The BrainStomp Blog Tech for your small business

     First of all - credit where credit is due. I did not come up with this, I found the original project at iPodWizard.net, the reason I am creating this how-to is because I had a terrible time finding this data originally. That said - on with the show.

     I have tried about a half a dozen iPod FM transmitters, NONE of which delivered what I wanted; clean, clear, crisp sound with minimal to no static. The best one of the lot was the Monster iCarPlayPlus but it still fell short of the target. So I set off to find a way to improve it. I knew that someone far smarter and far more creative than me must have done it by now, so began the search. After much time spent looking at things that mentioned the iCarPlayPlus but did not contain a proper modification or hack for the device I found one at iPodWizard.net. I made this mod on my first device and never put the case back on it, when I finally decided to put the case on I must have crimped a power cable or something because my unit went up in smoke. Seeing as I was going to do the modification/hack all over again because of the tremendous gains that I saw with it I figured that I mind as well document it and write this up.

     This write up assumes you have the iCarPlayPlus, some cable (I used a strand from a piece of Cat V), a soldering iron, a small drill bit (1/16" or 1.58mm for me), a couple of extra hands and the patience to do this kind of stuff.

     The disclaimer mumble jumble - I and BrainStomp are in no way resposible for what you do with this information. This process can damage your equipment, burn you, make you blind, give you lead poisoning, yada, yada, yada - Do this at your own risk, if you dare, but don't come complaining to me if something goes wrong. You are a big boy or big girl take responsibility for your own actions. Are we clear? Great.

     So we begin by opening the case of the device. This thing is only held together by some glue. If you use a small flat blade screw driver and just glide it along the seam where the two parts come together it will come apart soon enough. Take your time, be gentle, don't mess up the finish because you will want this to look good when you put it back together right? FWIW I used the bottle opener/flat blade on my Gerber multi tool.

     Next, we carefully take this thing apart. Be careful those 3 red buttons are loose in there, do not loose them in the carpet/room, you will need them later.

     Next, cut yourself a piece of cable. I used a strand from a length of Cat V cable. You can use any solid 22 or 24 gage cable. The strand I cut was 34 inches. The final product will be 30 inches but I wanted to give myself some room to screw this up without having to cut a whole new cable.

     Ok, now it is time to do some reading on the original document, on page 4 of the original PDF you are going to find the location you will need to solder to get this antenna on. The picture here is the detail of that area. You will need a low power soldering iron for this. These are surface mount components and they take very tiny tips to work on and any large amount of heat could burn up a component. So you will need to work very skillfully and fast. I used a Radio Shack 15w iron with the smallest tip they had for it. I started by heating the iron and letting it get to temperature. Then I warmed up my new antenna by touching the tip of the iron to the exposed copper for few seconds, long enough for me to feel the heat by holding the antenna about 1 inch from the end of the cable's exposed end. Next, you will likely need the help of a couple of extra hands to hold the components down while you solder. So get that trusty assistant to hold the cable in place, you then touch the tip of the iron to the cable 's exposed end. This will heat up the cable and the contact point at the same time while making the cable a heat sink to prevent you from overheating the surface mount component. Once your assistant can't hold that cable in place any longer because of the heat traveling up the antenna cable - then use the solder on the iron and let just enough get to the cable. Take the iron off and make your assistant hold that cable in place till the solder is solid, it will only take a couple of seconds or so. The hard part is now done.Make sure you do this according to the instructions on the PDF. I messed up the first time I did this and had to go back and add more solder to make a connection with the pad that is the antenna lead. BTW - the pictures in this write up are prior to me fixing the lack of solder to get both pads. Taking the case appart is much easier with the factory glue than with super-glue.

     Now make a tiny hole for your antenna cable to exit the unit. Make this hole as close as possible to where the antenna soldering point is. I used a 1/16th bit by hand to make the hole. It doesn't take much time and I think it is cleaner than using a power drill.

     Make a knot about 1/2 inch from the solder point on the antenna cable this will serve as a safety mechanism in case the antenna gets pulled or tugged. The knot will keep the stress at the case and keep it from the soldering point.

     Thread the antenna cable though the hole on the case and put the case back together. Be careful not to pinch any of wires. I used some super glue to hold it together.

     Next I used some black parachute cord to encase the antenna cable to make it look better. You don't need to do this but it makes a difference in the looks of the device in your car. I measured 30 inches of cable and made a sharp bend on the cable itself. After that I made a knot on one end of the para-cord, on the other end I selected a single strand and attached my cable to it with a square knot on the strand and a couple of twists on the cable. Then I trimmed the excess cable from the antenna. I fished the antenna cable though the para-cord using the strand by pulling on the end that has the knot on it. after the cable was mostly all in then I took the knot off to allow the strands to be taken out of the para-cord. I burnished both ends very carefully with a lighter and super-glued the end next to the device against the case.

     The mounted hardware takes the antenna vertical and hangs it from the rear view mirror.

     I have been using DNSStuff to get information about...well DNS but they keep on making things less and less available to try to get you to get a paid account. Don't misunderstand me, I understand that they need to monetize their business but I am not inclined to pay for s service that is free already; it would be like paying to breathe. So I went in search of an alternative on line. There are software tools that can do all that DNS Stuff does such as Sam Spade but having software installed is not always convenient. Enter IPTools.com.
     IPTools.com has all the stuff that I would be using from DNSStuff but it is free and it works just as well. Give them a try!

     I have been playing with VMWare Server 2.0 Beta and I have to say, this is impressive. The upgrade from 1.x of my virtual systems went though flawlessly and the new interface is what the UI should have been for this product from the beginning. If this is your introduction to VMWare then it should have a very memorable impact, this UI delivers that impact. I think that VMWare will sell more licenses of its other products based on the experiences that people have with this free version as opposed to the prior free version.
    If you are used to VMWare server but not used to ESX or their infrastructure product then this will be a bit of a shock. The console is gone in favor of a fully web driven experience, so if you want to connect to the virtual machines and if you want to look at overall performance you only have one place to go. As with its Infrastructure line you can go to a web server hosted on the IP address of the host machine and it automatically transfers to an HTTPS session. From there you have to login to be able to look at things and install the required plug ins that will allow you to actually connect to the console of the guest systems. There are built in plug ins for Firefox and for Internet Explorer and both worked under my tests.
     If you are already running VMWare server 1.x you should seriously consider testing the Beta of v.2, if you are not already running VMWare sever - what are you waiting for? This is the perfect environment to test out applications and operating systems.

     Here is my first non OSS entry and I think it is a good one. Not too long ago we used to sell Veritas BackupExec to cover the backup needs of our clients. When Symantec bought Veritas we knew that the great program and service we had experienced would eventually be replaced by the monolith crap support that Symantec is famous for. It did not take long and we started looking for a different alternative for backups at our client sites. Enter Storagecraft!
     After trying out other backup solutions, none that delivered a worthwhile backup experience we stumbled onto StorageCraft only expecting the same disappointment that we had experienced with other solutions. Boy where we wrong! This is one piece of software well worth the expense it comes with. Backups with StorageCraft to network shares were not only fast but very reliable, the same was true to a local hard drive and to a USB hard drive. We tried to make this fail, it didn't! Restoring from an Image is just as fast as backing it up and in all our trials it never failed.
     You can mount an image as a drive to restore files within the image back to the live system or you can restore the system entirely from the image. Since the backups are based on an initial full backup and subsequent incremental backups as often as you want them, you can restore  to any given point in time from your images; all hell broke loose and you want to restore to last night's full backup? Sure thing! A user deleted some critical stuff that had been edited an hour ago and you want to recover that so you don't loose all the work? Sure thing too!
     Going from a real system to a virtual machine? No sweat, StorageCraft takes care of that too. Oh, you want to go from a virtual machine to a real system? No big deal either. This thing handles it every time.

     Once upon a long time ago I thought that WinRAR was the absolute and only zip/compressed file manager and program. Then I stumbled onto 7-Zip, after a very unwilling trial of it in place of WinRAR it won my heart over. It is fast, sleek, elegant and best of all - OSS. Don't misunderstand me OSS isn't everything or the end all be all but when deploying software to a large quantity of workstations price does matter and when the price is $0 and the software outperforms the commercial alternative, well it is a no brainer on what the clear choice is. Try 7-Zip if you haven't, it will be worth your time.

     As you read more and more on this blog you will find that I am a HUGE fan of Open Source Software and that a lot of the links I'll put up will be based on Source Forge. That said I have to mention Nagios.

     Nagios makes my life as a consultant a pleasure. Nagios will help you monitor your network in very detailed ways and it helps you prevent problems by showing you where your problems lie as they develop. It take a while to setup the system and it takes some tweaking but in the end it is very worth while to take the time to do it. Take at it and enjoy it once it is setup!

     Way back in the day, way way way back when I started working on PCs there was this great game to kill time, Scorched. Well it turns out someone remade it in a 3D mode and put it up on Source Forge. This is a great time killer of a game and now the 3D aspect makes it even more challenging than before.

     I am a huge fan of Open Source software. It saves a lot of money to my clients and it generally works just as well as commercial software, sometimes even better that is always a good thing.

     Today's entry to the blog? Clonezilla! My friend Beth put me on to this one a while back and it is great. Clonezilla is a Source Forge based project aimed at replacing Norton Ghost. The software works rather well and is certainly worth trying if you intend to deploy images over a network or just simply cloning from one PC to another.

     This being the first real post of this blog I will try to keep things as civil as I can. That said the last couple of weeks have been a real hell and it is all thanks to Adobe's Automatic Update.

     We are a consulting and support company for small businesses in our area. In essence we assume the responsibility of being the IT department for companies that do not want to have an organic IT function or who do not want to afford one in a full time basis. That means that we take care of the whole enchilada to include updates and firewall security as well as ensure that everything in the IT world of the companies that we support is TipTop. Enter Adobe's Automatic Update; It all started with a client that runs all of their sales operations from remote offices for each salesperson. The sales person keeps at their home a company provided firewall (Check Point Safe@Office 500W), a VoIP phone and a company PC. The client's complaint is that their phones have a 5 to 7 second time delay as if they are calling from a different continent in the 1970's and that their remote sessions to the terminal server at the main site are very slow. The initial response is to halt all unnecessary traffic by restricting all but the most essential traffic on the Internet connection. Once we blocked all HTTP traffic and killed all existing connections things went back to normal. So looking at the firewall logs shows an enormous amount of traffic going to Akamai and to NTT. So in go rules in the firewall to block all traffic headed for the specific IPs and we re-enable all the access for the users. Two days later we are back at the problems with the connections. Back to the firewall logs and there is again a ton of traffic to the aforementioned locations. Again we add more restrictions to disallow this traffic and we move on.

     It gets better, a different client calls complaining of the same troubles. So now armed with some information we know to halt all communications but this calls for a packet capture of what in the world could be flooding an OC3 pipe to 100% utilization. The packet capture reveals Adobe Automatic Update calling home for some TLC. When it is all said and done we are blocking a couple of Class B subnets associated with Akamai and NTT. This is great as it stops the problem from continuing to eat up all the bandwidth on the Internet connection but this also sucks because of the "Guilt by association" rules that we had to put in place to curb this problem also means that any site that load balances using Akamai or NTT is not longer available on these networks and there are several sites that the user base demands access to.

     The ultimate fix is to update all the PCs running any Adobe product to the latest and greatest version of that product and disable the automatic update but this is a royal pain for a lot of sites. Wherever we can we have moved away from using Acrobat by replacing it with FoxIt Reader and PDF Creator. Some things are unable to use these so test them before deploying them but for the most part they work great and have a significantly smaller foot print than Adobe.

     Adobe - you need to change the behavior of your updates, this kind of problem is just unacceptable.