January 24, 2010
For a while, I’d been using an offline reader, then Google did some upgrades, so I swapped. I’ve been using Google Reader since late 2006, diligently serving my news to me, in its simple, and easy to use interface.
Recently I decided to tinker with a new offline reader, RSSOwl. Simple interface, easy to use, customizable searches, article flagging, and sharing features. Well worth a peek…
Read the rest of this entry »
Technorati Tags: Feed Readers, RSS, RSSOwl
Posted in General Ramblings, Google, Open Source, Technology 
3 Comments »
January 13, 2010
Due to some unforeseen issues, we had to move our RAS server into a new DHCP scope, and VLAN today. This is usually relatively easy…
- Change Server IP
- Change switch port VLANs
- Change firewall to point to new server
This went smoothly, all being completed in about 2 minutes. But on checking the DHCP scope, the RAS server wasn’t requesting any IP addresses. I recycled the RAS service, but that didn’t seem to help, only hint of an issue for RAS was the generic message about DHCP server not being reachable…
Unable to contact a DHCP server. The Automatic Private IP Address 169.254.71.62 will be assigned to dial-in clients. Clients may be unable to access resources on the network.
Apparently my brain has been on overdrive, and I forgot that moving the server to a different VLAN also made the DHCP requests not reach it. This is easily resolved with a few commands on our switches…
# config t
(config)# int vlan77
(config-if)# ip helper-address 10.13.1.3
(config-if)# exit
(config)# exit
# write
A quick restart of the RAS service, and the new VLAN is hosting its assigned IP scope.
Technorati Tags: Cisco, Microsoft, RAS, VLAN
Posted in Microsoft, Technology, Work 1 Comment »
January 12, 2010
After today’s little hiccup, I noticed the random image in the top right of my page throwing an error message, something about ERROR_STORAGE_FAILURE. A little digging about, I stumbled across an error in the daemon.log file…
mysqld[4478]: 100112 20:31:04 [ERROR] Got error 127 when reading table g2_ItemAttributesMap
Fortunately, most of the times, this is relatively easy to resolve.
mysql> USE mydbname;
mysql> REPAIR TABLE g2_ItemAttributesMap;
+----------------------+--------+----------+----------+
| Table | Op | Msg_type | Msg_text |
+----------------------+--------+----------+----------+
| g2_ItemAttributesMap | repair | status | OK |
+----------------------+--------+----------+----------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
As you can see from the Msg_text column, the command completed OK. A quick refresh of the blog page, and the error is now gone, and the random picture is back…
Technorati Tags: MySql, Repair
Posted in Linux, Open Source, Technology No Comments »
January 12, 2010
Running on from today’s outage, I’ve put a few more safety measures in place. I’ve always had old faithful Nagios watching over my servers, however sometimes a little more is needed. Introducing Monit into the picture…
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Linux, Open Source, Technology No Comments »
January 12, 2010
Unfortunately from 1716 CST through to 1845 CST, the Netdork server was unreachable due to a runaway process. Unable to get onto the server I was forced to initiate a remote reboot of the machine to regain control.
Now the server is back up and stable, I’ll be implementing controls to stop these processes from running away with themselves (I’m sure they went to Vegas).
Posted in General Ramblings 1 Comment »
January 8, 2010
What do the following things have in common…
- Shipping Containers
- Submarine Diesel Engines
- Rope Bridge
- Van de Graff “silo”
- 660 lb fly wheel
No idea yet? Maybe this will help. Click on the videos at the top, watch each one. Very cool stuff…
Posted in General Ramblings, Technology No Comments »
December 21, 2009
With Windows 2008, the task scheduler is setup differently than earlier. You can use the Com object Schedule.Service to access information about tasks.
Read the rest of this entry »
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, PowerShell, Work
Posted in Microsoft, PowerShell, Work No Comments »
December 21, 2009
Windows 2008 doesn’t have SMTP as part of IIS any more. It’s only kept around by shipping the IIS 6 libraries with it, which means it’s managed by the old IIS 6 utilities. We installed SMTP so that our web servers had a relaying agent so if there were any delays talking to the main SMTP server the app wouldn’t crash out. The problem is, the default setting is for the SMTP service to be set to a manual startup, rather than Automatic. This is easily remedied by going through the services management utilities, or powershell one liner…
gwmi win32_service
| ?{$_.name
-like "*SMTP*"} | %{$_.changestartmode
("Automatic")} This is actually 3 steps. The first step connects to WMI and fetches all the services. The second limits the scope to just services with SMTP in the name. And the third is using the returned object and changing settings.
When run, a buunch of data is returned telling to the state of the command:
__GENUS : 2
__CLASS : __PARAMETERS
__SUPERCLASS :
__DYNASTY : __PARAMETERS
__RELPATH :
__PROPERTY_COUNT : 1
__DERIVATION : {}
__SERVER :
__NAMESPACE :
__PATH :
ReturnValue : 0
You can verify that the command worked properly by looking at the ReturnValue, or by running the command again, but without the set step…
ExitCode : 0
Name : SMTPSVC
ProcessId : 7024
StartMode : Auto
State : Running
Status : OK
Running this command on a 2008 server is about 10 times faster than waiting for the services utility to open.
Technorati Tags: PowerShell
Posted in Microsoft, PowerShell, Work No Comments »
December 21, 2009
I have an awful memory, so this is more a bookmark for me than anything. Whilst running home grown scripts for PowerShell, you often see the following error:
File C:\scripts\test.ps1 cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system. Please see “get-
help about_signing” for more details.
At line:1 char:19
+ c:\scripts\test.ps1 < <<<
This is because PowerShell expects the script to be signed (something I have to look into). But as I’m doing basic scripts, you can disable this by using the following command:
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
You can get more details on this by using the following:
Technorati Tags: PowerShell
Posted in Microsoft, PowerShell, Work No Comments »
December 2, 2009
I recently mentioned that I was going to try starting to post more again, and so here is my attempt at rebooting myself…
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in General Ramblings, Work No Comments »
content rss
