On Tuesday I detailed a project for upgrading a server to 2008, and one of the tasks of handling all the scheduled tasks on the server. I gave 2 examples on how to export the 2003 task format to something 2008 could handle. This is a follow-up on how to re-import all those tasks again.

We’ve recently been asked to upgrade a 2003 server to 2008R2. Instead of doing an upgrade, we’re planning on doing a format, and clean install. One of the issues we have with this server is the number of scheduled tasks on the server. Unfortunately the 2003 .job format isn’t compatible with the 2008 .xml job format. After poking around, I found two solutions to this.

One of the other recent errors I noticed in my LogWatch reports, other than the spam spike, was a weird error with cron reporting the grandchild had exited with a non-zero exit code. When I first saw it, it coincided with the spike in spam, so I had assumed it was logwatch timing out within cron whilst processing the log file. Now the spam level has died down, I noticed the error persisted…

My personal server doesn’t receive much email, and only hosts a few domains, as well as running as backup mail server for the SquirrelMail.org. It usually processes about 6500 emails on a daily basis, of that 4000 or so of that is rejected by RBL. After the Squeeze update, the amount of email rocketed to 230000, with 229000 rejected by RBL matches…

Earlier today, I caught a message by @ninjasys on Twitter asking for help looking for ways to catch PHP errors on a website.

Has anyone scraped a webpage for PHP errors using Nagios? PHP errors are displayed before HTML content :( #nagios #sysadmin — Ninjasys

In the past, I’ve used webinject to do page validation, but after making a couple of suggestions, @ninjasys came back with a more detailed explanation as to what they were really after. They’re limited on what can be installed, and were having issues with disk space problems. So they couldn’t install snmp, nor were they able to use NRPE to do agent lookups. Follow the jump to see a few of the ideas I’ve come up with.

I’ve been pushing for getting a proper utility to handle remote installations for a while, and being a Microsoft shop, we’re looking at Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). However there are a number of hold-ups on that project, so we’re currently using Lumension’s PatchLink¹.

Recently Google announced they were adding enhanced security to their lineup for your Google account. While I think this is a great feature, it’s still flawed by the same reasons traditional security is flawed; The end user.

In most situations, you can spend a lot of time, planning for the worst possible outcome in the event of an outage. It’s usually the silly little things that end up getting you…

Last week I walked into the office greeted with an email telling me “the virtual machines are down”. This is most concerning, not sure how it went unnoticed by our monitoring software that multiple VM machines went offline, and nor did we get any notification from the other department that uses these machines that any of the night jobs had failed. So I set about figuring out what was going on…

When doing a SQL cluster install, there is a rule for network binding order that causes a warning from time to time. This is really easy to fix, and is a good practice for cluster services to reduce the chance of network latency whilst services try and figure out where they need to go for certain services.