Revo Uninstaller, One Bad Program Remover!

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revo_box2Bad as in good, as in one bad motha’SHUT YO MOUTH!  Jus’ talkin’ ’bout Revo.

Sorry, I digress.  Anyway, this cool tool is called Revo Uninstaller as if you didn’t catch that already, and it’s one of the most useful Windows tools I have come across in a long time.  Don’t get me wrong, all the Cool Tools are great, but this one is a real gem.  What does it do?  The short version is that it uninstalls software.  In reality it does far more than that.  Yes, it interfaces to the standard Windows uninstaller, but it also can find stuff the uninstaller left behind (both registry items and files/directories) and remove them.  It can even monitor an application that doesn’t have an installer and figure out how to go in and remove it.  Now that’s cool.  All in all this has been superb at helping me keep my hard drive clean when I remove applications, and it keeps me from having to do all of that searching by hand like I used to do.  Best of all, it’s FREE!  Yep, you heard me, it’s free.  So go give it a test drive today, I am certain you will love it as much as I do.

http://www.revouninstaller.com/

Be sure to check out the rest of the Cool Tools that we have listed, you never know, you might find that perfect utility that you have been looking for!

Verizon Cripples Users Email

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Guess what kiddies, in troubleshooting an email connection for a customer that was unable to send any email through one of my servers, I found the problem was not quite what I expected.  The good news is that the problem wasn’t my mail server, or even on my end at all for that matter.  After some testing and digging I found that the problem is that Verizon has now blocked ALL out bound port 25 traffic.  Period.  As you know, port 25 is the standard RFC compliant port for SMTP communication, and Verizon has blocked all port 25 traffic as a means to fight SPAM.  Uh-huh.  Sure.

This means that you cannot use any other email provider for sending mail unless they support a non-standard port for their SMTP service, or you are using webmail exclusively.  This, to me, is wrong on so many levels.  First off, it’s not helping in the SPAM wars as far as I can tell.  I am told the same thing by some Verizon customers I surveyed.  Second, it’s just wrong to cut out basically all other mail providers like that.  This is yet another example of how stupid Verizon is, and how they cannot manage their service at all.

I have done business with many, many telco’s over the years, and Verizon tops the list by a mile of the worst service providers to deal with.  Some of the most incompetent people, bone headed mistakes and plain batshiat crazy experiences have all been at the hands of Verizon.  I hope this is just the first of many nails in their coffin.

One last thing, conveniently enough, the only way around this is to upgrade to FIOS (or other non-specified broadband service) and pay extra for a static IP address.  How nice.  Read more here.

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Hosted Subversion and a whole lot more at CodeSpaces

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CodeSpaces LogoGreetings folks, I’d like to take a moment to share with you something that I found a while back and have been using since I found it.  What I found was a service, a source code hosting service fully integrated with Subversion.  Now, I had already been using Subversion, I had it setup and running on my own servers in my lab.  I had even looked at the idea of commercial Internet based Subversion hosting since it would put my source code archive off-site and accessible from outside my lab, but the providers and plans I found were either expensive, feature light, or just didn’t seam to be a quality service provider.  Usually more than one of those things.  Besides, I am very picky about where I put my source code.  Call me paranoid, but I don’t toss code around anywhere, I have to be comfortable that it’s in a safe and secure place.

So, now enter Code Spaces, the best hosted Subversion I have ever seen, even over hosting it myself.  The service is superb and the features included go way beyond simple Subversion hosting.  In the end, between the ease of use and the extra goodies that they include with the service, not to mention the reasonable price, I believe in the long run I am saving money over hassling with doing it myself.  Not to mention my code is now safely archived off site, which is great for disaster recovery.

Now, what all do they provide other than great Subversion hosting?  Take a look:

  • SSL Encryption
  • Real Time Backups
  • Project Management Tools
  • Bug Tacking Tools
  • Project Milestones and Task Setup
  • A 45 Day FREE Trial
  • A Money Back Guarantee

There’s more to it than that, but you really have to go check out their site to get a handle on all that they offer.  Frankly, if this type of service is something that you want or need, I’d give them a shot for the 45 day free trial.  That’s what I did and I was blown away by how good their service is.  Check them out at http://www.codespaces.com today!  By the way, if anyone is interested, this is not a paid endorsement.  I don’t get any kickbacks or consignments if you sign up and they didn’t pay me or give me a credit/discount for this post, I just like the service that much that I wanted to share it with all my visitors.  Enjoy!

Piggyback App On Java Update

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Here is a heads up that we are seeing the online backup application Carbonite, put out by the company of the same name, bundled with a Java update. If you aren’t careful, when you click through the Java update installer, you get Carbonite and a 30 day trial subscription to the service. Not sure if the trial subscription is automatic or if that’s an extra step. Now, I am not saying anything bad or good about Carbonite, I haven’t ever used the service (naturally I prefer MYfilesanywhere), but any time an application gets installed automagically without my express consent, it sets off a red flag in my book.

Latest Solaris 10 Patch Cluster Is Broken

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Thought I would share this with anyone out there that manages Solaris 10 servers.  In my case we were working with Sparc, but x86 might be affected as well.  I’ll skip all of the gory details, but basically what we ran into was a problem with the dependency matrix for a kernel patch (I believe the patch number is 141414–07).  What does that mean, you ask?  Well, it means that the kernel patch got applied via the patch cluster install script, but without the requisite dependencies being satisfied.  Yeah, ouch.

The servers in question would then panic as soon as you tried to bring them back up, and I mean panic hard.  You couldn’t even get into single user mode.  We spent hours on the phone with Sun support (this is where we finally found out about the dependency problem) to no avail.  Sun has really gone downhill in the last few years, and pretty much like a rock since Oracle bought them.  Their answer was that they can’t test everything and we had to figure it out on our own.  Yikes, what are we paying for support for again???

We ended up having to go back and restore from tape, but since we couldn’t boot into single user mode we did the old net boot from the jumpstart server trick and then restore from tape.  All in all it was not fun, but we made it through it.  One last thing, we had some servers that were OK with the patch cluster.  I think it depends on the release of Solaris that you are running.  The older installs did not have the proper dependencies, but the newer installs did.  I just wanted to put this out there as a heads up for anyone else getting ready to patch up a Solaris 10 box, be careful cause you might make a brick.

Hope that helps!

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ANNOUNCEMENT: Solarum Is Looking For Contributors

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Here at Solarum, the idea that I started this site with was to share information.  If I share what I know and the experiences that I have had, and others that visit this site do the same, pretty soon we have a great deal of information that anyone and everyone can use anytime they need it.  So far, all of the information posted here has come from me.  Now, that’s fine because it’s my site and I wanted to share that information.  However, in the interest of making this site better, I am putting out the offer for others to become contributors here.  If you like to write and have some type of technology background and/or experience that you want to share with others, please contact me and let me know.  I will then contact you and we will go from there.  Just so I don’t misrepresent anything, this is not a paid position or anything like that (it’s not for me either, I am running this site out of my own pocket to try and do some good for people), but anyone that wants to contribute will get full credit for their work and will be helping others from all over the world that come here to get help and info.  It’s a pretty cool thing all in all.  So what are you waiting for?  Sharpen up those pens, light up those keyboards and get to writing!