This error popped up on the setup applications for several new programs. Doing some searching I stumbled across a couple of posts that hinted on removing the project output from the setup, and trying again. This stopped the errors on the setup application, but not the actual application itself.

Then I saw a hint in the errors list…

Checking into the app.config file, I stumbled across the cause. It looks like somebody had pasted code that had been “fixed” up by Outlook, or word, and broken a comment. Fixing this, resolved both the app compilation, and the setup validation error.

Technorati Tags: Work

The picture to the right is probably one of my favourite from the trip. More can be seen on my gallery.

EDIT: Forgot to actually link to the KMZ file… oups.

Technorati Tags: Dallas Zoo, Photography

I was presented a delightful error about Smarty templates being missing. Doing a quick search, the files were all still in place, and permissions were all still correct, but WPG2’s widget was not liking something about the update. Doing some searching, I stumbled upon a handful of people having similar issues back in 2008, but by several followups report it was fixing in 3.06 of WPG2. This sucks because I am on 3.07, so you’d think it would also be fixed there too.

Another post gave another hint as to a way to resolve the issue. One of the recommendations was to copy the files into the WPG2 directory, another was to create a symlink. This is easy to do:

As I was using this in a multi-site environment, I also added a symlink to the modules from the root of the local user gallery too…

I’d initially used full paths for the symlinks, but that appeared not to work, so I swapped it out for relative symlinks. A quick clear of WP-Supercache and WP-Widget Cache, and it appears to all be working now.

Technorati Tags: Gallery2, Wordpress, WPG2

The command is relatively easy to understand. /vdir.name is the path to the site, and virtual directory, and /physicalPath is the new path. Easy huh?

Technorati Tags: AppCmd, IIS, Microsoft

**Statement as of 7:10 PM CST on February 11, 2010** … Greatest all-time calendar day snow on record set at Dallas Fort Worth… … Record 24-hour snow for February set at Dallas Fort Worth… … Record daily maximum snowfall for February 11th set at Dallas Fort Worth… Through 7 PM CDT… Dallas Fort Worth Airport has recorded 7.9 inches of snow. This breaks the greatest calendar day snow on record. The old record is 7.8 inches set on January 15… 1964 and January 14… 1917. This also breaks the record 24-hour snowfall for February which was 7.5 inches… set on February 17… 1978 and February 25… 1924. Obviously… .this shatters the record daily maximum snowfall for February 11th… of 1.4 inches which was previously set in 1988. With the snow continuing… the snow total will increase. An updated record event report will be sent later this evening.

Technorati Tags: Weather

An analog radio (one with an old-fashion vacuum tube) sounds great at first, but you hear more static when the tube starts to wear out. Then the tube dies and you hear nothing. If you change the tube when it starts to degrade, you’ll never have a dead radio. (Assume, of course, you change the tube when your favorite radio show isn’t on.) A transistor radio, on the other hand, is digital. It plays and plays and plays and then stops. Now, during your favorite song, you have to repair it.

This is one of those great analogies that works well for the situation. Watching for the host to go down is reactive, it’s already too late (transistor radio), watching for stuff changing, and adapting your system(s) to it is proactive. Take for example the image to the right. This is Nagios monitoring our VPN server’s connection counts. The server was in a small subnet, with a restricted number of connections (30). Nagios warns to excessive connections at 25, and alerts critical at 27. This allows us to take a look, and bump duplicate connections, or excessive timed connections. This was a temporary solution, because like any good admin, we didn’t want to sit messing with peoples’ connections all the time, so we moved the server so we could give it a bigger block. In this scenario we reacted to the changing demand of the VPN server as we watched trends (the year graph shows a trend upwards from 10-15 up to the current 25-28).

This is just one example of a reactive monitor, we watch all kinds of metrics from memory, to disk space, to IO, to webserver connections, all the way through to bandwidth utilization on our connections and VPN tunnels.

Reactive is fine for up/down status, but no good way to plan for your future needs, or your current performance trends. If you’ve not read either of Tom’s books, and you’d a system administrator, you should.

The Yahoo document is a great source of little hints and tips, and the SAJ article is a good gotcha on one of those tips. Handy to keep around if you’re planning on tweaking your servers for a little bit of a performance boost for your users. Worth reading the document for some ideas…

Also links back to the Irssi documentation with other handy tips.

Technorati Tags: irssi, tip

It’s easy to see from the response that abuse is easy for us, we have the access, the temptation is there, but we’re not all bad. I’ve known people to cross the fine line between doing their job, and looking a little deeper at somebody’s email account whilst “fixing”. It’s not hard for us to peek at chat conversations whilst we sniff out connectivity issues for servers.

Whilst we may possess the power to do so, most of us follow ethics, if not officially documented ethics, our own personal ones. And whilst there are always a few bad apples, it applies to all industries, the large majority of us are good, don’t let the few bad ones make you think we’re all out to spy on you.

Technorati Tags: Ethics