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Volume 2, Issue 5 - May, 2007 - © 2009 by Moose Logic, All Rights Reserved
Cover Story: How To Spring Clean Your PC
How To Instantly Do Any Job Faster With FREE Done-For-You Templates
Let’s Talk About Virtualization...
The Lighter Side
Backup Alert To All iPod Users
Moose Logic Coming Events
(Moose Views is a monthly newsletter prepared by Moose Logic to bring you information and tips on maintaining a trouble-free network)
How To Spring Clean Your PC
Are you having trouble seeing through the smudges and smears on your computer monitor? Do your keys stick because
of the crumbs from months of eat-at-your-desk lunches? Then it’s time to clean your computer!
Did you know your computer keyboard has more germs on it than the average toilet seat? Pretty gross. But aside from the health hazards of a dirty workstation, all that dust and dirt can actually make your PC overheat and inhibit proper performance. Since spring is in the air, there’s no time like the present to rescue your desktop from all that grunge.
For this project, regular old Windex and Mr. Clean are taboo. Make sure you have the right tools before you get started. We recommend:
- A can of compressed air
- Antibacterial wipes
- A cleaner designed specifically for computer monitor screens
- A soft, lint-free cloth
- A small vacuum
Next, clean your monitor screen. Before you clean your monitor, turn it off; it will be easier to see fingerprints and smudges.
NEVER spray Windex or a regular household cleaner directly onto your monitor. The liquid could seep down through the edges of the monitor and cause irreversible damage. Instead, use computer cleaning wipes that can be purchased at any computer or electronics store. If you don’t have these wipes available, you can use a diluted 50-50 mixture of water and isopropyl alcohol. Spray a little bit of this mixture onto a soft, lint-free cloth and wipe the screen carefully. Again, make sure the cloth is slightly damp and not wet or the water can enter the monitor and damage the circuitry.
Now for the really dirty part: your computer’s fan. This is the most serious dirt-related threat to your PC. Dust constantly gets sucked inside the case while your computer is running and, over time, it will cling to and clog your power-supply and cooling fans, causing them to slow down or fail completely. If and when the fan stops working, your PC will overheat and cause component failure and ultimately, data loss.
Once again, grab your can of compressed air. Remove the case lid and you’ll see the various fans and incredible dust bunnies clinging to them. Using short, powerful bursts, blow the dust through the internal slits so it exits to the outside of the case. Make sure to spray the compressed air in short bursts, keeping the can upright and the tube at least a couple of inches from the hardware. You may want to use the vacuum to suck up the dust you blow out onto the carpet, BUT BE CAREFUL! Vacuums create static electricity, which is deadly to sensitive electronic components. Don’t stick your vacuum hose inside your PC to clean up the dust or you’ll risk damaging the sensitive electronic components
You can buy battery-powered vacuums made specifically for electronics, but for the price, compressed air will work just as well. Just make sure you power down your computer and unplug it before you start cleaning it.
After you are done, check all the cables and plugs inside your PC to make sure you didn’t knock anything loose during cleaning and turn it back on.
How To Instantly Do Any Job Faster With FREE Done-For-You Templates
Using templates can really speed up any job. At http://office.microsoft.com/templates, you can search and download
hundreds of free templates ranging from inventory sheets, time sheets, to business cards and envelopes. You can
even find newsletter templates just like the one you are reading!
If you are looking for web site templates, check out www.templatemonster.com. You can search through hundreds of web site templates by style or category. You have the option to buy a copy for as little as $62, or buy a “unique” copy for $2,500+.
What’s the difference? A unique copy removes the template from their library so no one else can purchase that template. The downside is that if others BEFORE you have downloaded it, they still get to legally use their copy. Plus, you’ll need help from a web designer to post the site and make it work. The upside is that you can get GREAT design ideas for nothing, or shortcut the number of billable hours your web designer has to spend on creating a template from scratch.
And don’t forget: Moose Logic offers Web design services. For a free Web design consultation, just give us a call at (206) 774-0619.
Let’s Talk About Virtualization...
Virtualization is getting a lot of attention these days. In case you’re not familiar with the concept, we’re talking about running multiple virtual operating systems (workstations or servers) on a single, powerful, hardware platform. The concept of virtualization isn’t new, of course—it’s been around since the days of IBM’s “big iron.” In these days of “wintel” servers, though, we’ve grown used to the concept of one server operating system per physical server. But today, when the average desktop workstation has more processing power, memory, and local storage than the average 1970s-era mainframe computer did, it doesn’t have to be that way.If you take a look at a typical server in a typical business, you’ll probably see consistently low processor utilization. So why, then, do servers seem to multiply like mushrooms in dark corners? Well, because sometimes server applications interfere with one another if we try to put them on the same system. We also may want to take a system off-line for maintenance without impacting any other applications in the environment. Or insure that the failure of one server doesn’t impact other critical services.
By running multiple virtual servers on a single physical server, we can make more efficient use of the physical resources. We can run the processor at a higher average utilization level. We can make more efficient use of memory and storage—particularly if our physical servers are tied into some kind of shared storage system (like a Storage Area Network, or “SAN”). We can shut down or reboot a virtual server without impacting any other virtual server that’s running on that piece of hardware.
There are also power savings to be had—not only the power saved by having fewer physical servers running, but the additional power saved by not needing as much air conditioning capacity in the server room. The savings are significant enough that the power companies are beginning to take notice. According to their Web site, as of this writing, PG&E was paying incentives of $150—$300 per physical server that was removed from a company’s environment through a virtualization project. The smart money says that other power companies will jump on this bandwagon, too.
The other side of the coin, though, is that if the host hardware fails, it will affect multiple systems, not just one. We can deal with this in several ways. First, if we’re buying fewer pieces of hardware for an environment, we can probably afford to make those pieces of hardware more robust: multiple processors, redundant power supplies, redundant fans, etc., so the hardware is less likely to fail. Or, we can go the other direction, and deploy blade servers tied into a SAN, so if a blade fails, we just replace it, or move the Virtual Machines (VMs) to a different blade. And, since an entire VM is really just a big disk file, we can periodically take a snapshot copy of that big disk file, store it away somewhere, and mount it on another host platform for quick recovery in the event of a failure.
Today, there are, broadly speaking, three approaches to virtualization. The first approach relies on an underlying host operating system, which is a full-blown server in it’s own right. Microsoft’s Virtual Server and VMware’s VMware Server (formerly known as VMware GSX) fall into this category. But, because there is an underlying host operating system, your VMs will not perform quite as well as they will in the other approaches we’re going to discuss. Also, you have very little control over the allocation of processing resources to the VMs. The underlying host operating system is going to be responsible for it, whether you like it or not.
The second approach, typified by VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure (a.k.a. VMware ESX), has a very efficient, bare-bones operating system whose only purpose in life is to serve as a host platform for VMs. Not only is this far more efficient, but in the latest generation of the product, you can have quite granular control over the allocation of resources. For example, if your host machine is a quad-processor system, you could specify that you wanted two processors assigned to VM #1, one processor assigned to VM #2, and the last processor shared by VMs #3—#5.
The third approach, typified by XenSource’s XenEnterprise, is generally referred to as paravirtualization. It also utilizes a very efficient bare-bones host OS. But in the past, paravirtualization required the guest operating system to be specifically modified to run on the virtualization platform. Not to get too technical, a traditional Intel processor has a hierarchy of “privilege levels” in which instructions can run. Certain kernel processes of an OS are usually designed to run at the most privileged level, sometime called “Ring 0.” To run on a paravirtualized platform, where the virtual host itself was running in Ring 0, the guest OS had to be modified to eliminate the need for it to execute any of its own code in Ring 0. (For more on this, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user_mode, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/paravirtualization.) However, the latest generations of Intel and AMD processors (Intel’s “VT-x” technology, and AMD’s “AMD-V” technology) have built-in hardware support for virtualization. This allows unmodified operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, to run on the XenSource paravirtualization platform. If you have hardware that supports it (and all of the newer Intel 5000– and 7000-series processors do) , the price point—under $1,000 for a two-processor-socket license including the first year of software maintenance—is extremely attractive. While it may not be as fully featured as VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure (yet), it finally brings virtualization within the budget of smaller businesses.
Moose Logic is moving into the virtualization arena in a big way. We’re in the final stages of our authorization process as a VMware partner, and we are also an authorized XenSource partner. We recently used XenSource to do a network upgrade for one of our smaller customers that deployed seven virtual Windows servers running on two dual-processor host machines (four on one, three on the other). The host machines are sized such that either could run all seven VMs if one host failed (8 Gb of RAM in each and lots of disk space). Trying to build the same environment with seven new physical servers would have been cost-prohibitive for a business of their size.
If you’d like to know more about virtualization, and the benefits virtualization could bring to your environment, give us a call. We’d love to talk with you about it. And stay tuned for more information in coming issues of Moose Views about the Citrix “Virtual Desktop Initiative,” and how it fits into what we’ve discussed here!
The Lighter Side
"Cash, check or charge?" the checker asked. When the woman opened her purse, there was a TV remote inside. "So, do you always carry your TV remote?" the checker asked. "No," she said, "my husband wouldn't go shopping with me. This was the most horrible thing I could do to him legally."Two government economists were returning home from a field meeting. As with all government travelers, they were assigned the cheapest seats on the plane, and were occupying the center seat on opposite sides of the aisle. They continued their discussion of the knotty problem that had been the subject of their meeting through takeoff and meal service until finally one of the passengers in an aisle seat offered to trade places so they could talk and he could sleep.
After switching seats, one economist remarked to the other, “Well, that’s the first time an economic discussion ever kept anyone awake!”
Backup Alert To All iPod Users
If you’ve been an iTunes and iPod customer for any length of time, you’ve probably racked up a large number of
songs, videos, and audio books in your library. And in no time flat, you can end up spending a small fortune on
them.
But be warned! Most iTunes customers don’t realize that Apple will NOT allow you to re-download the music you’ve paid for, even if you lose every file because your computer dies, gets fried, infected, or destroyed.
If you don’t want to risk losing the purchases you’ve made, then make sure you back them up. Here’s how:
- From the iTunes File menu, choose Backup to Disc. A dialog box will open up giving you an option to
do one of the following:
- Back up entire iTunes library and playlists (to backup everything)
- Back up only iTunes Store purchases (to backup only your purchases)
- Click “Back Up” and wait for the CD drawer to open. Add a disc each time iTunes asks for one. If your library won’t fit on a single disc, iTunes will ask one at a time for as many discs as needed and write your library to them.
- Make sure you store your backups in an off-site location. Otherwise, if your office catches on fire, gets burglarized, or destroyed by a flood, faulty sprinkler system, or violent storm, they may go down with your PC.
