all paper wallets!

Pitfall #4 Don’t forget your passwords… maybe… or maybe not? OK, so if you can’t store your coins on the exchanges or pools, that only leaves you with paper and digital wallets. Both of which are risky to hold crypto and ultimately I think this is the major downfall of doing any long term investing with it. I mentioned earlier in this post that the bulk of all my altcoins were converted to Bitcoin and dumped to a Bitcoin Core wallet back in 2005. So now I want to cash them out as with close to 4.8 Bit Coins I would be able to sell them on Coinbase for almost 75 Grand.  So I download the latest Bitcoin core wallet, load in my backup wallet.dat file and wait for it to sync up. Four days later, the wallet is synced and I’m ready to cash out, only the wallet will not decrypt in order to send my Bitcoin to the exchange. At first I assumed that I had just forgotten the password and spent hours trying every known possibility of my default passwords to try to get it to unlock to no avail. So then I decide to use a wallet recovery service and read up on how to send them a partial wallet (so they can’t just decrypt the wallet and cash out) only to get one error message after the other while trying to create the partial wallet. After reading tons of forum posts and doing technical research I find out that the wallet.dat file is actually corrupted/damaged and that in combination with changes to the Bitcoin Core Software (They now use something called HD in the software and the problem occurs when the wallet backup file has to be converted to the new format.) is what might be preventing the wallet from decrypting when I put in my passwords. (So technically I don’t know if I actually forgot the password, mistyped it, or it’s just data damage to the old backup wallet.dat file preventing me from using ANY password.) In any case I have to use a variety of open source tools to try to repair it and I believe I have been successful, although I have to run the Bitcoin Core Software in non-HD mode or it will crash. I am now ready to send off my password list to wallet recovery services and see if they can recover my password or not. Lesson: ???? I’m not sure here. The problem with keeping a digital backup isn’t just that you can loose it, or forget your password, but rather how that digital wallet backup file is going to integrate into whatever new software is running the wallets years down the road.  And you can bet that the wallet software is going to continue to change over time.  I really don’t see how the average non technical person is going to hold crypto long term on a digital wallet for this reason.  Lesson: The best bet for long term storage is to extract it to a paper wallet and put it in a safe. Just make sure you have the public and private keys.

As for me… It’s highly unlikely that I will ever get any of my Bitcoin back. But I’ll let you guys know if Walletrecoveryservices is successful or not.

UPDATE: 12-18-2017

I was able to figure out my password by exporting my browser saved passwords in chrome to a .csv file then running them though an open source password cracking program called “John the Ripper”

If you are currently using google chrome to store passwords you will be very surprised at the number of site – password combinations chrome has saved. For me it was over 1200 saved passwords and site combinations.

Pitfall #5 After recovering my BTC the next struggle was to cash out as fast as I could. What I found out rather quickly is that Coinbase had set a limit on how much you could cash out in a given week. Since I had a Coinbase account back in 2014 and was verified my limit was 15K per week. But with the volatility of bitcoin this is a bad thing, as I would have loved to cash all of them out at the highest value which was a little over 19K at the time I finally figured out my password. Made an account for my wife, but they set her account at 10K withdrawal per week. I tried getting verified on other exchanges such as Gemini but they were so backlogged they didn’t clear me until a month later. Lesson: If you plan on investing or trading in crypto get yourself verified on MULTIPLE exchanges ahead of time, otherwise you may not be able to cash out when you want to.

Well, I’m a happy camper that I am able to go into 2018 Debt free as I used my windfall to pay off all my personal and business debts and even had some left over to reinvest (went with Ripple, Iota, and Electronium, but will also be dumping some money into streamer data coin.

If you find this post useful feel free to send me a donation to my coinbase address of: 1AMgSJe5p7aTxvNRbPvYQbnJh2dPsWegvn

And if you plan on setting up an exchange account I recommend using CoinBase as they have been around for a very long time (they were the only exchange that I used previously that was still around.) and you can buy and sell in Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum. (just make sure you extract to paper if you decide to get out!)

How to put AT&T U-Verse’s Motorola NVG589 in Bridge Mode!

February 10 2015 by admin in HiTech Stuff, I.T. Knowledgebase, Networking, Tutorials |Comments Off on How to put AT&T U-Verse’s Motorola NVG589 in Bridge Mode!

Thinking about getting an AT&T U-Verse connection for your home or business? Better make sure you get the right router from them! Why? Because some genius at AT&T had the audacity to think that their “basic” modem/router would be good enough for all their customers. This is of course laughable as their routers lack the wattage to push out any real wireless speed, have no directional antenna’s, and aren’t rated for any of the new wireless standards such as “AC” (Some of their routers don’t even have wireless “N”.) They also lack basic wireless security like guest networks, multiple channels, etc. etc. AND I won’t even go into advanced features such as VPN, QOS, and port forwarding.

Bottom line is that you are going to want a “real” wireless router and that means putting the “basic” one you got from AT&T into “Bridge Mode”.

Bridge Mode means turning off all features and using their (AT&T’s) router as nothing more than a “pass though”.

So far, the only router they have that you can do this on is the Motorola NVG589. You will have to ask for it specifically, or you will end up with a router that CAN’T be put in “Bridge Mode”.

Below I have created a document that you can follow to do exactly that.

Oh, and you should also know that AT&T no longer has ANY techs above level 1. They laid them all off and now contract to a support company in India. I’m not going to comment on the quality of that support company other than to tell you to feel free to contact me for a paid support incident after you have finished pulling your hair out dealing with them.

thanks for reading and I hope this document helps!

How to Put the Motorola NVG589 in Bridge Mode by robert3671

How to set up OneDrive for business in Office 365

July 18 2014 by admin in I.T. Knowledgebase, Office 365 |Comments Off on How to set up OneDrive for business in Office 365

Here is a quick tutorial on how to set up OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) for Business in Office 365. This will become especially useful now that Microsoft has increased the meager 15GB to 1TB for business users. Note that this tutorial shows how to link the existing OneDrive application to the business’s Office 365 SharePoint site in the cloud. Here’s the skinny:

How to Set Up ONE DRIVE for Business

Office 365 “The Hard Way”! – What you really need to know about how to migrate your email to the cloud!

October 10 2013 by admin in Exchange and Mail, I.T. Knowledgebase, Office 365, Tutorials |Comments Off on Office 365 “The Hard Way”! – What you really need to know about how to migrate your email to the cloud!

If any of you have tried to implement an Office 365 migration one of the first things you will encounter is a complete lack of “decent” documentation from Microsoft.  Especially when it comes to all the “undocumented features” and limitations you will come up against that will have you pulling your hair out by the roots.

Here’s some key points you need to know BEFORE you begin any kind of migration to Office 365.

1. Active Directory integration means sacrificing redundancy and disaster recovery if you are in the SMB market space.  The quick and dirty is that if you want all your usernames and passwords to sync between your AD and Office 365 you have to set up an “active directory connector” which will directly tie your AD to Office 365.  If for any reason your AD on premise goes down, users will NOT be able to use ANY of the Office 365 services.  There is no “independent”  functioning of any of the cloud services if you set up federation between your on premise AD and the Office 365 cloud.  This means that either you will have to invest in redundant architecture (which most SMB’s can’t afford) or you will just have to manage two complete sets of usernames and passwords.  UGH!

2. Office 365’s “Administer on behalf of” feature lacks many of the things you need to set up new users (such as downloading and installing the connector software that actually builds the link between the end users office suite and the cloud exchange/lync servers). Plan on wasting a lot of time having to log in as the business admin or one of the end users to get anything done for setup. Think you can pre-deploy software without logging into EACH individual users account? Think again.  Do it and you end up tying your own partner software licenses to the end users computers and have to go through a lengthy process of uninstalling and re-installing to fix it. And while we are on the subject… I don’t recommend deploying the new Office 2013 suite.  At the time of this writing it is NOT ready for prime time.  I have experienced multiple issues on several different clients, including but not limited to; random crashing, extreme slowness, multiple different plugins breaking, macros no longer functioning, and much more.  NOT FUN! Oh, and don’t even think about installing this on a Terminal Server. Maybe Microsoft will fix these issues in the near future but for now you should stick to Office 2010.

3. There is a major bug involving recurring appointments in Outlooks calendar. BEFORE you sync your calendar with the office 365 cloud you should delete any recurring appointments, otherwise these appointments will not be able to be deleted.

4. If you are using Office 2010 suite (or just Outlook 2010) you must have Service Pack 2 or later installed or Outlook will not connect to the Office 365 Exchange servers.

5. The Exchange portion of Office 365 DOES NOT support any Single mail over 20MB in size. This means if you are doing an Exchange to Office 365 migration you had better plan ahead if your client had their exchange attachment settings allowing even 20MB in total per email.  To help you guys with this problem I have detailed a step by step guide on how I handled this exact problem below:

How to Prepare Your Email Accounts and Mailboxes for Importing Into Office 365

How to set up Hyper-V Replica for WorkGroup or Non-Domain SMB!

May 17 2013 by admin in Backups, Hyper-V 2012, I.T. Knowledgebase, Tutorials, Virtual Computing, Windows Server 2012 |Comments Off on How to set up Hyper-V Replica for WorkGroup or Non-Domain SMB!

OK folks here’s the scenario:  Got two Hyper-V boxes (either running the stand alone hypervisor, or within the Server 2012 platform) and you want to set up a Disaster Recovery (DR) site.   Maybe if you were like me, and had a few small / medium businesses who’s boxes you were hosting out of your home office, or a business location that is not set up like a Tier 3 data center and wanted to do the following:

  1. Reduce the number of physical boxes by converting them to virtual (let heat, and more free space).
  2. Provide both hardware and software redundancy (remove single points of failure).
  3. Provide true Disaster Recovery (DR) in the event of a major power outage, or weather conditions (like a flood, hurricane, etc. etc.)
  4. Tired of paying crappy hosting companies (I’m lookin’ at you 1and1) for server rental on cheap hardware that breaks every year, and terrible service that has your customers screaming and pulling their hair out.

Then the new Hyper-v Replication features in Hyper-V 2012 are just the thing for you.

There already are a bunch of great articles out there with really nice graphics so I’m going to link you to them shortly, but there are A LOT of missing pieces of the puzzle when you actually want to make this happen.  THIS ARTICLE is going to fill in the gaps and provide you with a TRUE start to finish guide.

Start with THIS ARTICLE, then come back here before you continue on to PURCHASE AND INSTALL THE SSL CERTTIFICATES.

STEP 1:  Get TWO certificates.  I recommend using the 30 FREE RAPID SSL certs from TRUSTICO to get started since they are free, and if they don’t work for your scenario, you can just let them expire and it has cost you nothing but time.  That said you should know that they will only provide you ONE FREE RAPID SSL per DOMAIN, and YES you have to have an ACTUAL DOMAIN (two different domains, one for each cert) to certify and validate the certificates.  NOTE:  During the process of signing up for your free certificates, which you MUST certify/validate with an email registered to the root of the domain.  This email is NOT one of your choosing, but one that is part of the ICANN registration process when you first registered your domain name.   But hey, if you’re like me you should have 10-15 domain names laying around, so using one of these should be rather easy.  I used the following format: servername.domainname.com/net/us/etc.  So as an example if one of my servers was named hypervhost1 then the FQDN (and certificate) I would register would be hypervhost1.shofkom.com for example.

STEP 2:  Convert the cert to the correct format (PFX)using this tool.  NOTE:  The certificate code is sent to in a DIFFERENT ORDER than what is presented in the conversion tool, so be sure to READ what CODE it wants in what box.  I also recommend highlighting the code from the bottom up, then copy (Control C) and paste (Control V) without any additional spaces.  Other wise the tool won’t work.  Also don’t forget to add a password that you will not forget.  If all else fails Trustico has chat representative available in the morning hours that will convert it for you if you ask nice enough!

STEP 3:  This article will show you how to add the snap in and import the certificates.  You will need to do this with BOTH machines.

Now head back over to the original article and continue noting that you have to do everything to BOTH machines (It doesn’t do any good to have a FAIL OVER, if you don’t have a FAIL BACK!)

Lastly:  You will need to use some HOST FILES in order to get these boxes talking locally. (I recommend setting them up locally first, before breaking up your set and shipping one off to another location.)  Add an entry with your created FQDN and the IP of the NIC or NIC Team for your HOST box.  Don’t forget to do this on BOTH machines.

How to Get to and Edit the Hosts File:

If you want to edit the hosts file, you first need to locate and open it – on Vista and newer with UAC enabled from an elevated process (with admin rights). The procedure is a little tedious. Here is how to do it with 64-bit Notepad:

Click on the Start button, type “notepad” and press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER. Acknowledge the UAC dialog.Type CTRL+O. Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc. Select “All Files” in the bottom right corner.

Now you see the hosts file. Select and open it. Make your changes and save it.

Finally, when you are ready to break apart the pair and set them up you can use Static IP’s or redirects from NO-IP.  Make sure you don’t forget to port forward in your firewall!  🙂

 

 

How to fix, “My Game Will Not Work” Issues!

February 17 2013 by admin in I.T. Knowledgebase, Tutorials |Comments Off on How to fix, “My Game Will Not Work” Issues!

Many people ask me “what I do for fun”?  Being as I am so into technology… Well the answer is easy.  Gaming!

My Steam account is worth well over 3 grand, and I am always trying out new games.  Because of this, I’ve had to do a lot of trouble shooting when it comes to getting all kinds of games to work on various hardware, with various operating systems, in various configurations.

Like wise I have many friends that do the same, and end up asking me for assistance.  So to save myself some time I’ve doctored up a guide I found elsewhere and posted it below to assist everyone who has a game that is “not working”.

Drivers:

Your computer needs drivers to work properly. That CD/DVD that came with your hardware is outdated and that can cause problems. If you experiencing slowdown/crashes, chances are you are using outdated drivers.  You will need to find those drivers and get them updated.  More on how to do this later in the post.

Audio:

Unless you bought a separate sound-card (and who does that nowadays?), you’ve probably got a Realtek chip on your motherboard. If you actually have a separate card, you probably know what it is – you can just download updated drivers from the manufacturer’s website.

Note on Creative cards: Don’t bother downloading “updated” drivers from Creative’s website. This is a rare case where the drivers you got on the CD are always going to be better than those they offer on the website.

Video:

If you are using Intel Integrated Graphics, you are using a laptop (for example a Dell non XPS) I’ll just pause here to laugh at you because that’s not a gaming platform.  Otherwise you’ll have either an ATI/AMD or Nvidia card or Internal chipset to work with and will need to go to the sites below for the latest and greatest drivers.

ATI/AMD/Radeon
Nvidia/GeForce

These two often release Beta versions of their drivers in order to optimize support for big-name titles that have come out in the middle of their release cycle. Be careful! It might seem tempting to squeeze as much out of your card as possible for your favorite new game, but those drivers are labelled as Beta for a reason. Always keep the installer handy for the last stable driver version that you had installed, should the Beta end up making things worse. Of course, on the other hand, sometimes the game will run like utter crap without the Beta update, so it’s a toss-up. I generally advise that you try your new game with the existing stable driver version to see if you even need the Beta in the first place.

What else?:

It can be a good idea to also update the drivers for other hardware on your PC (Network, Chipset, RAID, etc.) – this is generally a good place to start when it comes down to other problems you’re having. Sometimes, the manufacturer of your motherboard will supply updated drivers for all the hardware that came with that model (or, as it is referred to, hardware that is “on-board”). If you can get updated drivers for the individual components direct from their manufacturer though, that is usually better (especially in the case of Intel Chipset Drivers).

There are also updates for SSD harddrives (especially on older model SSDs that don’t use technology that is as efficient as newer models).

If you’re having RAID problems, look for updates for on-board Intel RAID (ICHxR southbridge), Intel Chipset drivers, and the Matrix Storage Manager; for non-Intel on-board RAID, either check the manufacturer’s website, or if you don’t know who that is, check the website of your motherboard manufacturer. For a dedicated RAID card, check the manufacturer’s website.

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE!:

Here are the websites for some motherboard manufactures (if you’re using another manufacturer; LOL):

GIGABYTE
MSI
ASUS
INTEL

If you’re using Windows 7/8, Windows Update should have updated drivers for you (though it is still better to get drivers direct from the manufacturer – hardware drivers in Windows Update can sometimes be outdated or altered from manufacturer specs). If you’re not using Windows 7/8, why not? Windows XP has a bus-pass and a zimmer, and no longer receives any updates. If you are using Vista, just go away. Leave. Now. Seriously. I’m not helping you.

If you have a Dell PC, DO NOT use Windows Update for hardware drivers! You can’t even trust updates from the manufacturer’s own website, unfortunately; Dell has a habit of doing funny things to their hardware that can mean that the manufacturer’s drivers wont work – or worse (especially in the case of graphics cards).

Your best bet is to go direct to the Dell support page
(support.dell.com)
And either enter your service tag or select your PC model from the options towards the bottom. Once selected, you will be presented with a picture of your PC and a row of tabs below that, one of which will take you to the drivers page. Be sure to then select the correct operating system from the drop-down menu, and then select the correct drivers for the devices you have within the available categories – sometimes (especially if you haven’t entered your service tag), the page can list drivers for devices that you don’t actually have, so use some common sense when downloading updates.

Dell also has an FTP site with all their drivers on it here.

Furthermore, ALWAYS create a restore point on your system drive before updating hardware drivers like these, no matter where the update has come from! — especially in the case of Chipset, Network, and RAID drivers. If updating one of those goes tits-up and you don’t have a restore point, you may not be able to recover your system.

Dependencies:

So you got the drivers, that’s it, right? Nope! Software depends on software. This is the part you probably want to pay attention to if your game spews errors after you installed it.

DirectX – Windows 7 covers DirectX10/11, but not 9 by default. Always install to be sure. This is super important, and you should always keep it up to date – 99.9% of PC games use DirectX. (DirectX Link Here.)

VC++ (x86) || VC++ (x64) – Missing a “dll”? Most likely because you’re missing this. Windows 7 will auto-update it once you have it installed. Again, exceptionally common, so get this anyway. x64 versions of Windows require both x64 and x86 packages below.
(VC++ (x86) || VC++ (x64) Links here.)

PhysX – nVidia drivers include PhysX, but if you don’t have a card from the green machine, you’ll need this. It’s a very common requirement in those dazzling super-sparkly high-end modern games, so if you don’t have a nVidia card, you should download this anyway.
(PhysX link here.)

OpenAL – Software sound driver – allows you hear the screams of the pixels you’re murdering in crystal clear definition! More common in indie games, but is actually still quite widespread. It’s a tiny, super-fast installer. Even if your game doesn’t specifically require this, get it anyway. (OpenAL Link here.)

.NET framework – Less common in games, but lots of applications out there require this. You should always have it installed. Be wary, however: some software may require older versions in order to function, so if you still encounter issues after downloading v4.5, try v4.0, v3.5 SP1, v2.0, SP1, SP2 or even v1.1

XNA – Microsoft likes runtimes. This allows you to play XNA games (games made using the Microsoft XNA SDK). This is version 4. Try other versions as well. (XNA Link here.)

If you download a game, and it has a redist/drivers folder, install all that stuff.

Now what?:

Still not working? I highly suggest you run Ninite, FileHippo and/or PSI Secunia and update everything that’s outdated. And install Windows Updates (see note in Drivers section first). Also, the above Dependencies section is not an exhaustive list – some games may have other requirements. Generally, reading the .NFO, manual (RTFM) and the game’s system requirements is a good place to start when trying to find out what dependencies it may have. Honestly though, you should be reading the .NFO of any release that you download anyway.

NINITE
FILEHIPPO
PSI Secunia

Still not working?:

In a word, permissions. In Windows Vista and above, some games may require elevated permissions to work properly – while sometimes it may start up fine, you may encounter certain bugs unless you run it as administrator. Here’s a quote for you:

Just because you’re on an account that is an administrator, doesn’t mean that UAC wont run some things as non-admin by default. A lot of installers have a ‘run me as admin’ call that UAC will then ding you about, but some things are not coded to automatically ask you. Forcing something to run as Admin causes it to elevate itself before it even gets that far.

Basically, if you are using UAC (which you probably are and should be by default), being on an admin account just keeps you from needing to input your password manually when a UAC prompt comes up asking for elevated rights. If you were not on an administrator account, it would have the same prompt but also ask you for another password from an actual admin-flagged account.

That’s the difference between being on an admin account and having things run as the administrator.

If that doesn’t do it for ya….. Format and Reload!

Upgrading WordPress on 1and1 linux host need PHP 5 or higher.

October 5 2011 by admin in I.T. Knowledgebase, Tutorials |Comments Off on Upgrading WordPress on 1and1 linux host need PHP 5 or higher.

Just upgraded this bog from WordPress 2.8.0 to 3.2.1 (long overdue) and changed the theme so it would render properly in IE9.  I followed the directions in these two posts:

Backing up your Database (Using PHP MyAdmin).

and

Updating WordPress to the latest version.

Everything was working fine until i got an error message saying that WordPress required PHP 5 or higher to run.  After some expert “Google” searching I was able to find the answer to my problem.

If you are on 1and1’s shared hosting packages you will need to do the following:

1. Log into your admin panel and select the following:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then use the drop down menu to change from what ever older version you are running to PHP5.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s all there is to it.  Hopefully this will save some time for a few of you who use 1and1 for hosting.

And for my regular visitors, enjoy the new look and feel of the site!

 

My Recommended #1 piece of software every System Admin needs to have in his arsenal: EaseUS® Todo Backup Technician 2.5

July 26 2011 by admin in Backups, I.T. Knowledgebase, Server 2003/2008 |Comments Off on My Recommended #1 piece of software every System Admin needs to have in his arsenal: EaseUS® Todo Backup Technician 2.5

First let me state for the record that I am in no way affiliated with, or receive any monetary compensation for the following review.

That out of the way, I wanted to let you guys know about an incredible piece of software that has saved me HOURS, even DAYS of time in the restoration and recreation of system images.  The product is EaseUS® Todo Backup Technician 2.5.  I’m currently working with a group of software testers whose job it is to test code on all different “target” machines with different software and hardware configurations.

What this software does is allow you to backup and restore EVERY computer in your environment including physical and virtual machines, regardless of OS.  (Note: As of this writing I have only tested out Microsoft Windows based system images, and will likely write up a second report when I have had the chance to test on Linux based machines.) It performs all the traditional backup methods (Full, Incremental, Differential, etc.) and can send these backups to network shares, removable drives, off site ftp’s, etc.  You can set up schedules and lock down times for backups just like most other backup suites and has messaging capability built in to email you alerts for the success and failure of said backups.  However, I want to use this review to highlight what this software can do that others can’t.

The advantages this software has over the others are the following:

  1. The ability to convert a backup image into a .vmdk file for direct mounting to a VM in any of the ESX product lines.  (This does require the installation of a tool from VMware that you can download from here).  In my testing of the product I was not able to get the VM to boot directly from a single converted image, but it worked flawlessly when simply attaching a converted image to an existing VM.  For recovering a physical machine to a virtual machine I simply created the VM, attached the EaseUS® Todo Backup Technician 2.5 Boot .iso (The BOOT disc is a Windows PE Environment that will work with sysprep and contains the FULL Version of the software with the UNIVERSAL RESTORE.) to the VM and then pointed it to the image without even converting it and it worked like a dream.  I have tested both physical to virtual and virtual to physical and the software performed flawlessly.
  2. The ability to “mount” an image to get a single file or folder.  The ability to do a UNIVERSAL RESTORE or HARDWARE INDEPENDENT RESTORE where you can do a sector by sector backup of a system and recover it to a completely different system with completely different hardware.  I have tested this with ALL versions of W2K3 and W2K8 (32/64 as well as R2/non R2) and it worked flawlessly every time.  I have moved and recovered system images not only to different DELL hardware, but also cross platform moving a system image from a DELL server to an HP server, to an IBM server, and all worked flawlessly.  The software appears to do complete system prep and will ask you for any drivers that it can’t find during the initial boot up.  In the 12 test cases I have tried, only once did it ask me for a driver, and I was able to find it via the support.dell.com website.  You will have to reactivate windows and so far as I can tell has not given me any SID problems.  Please see these blog posts on changing SIDS as well as using SID changing software before you attempt to change SIDS in windows: REFERENCE 1 – REFERENCE 2 – REFERENCE 3
  3. The ability to create a system image from within the Windows GUI without having to use a Boot Disk or even reboot the server.  Again, this is especially convening when you are doing work remotely and can’t be there to physically insert a disk into the servers CD tray.  You can download this software, install it and perform the backup without having to boot the system via bios or use any iDrac features.

The only product I have seen that is comparable to this one is made by Acronis, but the license fees are much, much higher.  Acronis wants around $1200 to protect a single server while EaseUS® Todo Backup Technician 2.5 only charges around $600 for 10 licenses.  (I do not know what protection scheme Acronis uses but it appears that the EaseUS® Todo Backup Technician 2.5 licensing is completely on the honor system as I have never entered a single key since paying for and downloading the software.)

The only drawback I can see for using this software is that EASEUS is not an American company, so I do not know how difficult getting support would be.  However, I have not had to use any support or even open a single trouble ticket as the software just WORKS!  Also, the user manuals are very well written, with easy to follow instructions, and the software itself is very user friendly.  Grab the trial from here: and test it out yourself.  (The only thing you can’t do from the trial is the universal restore.)

So again, if you’re looking for backup software that is both affordable and works I would highly recommend you grab a copy of EaseUS® Todo Backup Technician 2.5 and implement it in your IT environment.  If you would like me to show you how to implement this software into your existing infrastructure, or replace your old Ghost or Backup Exec suite just hit me up on the contact form located here!

How to recover your virtual environment using an HP Falconstor CDP and VMWare ESX!

May 17 2011 by admin in Backups, I.T. Knowledgebase, Tutorials, Virtual Computing, Vista and Windows 7 |Comments Off on How to recover your virtual environment using an HP Falconstor CDP and VMWare ESX!

Recently I tasked to create some technical documentation for one of my clients on how to restore and recreate servers replicated to an HP Falconstor CDP.

The clients environment consisted of a multi-site virtual environment running on the VMware ESXi 4.1 platform.  Their primary method of off site protection was to use two HP Falconstor CDP devices and have the primary on-site unit replicate to a secondary unit off-site.  The CDP device does not do an OS replication, but rather only the data stored on each of the servers hard drives.  In the event the primary site was completely lost (for example a fire or flood) the method of recovery would be to recreate the VM’s on an ESX host at the secondary site then re-attach the replicated drives.

The following is a document I created that will show you how to bring up the production servers in the event of a disaster recovery situation. The method used to do this is to create virtual machines (servers) in ESX, and attach the replicated drives from the HP Falconstor CDP device. This will create a bootable server and essentially use the CDP device as a SAN (attached storage).

How to Recover Your Virtual Environment Using an HP Falcons Tor CDP and VMWare ESX

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