Vicky's Technical Blog

On a Saturday night, after happily and proudly connecting my Verbatim USB 3.0 External Drive I was shocked to hear a clicking and fearful noise. I thought the drive has failed. The drive is 1 TB (2.5 inch hard disk). I had to copy some important files from the External drive to my Laptop. I switched to another USB port and guess what... my drive worked correctly J The real culprit was one of the USB ports on my laptop. (Oh My DOG, this USB port is a real B*TCH !!) “Clicking Noise does not absolutely mean that the external drive has failed.” The USB port on my laptop is not faulty – a USB mouse connected on this port works correctly. I did some research to investigate this issue. Other users got similar problem “Low voltage to a hard-drive can mimic all manner of failures.” So, insufficient power from a USB port on a laptop or pc can cause clicking noises on an usb external drive. My drive is safe. I can copy my data from it. Long live my drive J

Below is the message I usually get when the 260 characters limit is exceeded while extracting an archive especially if it contains lots of HTML files. This limitation is by design in Windows. WinRAR or any software is not to be blamed. On Linux you don’t have this limitation. From MSDN : “In the Windows API (with some exceptions discussed in the following paragraphs), the maximum length for a path is  MAX_PATH , which is defined as 260 characters.” I found a couple of workarounds to deal with this issue: 1.Print my favorite online pages as PDF (You can use doPDF  or online web2pdf convertors. I recommend printfriendly.com ) 2.Move the archive file (ZIP or RAR) to the root of the drive. Example, You can copy or move it to C:\  or D:\  then extract your ZIP or RAR file from there.

Traditional T9 Style Keyboard for Android If you are looking for traditional keyboard on your android smartphone welcome!! I am used to the traditional style keyboard on my Nokia N73 mobile. So I find it a bit difficult to type using the QUERTY Keyboard especially on smaller screens. As solutions we have the following  apps on Google Play Store : 1. Perfect Keyboard Free - Free and Commercial Versions 2. (EvenBetter)NumberPad Keyboard - Commercial There might be other similar (FREE) apps but these two looks great. Just for your info, from Wikipedia : "T-9 , which stands for Text on 9 keys, is a USA-patented predictive text technology for mobile phones (specifically those that contain a 3x4 numeric keypad), originally developed by Tegic Communications, now part of Nuance Communications."

Even if you have passed the CCNA or higher certifications, there’s always something which still teases your mind and challenges your technical knowledge. I am talking about password encryption in cisco routers. I did some research and investigated it myself. From Official CiscoIOS Password Encryption Facts webpage: “To determine which scheme has been used to encrypt a specific password, check the digit preceding the encrypted string in the configuration file. If that digit is a 7, the password has been encrypted using the weak algorithm. If the digit is a 5, the password has been hashed using the stronger MD5 algorithm. ” Summary: 7 = type 7.weak encryption (reversible encryption) 5= type 5. strong encryption (MD5 one way hash encryption) enable password = plain text enable password in configuration file (show running-config) enable secret = encrypts enable password using the MD5 Hashing algorithm . Password is encrypted in configuration file (show runn...

Java is a programming language created by Sun Microsystems ,now owned by Oracle Corporation. One of the strength of the Java programming is that it comes with a rich set of Application Programming Interface (API). This API facilitates programming of IMAGE Processing, Sound processing etc. The standard library in C/C++ does not have any built in functions for manipulating images or sound. You have to start coding from scratch a set of functions which will allow you to accomplish this task (What a pain !!) Alternatively, you can use open-source or third party libraries. While searching for a native implementation of JAVA-like API I got NaJa and NewJ as solutions. NaJa is an open source project while NewJ is a commercial product (Trial available) What is NaJa according to the official website : "NaJA stands for Native C++ Java-like API. The Java API is is a rich, standard and quite good design object library. There is no complete equivalent usable direc...

Nice Introduction from the Acronis website: “There are three unavoidable certainties in life: Death, Taxes and Hard Disk Drive Failures.  Acronis does not have a solution for the first; however, we can make sure that your financial records, photos, videos and other items of sentimental or monetary value are protected so that you can cherish the memories and pay your taxes on time! Acronis Drive Monitor is a free tool that helps monitor your hard drive, and prevent data loss.” How? Understanding the Technology: S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is a disk monitoring technology which can predict many disk failures. This technology is implemented on the most modern hard drives. Many hard disk monitoring software e.g Acronis Drive Monitor query this information to analyze and predict hard drive health, status, failure. Supported Hard Drives according to the Acronis website: “ With the first version of Acronis Drive Monitor, the le...

KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). It consists of a loadable kernel module, kvm.ko, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and a processor specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko. KVM also requires a modified QEMU although work is underway to get the required changes upstream. Using KVM, one can run multiple virtual machines running unmodified Linux or Windows images. Each virtual machine has private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc. The kernel component of KVM is included in mainline Linux, as of 2.6.20. KVM is open source software. KVM is arguably a TYPE 1 Hypervisor according to this IBM blog post on virtualization: …but the truth is that  KVM  actually does run directly on x86 hardware. People assume it is a type 2 hypervisor because one of the ways that it is packaged is as a compo...

As in programming, I will follow the tradition by starting this technical blog with "Hello World". I will try to share my technical experiences,challenges and solutions to IT issues. This blog will be very helpful to System Administrators, Systems Engineers, DBA, Network Engineers, IT Managers, IT Newbies (noobs) and other IT professionals.