First of all Happy Halloween.

Second of all we have bad news for few the very few who were in the IRC today if you weren’t in it today then this is great news! The contest is postponed. We are not sure when this ipod nano is going to be given out, we will announce more detail hopefully next week.

-The TutorialNinjas Crew

Need:

• Pack of mentos, (the regular kind, no fruity stuff)
• 1 Two liter bottle of Diet Coke (Regular works but leaves a stickier mess)
• A sheet of paper or a towel to wrap several mentos

Steps:

1. Lay out your sheet of paper or paper towel and put a few Mentos on it (2 or 3).
   Then wrap it loosely so the Mentos can fall out later.
2. Open up your bottle of Diet Coke.
3. Dump the Mentos in.
4. Watch a beautiful fountain of soda and enjoy some left over Mentos.

Why This Works (Ipp’s best guess, not 100% sure):

• Soda has Carbon Dioxide bound tightly bound around water molecules.
• In order for the foam in water to appear the water molecules have to resist eachother
• Mentos contains Arabic Gum encased around a rough gelatin
• Arabic Gum will allow water molecules to break more easily
• The tiny pits around the mentos create nucleation sites, which basically allows carbon dioxide bubbles to form.
• So basically the mentos travel straight to the bottem of the soda weakening the resistance of the water and separating the carbon dioxide. When the water becomes “weak” enough all the Carbon Dioxide will jolt out of the soda bringing any soda that got in its way.

Comparing the Reaction to Something more understandable:

• Set up: You (water) are stopping a balloon (carbon dioxide) filled with helium and several coins (weakened water) are on it.
• Action: Someone (mentos) stops you (strong water) from holding the balloon (carbon dioxide) down and the coins (weakened water) can’t do the job.
• Result: The balloon will float into the air taking the coins with it which will eventually fall and create a “fountain” effect

Video

It seems that todays biggest competition with email happens over storage space. Everyone is wondering who can provide the most storage space at little or no-cost at all. If you grew up using AOL and still use it, AOL may not have alerted you months (or years) ago about any storage space upgrades. The announcement today is that: AOL grants you unlimited space! This is why they probably never bothered to tell you that. Each folder on an AOL mail account can hold up to 2 GB of emails. The keyword is: folder. If you take advantage of this, you will never have to delete an email again!

Lets get some free space!

1. Sign onto your AOL account.
2. Open your inbox, and go to the Manage Mail tab.
3. Right click the list item on the left that is titled “Saved on AOL” and click “Create New Folder”.
4. Type in your desired folder name. (Example: Mail Storage #1, #2, and so on…)

Now that your folder has been created, to move all of your emails from your inbox to Mail Storage #1:

1. Go back to your inbox tab.
2. In AOL, either use Ctrl + A or go to Edit > Select All, to select all of your emails in your inbox.
3. Right click the selected messages in your inbox and choose: Move to > Saved on AOL > Mail Storage #1 (or #2, etc).

Success alas! You have freed your inbox of 2 more GB of space. To access these emails at a later time:

1. Select the Manage Mail tab.
2. Click the + next to “Saved on AOL” and select your folder listed.
   Emails will be shown on the right of the screen.

Have fun with your unlimited email space!

A System Administrator could fall under the “IT Department” of any company. If they are doing their job well it may seem like they do not do much. This is because a good Sysadmin should be able to detect a problem before it occours and fix it before it breaks. So if you are reading this article and have recently complained about your work computer before link them to this article!

*Note all products linked here are 100% free and opensource*

Manufacturer’s Software

If your manufacturer takes time to develop software for you to use and bundles it with their computer, you should be using it. It can do helpfull things such as predict a hard drive failure which may not be common in a household but is fairly more common in a enterprise. Combined with the right monitoring software you can make sure your coworkers computers are always in the best physical health.

Monitoring Computers

Nagios even though it is made for Servers, it can also be used for workstations. Possible uses are:

• Monitor for predicted hardware failures
• Make sure the File Server is up and running
• Graph when PC’s are on/off (useful if your work wants to cut down on the electricity bill)

Another cool thing about Nagios is you can tell it to take action when something goes down, if used right you will never hear the question “is this down?”

*Note: Nagios is the actual server component. NRPE is the client for Linux and NSClient ++ is a great client for windows.

Managing Software

A computer is fairly secure until a user gets behind it, should use inventory software such as OCS-Inventory to keep track of what people are installing. With this you can not only scan for “rogue machines” aka peoples personal laptops, but you can check if they installed any software you don’t approve of such as PC Anywhere.

Syslog (servers)

You may have several servers or for whatever reason you want workstations logging to a central location. You can use Syslog-NG and PHP-Syslog-NG to record all this information into an easy to read web page that will let you filter + search. Why may this be useful? Well you would know if people have brute forced your server and more importantly gotten in. Also if someone gets in and attempts to hide it in the logs they would also have to break into your Syslog server, which is hopefully located on a different server to prevent you from finding out there was an intrusion.

Summary

As one can see open source software can be a great help but I would not recommend installing anything in an enterprise or especially on a machine that has a routable IP Address without doing some checks on just how secure it really is. With the 3 above packages you should be able to:

• Minimize downtime and ensure everything is running just fine(nagios)
• Track PC Uptime and possibly having users shut off their PC to save power(nagios)
• Monitor for unwanted software(OCSInventory)
• Have a central location of logs on your servers, mainly for security purposes(break-ins especially) as nagios should take care of services(Syslog-NG)

Getting Help

Google is your best friend however if Google is no help to you, turn to user groups, IRC and/or forums. Don’t know of a good place to ask your question? Register at our forums and ask us here!

Still Need Help?

You can try emailing me directly at ipp@tutorialninjas.net, or if you want to request our “Professional Services” for your business please send an email to support@tutorialninjas.net . We do have experience with installing the mentioned software in an enterprise and can tailor it to your companies needs.

After a long week and a half of doing some “beta” testing on the IRC server, we have concluded this with a server transition. To make a long story very short, some users were having problems, and the other server did not give us much fun/freedom (bots, etc). The Tutorial Ninjas IRC channel is officially launched, and can be easily accessed from our main website.

In the top right of our site where all of the navigation is, you will see a link called “Ninja Chat (IRC)”. Simply click that, type in your desired Nickname (preferably Forum user name) , and if you have registered your user name to the IRC, you can type in the password too. Click Submit and your good to start chatting!

It is official: The Octocontest will take place on the 31st of October. Your chance to win an iPod Nano!
Be sure to register to the new IRC server if you have not already!

We highly encourage you to visit our IRC channel and to participate in it!
A few examples of what we already have in it are: A scrambler bot and a PartyBot. Come join the fun!

For those of you who know more than the average-ninja about IRC:

IRC Server: irc.newnet.net
(For those of you in the USA use: na.newnet.net)
(For those of you in Europe use: eu.newnet.net)
Port: 6667
Channel: #tutorialninjas

See you in there and good luck in the contest!

Halloween is right around the corner! What is going in your trick-or-treat basket? I know some prefer candy, and others techies like us might prefer a gadget or two. Low and behold, today we are giving back that gift! Maybe you could be carrying around your new iPod Nano in that basket! Thats what all the buzz is about today, so if you seem interested… READ ON!

How to Qualify:

• Frequently visit the IRC channel
  • Be sure to register your nickname!
• Become a member of the community!
  If you don’t have an account already, register for the forums and post!

Contest Rules:

• Follow all of the qualification bullets.
• Your IRC channel nickname must match your Tutorial Ninjas forum account name.
  • The only exceptions are for those with secondary nick names. (We know who you are)
• We will be asking a series of questions in the IRC, you must answer to the best of your knowledge.
  • Answers may or may not pertain to Tutorial Ninjas.
• The contest length can range from 5 minutes to 1 hour. So be sure make some free some time!

The Prize:

You will be competing for a like-new, working condition iPod Nano (1st generation). It does not come in its original packaging.

More Information:

• The date this contest will be held is Wednesday October 31, 2007. (Be sure to qualify!)
• We will be asking a series of questions, so fill your brains with knowledge!
• The prize will be shipped to you via USPS (Snail mail).
• Any other questions? Please send them to contest@tutorialninjas.net.