BiggAndyy the Magazine

Even when “the government” tries, it fails. The Senate passed the Session’s Amendment to fund the construction of a border fence to help curtail illegal immigration and all the woes associated with it. But 2 BILLION dollars to construct nearly 900 miles of fence??? That is 2.2 MILLION dollars per mile.

A friend of mine over at Conservative Life blog helped build 9 miles fence on private land in Texas this spring. Double layer of chain link topped with razor wire AND motion sensors and cameras all for under $700,000. That is about $78,000 per mile. For every one mile the government builds private enterprise can build 28!

We need the border fence, no doubt about it. But instead of doing it in a bloated, bureaucratic manner why not ease many of the restrictions of building at the border? Allow private citizens to reclaim much of the land that is in government hands now and allow them to build the fences. There are many contractors and groups out there willing to do the work because they love this country. They will do it at cost, and they will do a much better job than government contractors loafing around to run up the costs overruns.

A fence is a very effective means of keeping people from going back and forth, Mr. President. Why not just ask the East Germans if a fence is good at handling that particular job.

Using the logic of the Democrats, we should pull out of Washington D.C. because it is too dangerous for Americans to stay there.

“In the Iraq theater of operations, there has been an average of 160,000 troops during the last 22 months with a total of 2,112 deaths. That gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000 prorated for the time factor. Analogously, the rate in Washington, D.C., is 80.6 per 100,000. This means that you are 25 percent more likely to be shot and killed in our nation’s capitol, which has some of the most stringent gun-control laws in the country, than you are in Iraq! ” Source.

I am all for bringing the troops home. After they win. If the opponents of the war would stop politicizing the effort and allow our troops to kill people and break things in Iraq the victory would come much faster and at a much cheaper cost in American lives and money.

Few average users realize that Pitt utilizes AFS for their network access. Fewer still realize that YOU can also use OpenAFS to access your Pitt Webspace and network filespace. You have access now to the Pitt filespace but odds are you were told that you had to use FTP or WS-FTP or Macromedia Contribute to gain access to that area.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to just “drag and drop” files directly from your desktop to your Pitt filespace? Why? First, it is convenient. No extra programs to open and log into each time you want to save something. Second, and more importantly, is that the AFS filespace is backed up by CSSD on a nightly basis. The files that are most important to you and to your department can be accessed via back up in case your desktop computer crashes completely.

Now there is a downside, the Pitt filesystem doesn’t grant a tremendous amount of file quota for us regular users. So we need to pick and choose carefully what gets saved to AFS. Auntie Edna’s recipe for creamed spinach should NOT be stored there.

Fortunately, the process of getting access is easy and only involves downloading a program from OpenAFS.org and installing it on your computer for access to the Pitt file system. For Windows 2000/XP/2003 you can download the latest stable version from the OpenAFS website (latest stable version).

Make sure you have Administrator Rights on your Windows machine and make sure all other programs are closed, OpenAFS requires a reboot after installation. After downloading the latest stable version run the file. It will ask for your language of choice (English in this example).

After you see the Welcome screen you can just accept all the default values until you get to screen 5, Client Cell Name Configuration. Here you are going to remove whatever default value they have listed in the Enter AFS Cell Name box and replace it with the value PITT.EDU. Everything else involved in the installation is accepting all the default values.

Next you need to configure your AFS client to map the drive letter of your choice to the Pitt filespace. Double click the AFS Tray Icon in your system tray and the AFS Dialog box will appear.

On the Tokens Tab click on Obtain New Tokens. The PITT.EDU cell will appear as the default AFS Cell. You simply need to fill in your MY.PITT.EDU username and password and click OK.

You have valid tokens in the Pitt AFS Cell, now you need to define which account you want to make your network drive. I am going to use in this example the username NETADMIN. Click on the Drive Letters Tab. The field showing which drive letters are assigned should be blank. Click on ADD and choose a Drive Letter. Better to pick a letter further down the alphabet (like W or X or Y rather than one closer to the front). In the AFS Path field the user NETADMIN would enter this:

/afs/pitt.edu/home/n/e/netadmin/

The pattern is easy. “/afs” is always the start of the address. “/pitt.edu” is the name of the cell. “/home” tells us that we are accessing users files. The next three parts “/n/e/netadmin” is simply the first letter of the username, the second letter of the username and finally the username separated by a slash.

So if your username is jjgst99 your AFS path would read:

/afs/pitt.edu/home/j/j/jjgst99/

Simple when you know the pattern.

When all of this is done you will now have a Drive W where you can either save files directly from programs like Microsoft Word or can open in an Explorer Window and drag and drop files directly and securely. Any computer that is running the OpenAFS client can access the Pitt AFS filespace anywhere in the world.

Ever see this at the bottom of your Firefox Browser? I never did either until a friend sent me a desparate message asking for help. This is a more common bug in Firefox than they let on.

Usually it is a buggy or broken firefox extension. Mozilla recommends to remove extensions from the browser until the red carrot disappears.

You can check this list from mozilla (problematic extensions) to see if you have any known conflicts before you begin removing extensions willy-nilly.

Also, there is a particular spyware file that can cause this problem. If you have this file: C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\chrome\m3ffxtbr.manifest delete it and restart firefox.

That is about it. You can visit Mozilla’s site to get the full article on this weird bug.

Just had this problem come up and took a while to google it out.
A Windows XP machine can sometimes have its WINSOCK catalog become corrupted and it appears like a network connection is disabled. Well, this is not always the case. If you perform a

PING -a -n 1 127.0.0.1

Ping the loopback connection at the COMMAND prompt you will see this as the hostname reply:

pinging °ÿ with 32 bytes of data

That °ÿ is the telltale sign that the WINSOCK catalog is corrupted. Simply enter this command at a command prompt:

netsh winsock reset catalog

and reboot the machine. The problem will be cleared up.