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Jun 02

Why I’m Blocking Bing.com on my School’s Network

Posted in: Software by Damien Barrett 10 Comments »

bingcom1Like the rest of the IT industry, I noticed when Microsoft–the proverbial 800lb gorilla in the room–waded into the search engine market with what appeared to be a fairly sophisticated new product, Bing. Billed as a “Google killer”, it does actually show some promise: clean interface, fairly accurate results, decent customization options, and it’s fast–all things that a good engine should be. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s cluelessness has once again bitten them in the ass and rendered their shiny new search engine completely unusable by the vast majority of school systems in this country. Here’s why.

Like most schools, we have a content filter. Ours happens to be [redacted], but these filters all work the same way, by blocking content from known-bad lists of domains. Some use fuzzy logic as well, but most are fairly straight-foward category-based content filters. Before we go further, try this as a experiment:

1) Go to Bing.com

2) Search for “Jenna Jameson” or any porn star name

3) Click on Videos at the top.

4) Turn off “safe search” if you haven’t done so already.

5) Now scrub your mouse over each of the videos in the search fields.

6) Voila! Instant porn, available to anyone, regardless of a content filter.

Right, okay, so what to do? As an IT administrator in a K-12 school, I can’t very well allow this content on my network. I’ve contacted my content filter provider and they said this:

After doing some research, it looks like Microsoft has developed Bing is such a way that will make it very, very difficult to block the inappropriate and/or dangerous content on the video links.

Most sites like this will have a page for turning on adult content, will allow a parameter to be passed that enforces safe searches, or other things. Microsoft appears to have done everything in the most difficult possible way. Everything is parameter based and mostly driven by javascript and random id numbers with zero clue as to content. Whereas Google and others embed the URL of the site where the content came from, which allows a partner to filter individual pieces out of results, bing does none of this. As there is no current way to block individual portions of a page and/or tools to enable something similar to “safe search”, at this time our recommendation is to simply block bing.com in your policies if you are concerned about users accessing inappropriate content.

So that’s my solution. Microsoft has left me with no option except to block their entire search engine. Good job, Microsoft. You’ll never win the search engine game with solutions as clueless as this.

6-17-2009: A day or so ago, Microsoft changed how their search results are delivered. Virtually all porn content is now pulled from “explicit.bing.com” instead of from the main domain itself. Very simply, they’ve listed to the complaints (including mine) and have made it much easier for me to use my existing content filter to block explicit content without having to resort to blocking the entire domain. Today I’ve unblocked “bing.com” and blocked “explicit.bing.com”. In all my testing so far, our content filter is working exactly as it’s supposed to and Bing.com can now be a resource our students can utilize.

More: TechCrunch. FoxNews. Loic Le Meur

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Apr 27

Building a Mac Tech Utilities Drive

Posted in: Mac OS X, Software by Damien Barrett 7 Comments »

screwdriverSo you’re a Mac tech and you regularly encounter hundreds, if not thousands, of Macs. And while these Macs share an operating system, they are often more different than they are alike. Users install the strangest stuff and do mind-bogglingly weird things to their systems, often while attempting to solve a problem themselves. Your job is to fix these neglected, abused, and mucked-up Macs. So, which tools do you use, and what tips or tricks are there to help you overcome the unforeseen problems that are lurking behind the innocent login window? Here’s my setup. You are welcome to copy or modify to fit your particular Mac troubleshooting environment:

Continue reading »

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Apr 22

Overcoming the Awfulness of Adobe Updater (CS3)

Posted in: Software by Damien Barrett 2 Comments »

adobe_iconSo I’ve just spent three weeks manually updating an Adobe CS3 installation on about 200 MacBooks. And while many problems arose during this maintenance period, nothing was as un-user-friendly or as awful as trying to get Adobe Updater to properly update a CS3 installation. If you find yourself in a similarly unpleasant situation, I hope that this document can help you overcome the multitude of problems that can arise while trying to update CS3.

Note: I’m using a VLA copy of Adobe CS3 at my campus. For those you using single-installs, most of these tips may apply, but you may be having issues with product activation, which I don’t talk about at all in this post.

  1. First, you need to make sure that you’re using the most recent version of Adobe Updater available. Sounds simple, right? One would think that if you navigate to /Applications/Utilities and launch Adobe Updater, that it would check against Adobe’s servers and see a newer version and tell you so. Outside from downloading the newerest Adobe Updater (5.1..1.1113) from Adobe’s site, the only way to get Adobe Updater to see the newer version is to first launch Acrobat Pro 8.x and run “Check for Updates” from the Help menu. Doing the same from any other application in the suite will not get the newest version. And without the newest version, Adobe Updater will lie to you, telling you that everything’s up to date when it’s not; specifically Acrobat, which would otherwise remain stuck at 8.0.0.
  2. Adobe Updater will often fail when trying to update an installed copy of Adobe Reader 8.x. It will download an update, attempt to run it, and then just quit out, without providing any feedback to the user whatsoever. Since part of this updating process was updating Adobe Reader to v9.1 on my MacBooks, I simply deleted Adobe Reader 8.x to work around this problem. Adobe Reader 9.x uses the AdobeUpdater6 program, not the AdobeUpdater5 program.
  3. If the updates to Adobe Acrobat Pro fail, you sometimes have to manually run the updates outside of the Adobe Updater program. If Adobe Updater has already downloaded the updates, you can find them in ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Updater5/Install/Acrobat.  This is where Adobe Updater5 installs all of its updates, so if you wanted to capture the updates to the CS3 suite for the purpose of running them individually, or for repackaging into an installer (yay for Casper Composer!), this is where you’d look to get the various updates that Adobe Updater5 runs.
  4. Sometimes you have to clear out stale or corrupted updaters. I’ve seen a few occasions where Adobe Updater just borks itself trying to apply an invalid or corrupted update. You can simply delete the entire “Updater5″ folder from the above location and then re-run it and it’ll regenerate all the necessary files and folders and, most importantly, redownload clean copies of the updater(s) that is failing.
  5. On a few occasions I had to manually apply the Acrobat 8.1.0 update to Acrobat 8.0.0 in order to get the 8.1.3 update to take. I don’t know why.
  6. If the Acrobat Pro Updater continues to say that there are other Adobe applications running and asks you to shut them down before continuing, you’ll have to quit out of the updater, run Acrobat Pro and agree to the nonsense self-healing crap that it throws up. If Acrobat Pro is in the state where it needs to repair itself, then the updates can’t happen. Long story short: make sure that Acrobat Pro can launch without throwing up any of the self-healing dialogue boxes for Word PDF plugins or the AdobePDF printer, and then the Updater will be able to run properly.
  7. The Adobe Flash Light and Adobe Air updates take a very long time–as long as 45 minutes on a fast MacBook, and 90+ minutes on a slower PowerBook G4. If you’re running these updates from Adobe Updater instead of manually, know that Adobe Updater isn’t providing you any granular feedback about what stage in the install process it’s in. It gives you only a blue progress bar. And on these loooooong updates, it appears that the Updater has actually stalled. On several occasions, I found my technicians forcequitting or cancelling the Adobe Updater because they believed that it had hung on something. If you wait long enough, these updates will complete. If you run these long updates manually, you’ll recieve better feedback and see that they’re installing many many thousands of HTML and help files, accounting for the very long install.
  8. If you install Adobe CS3 fresh on a machine and then run Adobe Updater to get updates (remember to run it from Acrobat Pro’s Help menu), you can expect there to be approximately 600MB of updates. Plan for about 90-120 minutes for all of these to install, per machine.
  9. Run Adobe Updater until it says there are no more udpates. At the time of this writing Acrobat Pro was verison 8.1.4, and is only available to install once you’ve gotten Acrobat to 8.1.3.
  10. Learn to curse Adobe Updater. It’s very therapeutic. Every day, my coworkers and I would create new ways to curse Adobe Updater. I’m not sure what a wanker or a knobend is, but Adobe Updater is surely one.

Lastly, I’m fondly looking forward to Adobe CS5. Word on the street is that the installer will finally be package-based and we can expect the Updater7 to be a well-behaved application instead of the misbehaving and almost unusable douche-nozzle that it currently is.

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Mar 28

Adobe CS5 Installer to use PKG Installer

Posted in: Software by Damien Barrett 2 Comments »

adobe_updaterI almost can’t even believe it. Adobe has indicated that the next version of Creative Suite (CS5) will have installers that are in pkg format. This will, of course, make it much easier for those of who administer and deploy Macs to manage Adobe’s software. And if that weren’t enough, they’ve also said that the next verison of Adobe Acrobat (version 10) will not have the obnoxious “self-healing” functionality anymore:

[William Smith writes]: I’d like to hear something from Adobe about plans for Acrobat and their installer. On the Mac side, Acrobat seems to be a stepchild of Adobe’s installer technology and I don’t understand why.

[Adobe staffer answers]: The Acrobat installers are actually completely separate from the suite installers. Its more of an organizational issue than anything else. The Acrobat installer and the Reader installer are completely different technology and a completely different team.

That said, the Acrobat installer for the next major Acrobat release plans to be completely PKG for the Mac. In addition, the self-healing functionality should be gone (that is the technology that tries to do further setup after first launch.) They planned to get rid of self-healing in Acrobat 9 but couldn’t quite get to it. For the next version it is already removed so really should ship without self-healing.

Adobe finally seems to be listening to the screaming coming from their customers. I have spent so many hours struggling with Adobe’s installers and their ridiculously bad updater software, and I know I’m not alone. Someone even created DearAdobe.com, where people have been griping and voting for months about the poor quality of Adobe’s installers, updaters, and softwares.

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Mar 12

Solving Postscript Printing Errors with IP-networked Printers

Posted in: Software by Damien Barrett No Comments »

hp_1320jpg[Originally posted February 18, 2005 on my old blog, MrBarrett.com]

For many years, I argued against abandoning support for the AppleTalk protocol on networks because of the problems presented by printing postscript data over IP (instead of AppleTalk). Mostly, I was right; printing postscript data over AppleTalk is easier and more troublefree. However, even Apple doesn’t fully support AppleTalk anymore. The world has moved to IP, and you should move along with it. But moving your network printing from AppleTalk to IP can be a headache.

How many times have you printed a document with postscript data in it and gotten many pages of several lines of gibberish code instead of your document? Yup, me too. It rarely happened when you were printing your postcript documents to your HP printers over AppleTalk. Now it happens quite a lot. The technical reason for this is that most of the print drivers from HP don’t fully support printing postscript data via IP. All of the design programs I know (Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator) default to sending their postscript data in binary format. HP’s printer drivers don’t understand this and will not parse the data correctly, resulting in reams of wasted paper (unless you catch it in time and cancel the job). The good news is that there’s a solution. The bad news is that the setting you’ll need to change is in a different place for each program. Continue reading »

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Mar 05

Must-have iPhone Apps for Mac SysAdmins

Posted in: Software by Damien Barrett No Comments »

Bjango iStatWithout a doubt, my iPhone has completely changed how I manage my Mac OS X Servers. It used to be that I had to carry around a laptop if I wanted to be able to access my servers while away from my desk. The power and flexability of the iPhone allows me to monitor and administer my servers from just about anywhere. Here are the iPhone apps I use regularly to do so:

Bjango’s iStat. ($1.99). This is my favorite app. It allows me to see the health and status of my servers at a glance. Yes, I could install Simon, Lithium, Nagios, or a similar type of monitoring software and access their status pages via Safari on the iPhone, but this is much easier.

Server Admin Remote. ($4.99). This is another must-have app. Server Admin Remote allows me to toggle services on my Leopard servers, check services statuses, and most importantly, read my log files.

Zinger-soft iSSH. ($3.99). Quite simply enough, this allows me to SSH to my servers. I’m still searching for the best SSH iPhone app. I’m moderately happy enough with iSSH but am on the lookout for a better replacement. For now, it’s adequate.

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Mar 04

The Trouble with Twitterific

Posted in: Software by Damien Barrett No Comments »

twitterifficMy first foray into Twitter was using Twitterific as a client. I hadn’t ever used the web interface and there weren’t that many other options when I started tweeting last year. As a Twitter client, I suppose it does its job, but I found it far too distracting to use on a regular basis. I actually stopped using Twitter entirely for several months because I found Twitterific so distracting to my focus. I’ve since gone to reading and updating Twitter via their web interface. Yes, I need to experiment with TweetDeck.

For what it’s worth, I have a similar issue with Growl and its interaction with some of my programs. I haven’t turned it off yet, but have tweaked its settings to be less intrusive.

On a related note, this is an excellent post from Chris Hedgate on using Spaces and Quicksilver to help him focus on tasks at hand not be distracted.

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