Did you know that since Word 2007, Microsoft natively supports publishing directly to WordPress? It’s true! Why would you want this? In my case, I regularly create documentation at work that would likely be useful to a wider audience.

I create this documentation in Outlook and unfortunately due to the HTML rendering engine used in Outlook, the formatting never comes out right, especially around bullets. However, if you publish from Word, it takes care of all that translation for you!

At a high level, it works like this:

• Enable the Publish as Blog Post function in Word
• Create an account on your wordpress site to be used by the login page (Note the login happens over HTTP so you don’t want to use your administrator account)
• Set up your account in Word and point it at your xmlrpc.php file on your server

The Details

• Login to your wordpress site and go to Users and Add User
• Pick a username and assign Editor permissions.

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This HOWTO will allow you to accomplish the following tasks using Macrium Reflect:

– Detect if a external NAS device is powered on and if not, power it on for the duration of the backup and power it down again
– Wait for the web management interface of the NAS device to come online before starting the backup
– Use Powershell to connect to the ISCSI target by verifying several characteristics of the NAS and assign it to a known drive letter
– Start a Reflect Backup and write to this data store

Click below read more link to check out the full source code!

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This HOWTO describes how to set up a Slackware Linux based BIND9 virtual DNS server.  The background on why this HOWTO came to be is that I recently received a renewal notice for my domain vanlab.net.  I haven’t used this domain for anything in nearly a year.  Not wanting to pay for DNS hosting or use someone else’s DNS servers, the domain has as a result sat idle.

It occurred to me last night though hat anything this domain would ever be used for would run off my laptop.  Since I’m the only one that would ever use it, it would be fine if it only was available when I was studying.  Therefore I decided that it would be feasible to host my own "part time" DNS server.

I opted not to use any flavor of Windows for three reasons:   First, I wanted as small a footprint as possible as this is a VM that will be running on my laptop all the time.  Second, Windows officially requires a license. (In my mind, this is a "production" implementation so I wanted to find something legal). Third, I’ve always wanted to see if I could make a useful Linux server and I finally came up with a use case.

What follows is how I’ve managed to successfully get my laptop to run a virtual machine that can resolve external DNS queries for vanlab.net.

Software

• We will be using SMS or Superb Mini Server (http://sms.it-ccs.com) as our Linux distribution of choice.  After much trial and error with multiple distros, I found this one the best as it includes a tool called Webmin that provides a graphical web based interface for configuring BIND
• (There is a wiki page for configuring this server at http://sms.it-ccs.com/wiki/)
  
• Download the SMS64.Live.CD-2.0.5.iso file.  Note: We are downloading the live CD and will install to the HD rather than the full installation despite the recommendation by the distro.  I tried to install the full version but couldn’t get it to boot.  It also includes almost 3GB of packages, almost none of which I needed for this project anyway

Domain Configuration

• My domain is registered with dyndns.org.  I first needed to configure the name servers for the domain.  I logged into the management interface at https://account.dyn.org
  and went to / My Zones Domains / Domain Registration / Edit Name Servers
• I added two entries (as a minimum of two are required) for ns1.vanlab.net and ns2.vanlab.net.  I then created two glue records by the same name and pointed both of those IPs at my Shaw public IP of 175.0.103.66.  (An IP that hasn’t changed in 2 years so it’s nearly public anyway)

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