Photo by Stinging Eyes via Flickr Creative Commons

In the wee hours of the morning, a colleague and I set to changing out administrative passwords and migrating some admin accounts to service accounts to better reduce our security risk footprint. We completed the task and began double checking services and applications. It quickly became clear that we were no longer able to log into one of our domain controllers, a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine. Red Alert! We began receiving the following message when attempting to log into the DC.

The security database on the server does not have a computer account for this workstation trust relationship.

After a lot of odd looks and log reviews, we decided to restart the DC into safe mode WITHOUT networking. Doing so allowed us to log into the DC with the previous administrator password. (Remember we had just changed the master admin password from one of the other DC’s). Now that we were in the problem DC, we could see the event logs. Two sets or errors peaked our interest.

Provider: Microsoft-Windows-Security-Kerberos
Event ID: 3
Error Message: KDC_ERR_S_PRINCIPAL_UNKNOWN

Provider: Microsoft-Windows-Kerberos-Key-Distribution-Center
Event ID: 11
Error Message: The KDC encountered duplicate names while processing a Kerberos authentication request. The duplicate name is ProtectedStorage/servername.example.com (of type DS_SERVICE_PRINCIPAL_NAME). This may result in authentication failures or downgrades to NTLM. In order to prevent this from occuring remove the duplicate entries for ProtectedStorage/servername.example.com in Active Directory.

A bit of Googling found us narrowing things down to what seemed to be a problem with an SPN (Server Principal Name) entry somewhere.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc733945(v=ws.10).aspx

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321044

All of the recommended means of finding the missing or duplicate SPN were failing to show us exactly where to resolve the issue. Finally, a simple ping from the MacBook Pro terminal window gave the answer. Pinging the IP address of the problem DC showed a round robin effect with each ping response resolving to two DNS host names.

Recently we had created a CNAME entry that pointed to a specific DC for use by all of our applications need Active Directory integration of LDAP authentication. Our thought was that doing so would mean no application configuration changes when we rebuilt/renamed our DC’s over the next month. Doh! Since we created a CNAME in the Active Directory DNS zone, it actually registered the SPN entries resolving both to this particular DC. This was the cause of the problem

Removing the CNAME record and replacing with an A host record solved the problem.

Thanks be to God for that solution without ill effect.

Image Courtesy of walknboston via Flickr CC

While working to migrate several web applications and update infrastructure, we also wanted to make some changes to the settings for our LDAP/Active Directory authentication for both Atlassian Confluence and Jira. Before Confluence 3.5, the custom authentication configurations we set in the atlassian-user.xml file. Starting with Confluence 3.5, these settings were automatically upgraded into a database stored and Confluence UI managed User Directory.

To my amazement, we went into Confluence –> Confluence Admin –> User Directories. Wow, there was not ability to edit the user directory configured for our Active Directory/LDAP authentication. After a bit of searching, the answer was simple, although i think this is a simple UX opportunity, i.e. notification box.

See, I was logged into my Active Directory account in Confluence. Doing so, I was authenticated against this user directory. Therefore, I was not allowed to edit the user directory since doing so might lock me out. The solution was to create an admin account that used the internal user database. Be sure to give the admin user the correct group permissions to be able to administer Confluence. Then it was just a matter of logging out of Confluence as myself, logging back in as the locally created admin user and easy as pie we could edit the user directory configuration.

Go figure.

Now, from our earlier posts about nonprofit infographic tips and 40 infographic online resources, you already know we are big fans of visual story telling. Kudos to NTEN and M+R Strategic Services for having created a short infographic providing a high level glimpse of the study results.

Did you know? As of November 2011, 89.6 million Americans use their mobile phone to access either work or personal email – an increase of 28% in the last year alone.

We’ve culled out some key take-aways below but be sure to download your free copy of the full 2012 eNonprofit Benchmark Study.

Key Findings

• For every 1,000 members of an email list, the average nonprofit had 103 Facebook fans, 29 Twitter followers and 12 mobile subscribers.
• While one-time gifts remained the largest source of online revenue for participants, online revenue from monthly giving is growing at a much faster rate.
• On average, 35% of online revenue was sourced to direct email appeals. The remaining 65% came from other sources, such as unsolicited web giving and peer referrals.
• Between 2010 and 2011, the fundraising response rate held steady at 0.08%
• Most organizations send 3-5 messages per month to subscribers.

Infographics

1. Visual.ly -  Quickly and easily create professional quality designs with your own data
2. Infogr.am – Online tool to create stunning infographics
3. Inkscape – Desktop vector graphics program. Can be used for putting together infographics
4. Visualize Free – By Inetsoft. Online data visualization and story telling tool
5. Re.Vu – Online personal infographic resume’s (Create a resume for your organization?)
6. Visualize.me – Another online personal infographic resume tool

Diagrams

1. Cacoo- Online diagram creation and collaboration tool
2. Creately - Online or desktop Mockup/Diagram/Infographic creation tool
3. Balsamiq - Online or desktop Mockup/Diagram/Infographic creation tool
4. Gliffy - Online diagram creation tool

Text Analysis / Display

1. ManyEyes – IBM visualizations including text tree, word clouds and more
2. Wordle – Text analysis and display.
3. Tagxedo – Online text display tools

Charts and Graphs

1. Hohli Charts – Online chart creation tool. Bar/chart/Venn diagrams and more. Ad supported
2. ChartsBin – Online interactive charts gallery and creation tool
3. Gephi – Desktop data analysis and visualization studio
4. ManyEyes – IBM Datasets and visualization tool. Charts and graphs
5. Google Public Data – Existing or upload datasets and explorer with visualization tools
6. GapMinder – Desktop application for analyzing and visualizing statistical data
7. Chartle – Simple and interactive online charts tool
8. Tableau – Desktop visualization toolbox

Maps and Geospatial

1. StatPlanet – Interactive map maker in free and commercial versions. Part of StatSilk
2. StatWorld – Interactive online data map creator. Part of StatSilk
3. ManyEyes – IBM Datasets and visualizations fits under mapping as well.
4. Google Public Data - Existing or upload datasets and explorer with visualization tools
5. GapMinder - Desktop application for analyzing and visualizing statistical data
6. Gunn Map 2 – Online map data display tool
7. Bubbl.us – Online Mind mapping tool

Templates

1. Advanced Infographic Charts and Templates
2. Infographic Elements – By BitGorilla
3. Vector Infographic Elements – Free SVG, EPS and PDF
4. World Infographic Elements - From GraphicRiver
5. Periodic Table of X - Here’s an example of how this can be used.
6. Infographic template and charts V5 – By Cursive Q Designs
7. Free Vector Infographic Kit – Nathan Brown
8. Infographic elements + template – By Cursive Q Designs

Tutorials and Resources

1. Create Cool Infographics Tutorial – From Digital Arts Online
2. Nicholas Felton Guides us through worlds of data – [Video]
3. Infographr – Great tumblr account wich new infographic examples posted frequently
4. Daily Infographic – A new infographic daily for inspiration
5. Visualizing.org – A community and gallery of infographics and data visualizations
6. How to create outstanding modern infographics
7. Visual Journalism – “80% of the news in infographics”
8. StrangeMaps – Cartographic curiosities for inspiration

Did we miss a tool you use or found? Let us know below.

Here is a list of our top 5 most used mod_rewrite snippets.

Force HTTPS on all HTTP requests

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

Force WWW as hostname

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* <a title="http://www.example.com/" href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.example.com/</a> [L,R=301]

Force no WWW in front of domain name

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .* <a title="http://example.com/" href="http://example.com/" rel="nofollow">http://example.com/</a> [L,R=301]

Prevent Image Hotlinking

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?example.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|swf|flv|png)$ /feed/ [R=302,L]

SEO Friendly .php to .html

RewriteRule ^(.*)\.php$ /$1.html [R=301,L]

or

RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ $1.php [R=301,L]

Not for the faint of heart
Canary is designed for developers and early adopters, and can sometimes break down completely.

One of the smart things Google has done is allowed for side-by-side installs. That means you can install Google Canary right along side Google Chrome and go back and forth between them. (See the preferences screenshot below. Both running at the same time) I believe this is a good fore-thought and will allow more folks to test Canary because they won’t be afraid of what they will do if something doesn’t work.

Sign-In and Sync

Upon installing Google Canary and firing it up for the first time, I logged into my Google account and the synchronization of apps, bookmarks, settings, extensions, etc… all began automatically. After the first sync completed, I must say that the surfing experience does seem to be a little bit snappier than Chrome albeit just slightly and without empirical results to prove one way or the other.

Monotonous Button Clicking

The one pain point I found was after I shut down Canary and then restarted it for the first time. On the Mac, it was a laborious and painful process to allow each and every site that I have saved a username/password in Chrome to save to the keychain. (Guessing that to allow for the side-by-side install that Canary and Chrome use different keychain entries.) Why isn’t there a one-time accept all button. I know, this is not necessarily a Google Canary specific issue but I would think the brilliant minds at Google would find a way to keep us from having to click Allow or Allow All a gazillion times. Thankfully this is a one-time process.

Preferences

Most of the improvements are ones that might go a bit unnoticed if you are already running the latest Google Chrome versions. One that you will see is in the way the preference settings are laid out. A more clean, and sparse experience with less tabs is what we saw during our initial wanderings. Browser history is easily accessible in its own tab and navigable in descending date order.

Side by side Canary vs Chrome preferences layout.

User Profiles

Support for user profiles – Canary supports multiple user profiles with different bookmarks and settings per user. Add and remove user profiles in the preferences pane. You can then change the profile in use from the “wrench” icon and clicking the name of the user you are current signed in as. On Windows, there is a profile dropdown in the top right window area.

Think First

Here are a couple of points we’ve distilled:

• Define a goal for the infographic. Absolutely do not create one just to create one. Are you wanting to incite an action? What is it? Do you want the reader learn more? Where?
• It needs to tell a story that includes how your organization is impacting a positive outcome or goal.
• Strong visual appeal is critical. Do not skimp on this, get a professional designer if you don’t have the skills.
• It is tough to visualize data and tell the story without information. Find out what story you want to tell in the future but are not yet tracking the corresponding data. Start tracking it.
• Simple colors. Two to three colors only and stick with it. If you end of printing these as posters, it’ll save your print costs as well.

Creating an Infographic: Tips for Nonprofits

Source: Philanthropy.com

• Look at a wide variety of infographics, from nonprofits, businesses, and other sources, to get ideas.
• Decide what the charity wants the infographic to achieve. Don’t create one just because it’s a trendy approach.
• Identify what data the organization has collected, but also look for outside sources, such as Census figures, that could bolster the message or help put the group’s data in context.
• Follow the organization’s style guidelines on fonts, color schemes, and tone to maintain the group’s brand.
• Keep it simple. Convey the message quickly and clearly. Too many numbers or ideas can confuse or overwhelm viewers.
• Balance esthetics and substance. An infographic needs to be useful as well as visually appealing.
• Credit sources of data.
• Experiment. Try free and low-cost software to see what’s possible.

Informational Resources

• Excellent Article on visualizing data
• Examples of non-profit infographics
• Do’s and Dont’s from Smashing Magazine
• The new storytelling

Tools

• Google Docs Templates – has templates for charts and maps
• Tegxedo - allows you to create infographics of the tag or word cloud variety
• Gapminder.org - a fact based view of the world. See trends and data
• Visual.ly – still beta but will allow you to create online visuals for sharing.
• Balsamiq – mockup and diagramming tool. Non-profit friendly with their licensing. Friendly folks.
• Creately.com – makes creating online diagrams a breeze

After review a few things, it became apparent that the host being used, A2Hosting.com, correctly has PHP’s fopen function disabled. Kudos to A2Hosting for that. Now, they offer a form that the customer can request this to be enabled with the caveat of security blah blah blah. We didn’t want to enable this permanently, only for the duration of the import. Again, some quick searches regarding Cpanel and custom php.ini’s led to the following solution.

Copy PHP.Ini and Force reading in .htaccess

Make a copy of the existing php.ini that the server uses and place it in your account home directory.

cp /usr/local/lib/php.ini /home/username/php.ini

Next, edit the PHP.ini to set allow_url_fopen = On

vi /home/username/php.ini
allow_url_fopen = On

Finally, edit the .htaccess file in the root of the Drupal installation directory and add the following:

SetEnv PHPRC /home/username/php.ini

Save. This now allowed our Drupal installation to run php with the directives in our custom php.ini with fopen allowed. The migration took all of maybe 30 seconds and we were done.

When we finished, we just reversed the process so we didn’t stay on our special php.ini and complicate life later down the road with the host.

Hope it helps.

I know what you’re thinking. It is one of two things. Either, it is going to be something like “Dude, battery life depends on how you use your system.” or you may be in the “Please, I hope he has something that will really help.”. You are both in luck.

I completely agree that battery life is quite dependent upon how you use your system. High processing power, high disk activity, CD/DVD spinning away, etc… all contribute to a reduction in the amount of time you will be able to squeeze out of a battery charge. However, since moving from Snow Leopard to Lion on a Late 2011 MacBook Pro, I have indeed noticed a 25-30% drop in the amount of time I can run per battery charge. Sure, I run a few different settings and applications since moving to Lion, but overall I have noticed a general drop in battery life.

Recently, I got fed up and went to do a bit of quick searching. I came across this post from the Pundit Reporter. It indicated that they noticed that the built-in graphics switching was staying in discrete mode only (higher power consumption mode) rather than switching down to integrated mode (lower power consumption) when the higher graphics capability was not needed. They reference the gfxCardStatus app by Cody Krieger.

So I installed the app and saw that in fact, even with all my normal apps closed, the system was still running in discrete graphics mode. After using the status bar app to switch to integrated mode only, I immediately noticed the time remaining  for my battery began to increase. This got my thinking that there must be an app or service that was causing the system to never switch back to integrate graphics mode. Let the testing begin.

Skype 5.7.0 is causing the system to remain in discrete graphics mode even when not in a call!

I set the gfxCardStatus setting back the dynamic switching. Instantly the mode went back into discrete mode. Quickly, the culprit was found. Skype. Boy, Skype has really been a bane for me on Lion already. When doing video chat, which we use extensively in our daily work, CPU goes high, the twin turbines on the MacBook go into high gear and  it sounds like a 747 taking off. Now, I noticed that as soon I killed Skype, the system switch to integrated mode and battery drain significantly decreased.

If you use gfxCardStatus, toss a donation Cody’s way. Heck, he just gave you back 2 hours of untethered life back and is pursuing Software Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology

Well at least the culprit in my case was found. Now unfortunately I need Skype daily for work so it appears the only option is to live with the gfxCardStatus app forcing the system into integrated graphics mode in order to get  my 6+ hours of battery life versus my previous 3-4 hours, or….plug in more often. Someday I hope Skype will really listen to the Mac community and address the silliness their product is causing. If it wasn’t for needing Skype to communicate with our organizations staff, I’d use an alternative. Time for change management to kick in perhaps.

Example of a Rally Note from NTC 2012

Big thanks to y’all at Rally.org. Great idea. Check out these links to the sessions they posted.

• 100 Trends in Nonprofit Tech – An Illustrated Poster
• Rethinking Your Website: Tips on Process and Success
• Should You Worry About Mobile? Why?
• Dan Roam Believes You Can Draw—for Good
• Data Visualization for Social Change
• How to Engage with your Community—Online
• Engaging Donors with Storytelling-Beyond the Personal Story
• What Does Innovation Mean for Nonprofits?
• You Need a Strategy, Dammit, Not a Twitter Account
• How to “Funnify” Your Cause & Open the Door to a Massive Audience
• Lights, Camera, Action: How to Succeed on YouTube