It’s always been one of those items on my list to try, operating entirely at work without Microsoft Windows (r) on my laptop. Yesterday I think that possibility became all the more viable. With the move of our production servers to our corporate office, and there being no direct link to the servers, we have to use Citrix. Citrix has a Linux client. The other issue I had was with Microsoft Office Outlook (r). With the mail services being moved to our corporate office, we have to use Outlook with RPC over HTTPS. This complicates the usage of Outlook, however, Citrix comes in again, as they provide access to Outlook via the Citrix services.

Everything else I need to do here in the office can be done using RDP, for example, user management can be done on the Domain Controllers. Permissions on files can be done on the file servers…

So it’s looking to be almost a possibility. I may have to give it a go.

Recently we had a need to start looking at other solutions for the SQLMail service in SQL Server 2000. The service is unreliable, depends on Microsoft Outlook (2000 before SR1 preferable), and an email server. Corporate suggested a new solution called SqlAnswersMail. It is a drop in replacement for SQLMail service, and they even have an example of how to replace the xp_sendmail command for better flexibility. It has a small fee behind it, but then again, so does running Outlook.

When I decided to deploy the demo version on one of our QA boxes, and all was going well… At least the setup was. When I went to test the command inside SQL, it generated the following error:

Server: Msg 50000, Level 16, State 1, Procedure sp_sendSAM, Line 305 Parameter PrimaryMailServer is required. Section SQL:. Please check configuration settings for SqlAnswersMail. Source: SqlAnswersMail.DLL, INIFile, LoadSQLIni

This is weird, I know I set one, and I had even tested it from the config client, so I decided to take a look around. I ended up hitting the SQLAnswers forum, and stumbling on this error. One of the answers hit the nail right on the head. When I executed select @@ServerName, it returned a different name from the name that SQL was running on. I should have known this, as the server was a vmware clone of another box. I did some looking around, and came across an MS article. It basically says:

sp_dropserver <old_servername>
go
sp_addserver <new_servername> , local
go

Then you need to reset the SQL service. Testing afterwards was successful, and all is now working. This is a great step in replacement for SQLMail, and it is not dependent on MAPI, or login accounts.

Stumbled on an odd one today. I was adding some new hosts to our Nagios server, and while I was looking at the interface, one of the servers kept popping up an error, the error was:

PING WARNING - System call sent warnings to stderr System call sent warnings to stderr

So I checked the output of the command, by executing the same command the script was executing:

./libexec/check_ping -H {server} -w 100.0,20% -c 500,50% -p 5

And sure enough, the same error came up. A little baffled, I did some googling, and stumbled on this. Somebody else was having a similar issue, but a different plugin. I briefly skimmed over the article, and noticed they did some debugging with strace. Not sure why I didn’t think of doing that before, so I did…

strace ./libexec/check_ping -H {server} -w 100.0,20% \
  -c 500,50% -p 5

Sure enough, there is that same error message, buried deep in amongst the extra code, however something else caught my eye.

read(5, “Warning: time of day goes back (“…, 4096) = 130

Bingo… So I checked, without using the Nagios plugins.

ping {host}

And sure enough, there was that error message again:

Warning: time of day goes back (-282us), taking countermeasures.

Then I remembered, this is the machine that was having issues with clock sync because it’s running as VMWare guest, and I had setup ntpdate to run every few minutes. It seems the time on the server sporadically runs faster than that of the windows server it is pinging, and as such, the times in the pings seem to come back faster than when they were sent. As it appears to only occur once every 15-20 pings or so, I’m not that worried. It’s not triggering alarms, it just flags one of the ping result sets as “warning” and goes away on the next ping.

Whilst driving home this evening, I caught the tail end of “All Things Considered” on NPR (yes, I do listen to NPR sometimes). The last item they ran was an interview with two political ad voices. You might recognize them. They have the audio up on this page, and in the middle, it’s rather amusing. They talk about how the tone of voices can affect the statements they are making.

I swear you’ll never see Humpty Dumpty the same way again… Tax stealer… what’s this world coming to.

I don’t often just play with apps, I usually have to have a need behind them, and today at work we were discussing houses. It’s been discussed at home, that we start looking at houses soon (year or so), and then LifeHacker had mentions of a nifty little Flash application that you can use to get inspiration for painting your home. It gives you multiple starting options, such as pick colors, or pick inspirations (where you get to pick from a handful of photographs), and then you get to chose the shading for those inspirations, then a room. Once in the room, you get to preview the colors by clicking a color, then a region. A very well thought out application by Behr (this is strictly targeting their paint products), but a very good idea. I wonder if anybody else has one up.

Ever noticed that when encoding your CDs, they end up being encoded at different volumes? I’ve become incredibly frustrated at this, so I started looking around. I stumbled on Normalize. An excellent program that will run through wav, mp3, and ogg format files, and normalize the output volume. This is great, because I’ve burned my CD collection to ogg format, dropped on my server at home, and stream the audio so I can listen to it at work, without having to haul my CDs everywhere. Very handy. And, with a little find trickery, you can do whole directory structures too:

find /media -name \*.ogg -exec normalize-ogg {} \;

This is handy if you encoded your CD collection as I have… artist\album\title.

This is mostly for Bill, but I am rather impressed with Dell on this one, so I thought I’d post, rather than email…

Yesterday our fourth domain controller arrived. A rather nicely spec’d Dell PowerEdge 1950. It was built using the corporate template, so it’s well over-spec’d for what we need (dual core 1.8ghz with 4mb cache, 1gb RAM etc etc). When ordering, I paid specific attention to the type of rails to order. I made sure it said “versa-rails” as we have round holed rack.

Short of purchasing a volume license for MS Office, or deleting registry keys on every new clone, does anybody know of a way to get MS Office to change the reg key on build from a clone? Something like sysprep for office?

When installing any office products, and you get to the last page that asks if you want to remove the installation files… DO NOT DO IT. Some patches require access to the install CD. If you leave the installation files installed on your computer, you don’t need the CD. If you remove them, WSUS will fail updates because it cannot find the media.

It’s amusing how many people install software like the “atomic clock” application to keep there servers/desktops in sync with a real server. They don’t seem to realize that the functionality is pre-build into windows in the form of the w32time service. For example, our domain controllers in the office are syncing with pool.ntp.org. The desktop machines keep their time synced usign the domain controllers, so all is well. To change the time source, the commands (executed from dos) are as follows:

  net stop w32time
  net time /setsntp:pool.ntp.org
  net start w32time

Simple, and now the server will sync up automagically.