These are my links for June 9th through June 15th:

• VMware KB: vMotioning a virtual machine that resides on an NFS datastore fails with the error: General System Error Occured - Few tips on fixing issues with NFS permissions and vMotion
• Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary for June 2011 - June 2011 Security updates from Microsoft, coming in at 16 updates.
• Latest Android Malware Takes Flight With Angry Birds - Dark Reading - Another round of malware strikes the Android market
• ISC Diary - Adobe releases patches - ISC reporting on a round of patches from Adobe covering a suite of products.
• Top 10 Git Tutorials for Beginners -

While working on a SQL server cluster install, after a failed cluster setup, we started getting the error:

The SQL Server failover cluster instance name 'SQLCluster1' already exists as a server on the network

This error refused to let us proceed with installing an instance with a previously used (but removed) instance name. See how to resolve it after the jump…

These are my links for June 4th through June 7th:

• LEGO Digital Designer : Virtual Building Software -
• RSA Offers Replacement SecurID Tokens For Customers In Wake Of Lockheed Hack - Dark Reading - RSA handing out replacement tokens as the list of victims increase due to their recent compromise.
• U.N. Report Declares Internet Access a Human Right | Threat Level | Wired.com - An interesting post on the UN declaring that Internet access is now a Human right.
• Syrian Internet Shutdown - Renesys Blog - Rensys reports that Syria becomes another country blocking internet access for its citizens because of political unrest.
• Why “Bring Your Own Device” Is Seriously Flawed — The Lone Sysadmin - Bob Plankers writes a follow up article to a ZDNet post on allowing users to bring their own devices to the work place, offering some ideas why its bad not just for security.

These are my links for May 9th through June 2nd:

• DroidDream Returns, Dozens of Infected Apps Pulled From Android Market | threatpost - Mobile security is hitting the headlines more frequently, as DroidDream has another stab at the market.
• You Will be Assimilated - Server Fault Blog - Kyle Brandt, of ServerFault, has an interesting post on comparing server farms and borg, stating that individuality is bad for farms.
• How to send and reply to email - A few tips on how to send emails.
• YouTube - Ants - Nature’s Secret Power -
• Visualising studio lighting | Pixiq -
• A Yummy Marinade « Mike’s Place -
• Bodybuilding.com - Recipe Of The Week: Protein Shake Recipes. -
• Regular Expression Tutorial - Learn How to Use Regular Expressions -
• User Profile Error - Logged on with a Temporary Profile - Vista Forums -
• Bodybuilding.com - No Blender? No Worries! 5 Novel Uses For Protein Powder -
• Lync PowerShell Cmdlets Mind Maps | Lync’d Up -
• setting up syslog? - DevCentral - F5 DevCentral > Community > Group Details - Social Forums - Monitoring & Management -
• Online Diagram Software - Gliffy -
• Visio Guy -
• Network Topology Icons - Cisco Systems -

Today I was reading Matt Simmons’ post “View from the other side…” and a phrase he used in it seemed a little off to me. He wrote:

Automation is big for most sysadmins. We’re inherently lazy, so the idea of pushing a button and making programs work for us? Appealing.

I’m not entirely sure I agree with the statement that we are lazy. I’m pretty sure Matt is not lazy, in fact I’m not sure I’ve met any system administrator that was lazy. I do agree that automation is a big thing for us though. Here’s why I think it’s big…

• Repeatable tasks leads to automation
• Automation leads to consistency
• Consistency reduces errors
• Reducing errors leads to a more stable environment
• A stable environment leads to happy customers

So while automation does reduce the amount of work we do for a task, it’s far from what I’d consider a goal of laziness. Automation brings us a stable environment, giving us more time to work on other important stuff, like planning for the next big project, or automating other tasks. It also gives us a way to “pass the buck” to a junior.

Another method of automation comes in the form of configuration management. This is a perfect example of producing a consistent, and repeatable, setup. Configuration management is one of those areas that is far from lazy, but in large environments, critical to your operations. If you have a web farm of 100 web servers, and they have to run the same packages, how do you guarantee they have those packages, and are the same version? If you were to do each one by hand, you’d be there all week, and you’d probably miss a server or three.

So on the outset, it might look like we’re being lazy, but scrape away the thin layer on the top, and we’re really doing it for the greater good of ourselves, our environment, and those around us too.

As a side note, Tom Limoncelli wrote a section in his book, Time Management for System Administrators, on automation. It boils down some very good reasons to automate. If you’re a system administrator, and you don’t have that book on your shelf, go get it.

So are we lazy? Or are we working towards a better system?

Today I got to play a little with some PowerCLI, VMware’s PowerShell modules. I was helping out our DBA building SQL clusters, when I hit an issue where the cluster software was telling me the IP address I was trying to assign this SQL instance was already in use. A quick ping, and it confirmed it was active. If you’ve read my post on IP conflicts, you’ll know that you can look at the ARP table, and figure out what kind of device is using the IP, and in this case, it turns out to be a VMWare MAC. Instead of going through each of our vmware guests, I jumped into PowerShell…

While working on a small PowerShell script to create Windows Media Player playlist files, I stumbled across an odd occurence when working with nested elements. Using the syntax $xml.childnode.childnode2 you cannot add additional child nodes as it treats childnode2 as a string. Using the SelectSingleNode function, it’s possible to work around this.

After my last Nagios post I noticed an increase in hits triggered by search terms on the subject of web scraping, and using Nagios to monitor web pages. This post covers several methods of monitoring pages using Nagios, from the basic page check, to the more complicated user interaction.

Usually when I do any walking around with my camera, I usually carry my GPS device in my backpack. This allows me to track how far I walked, as well as marking where I took pictures. On a recent trip to the Dallas Zoo, I forgot to transfer my GPS data to my computer before I transferred my photos, and my images were not tagged with the geolocation data.

After upgrading several servers with a newer instance of nsclient++, we discovered Memory graphs were broken because of new performance metrics included in the check memory results. Well broken is subjective, the new performance data included the percentage free (as before), with the addition of the actual physical value (ie 1GB). This addition was missing from the RRDs when they were originally created, so when pnp4Nagios was updating the XML file it uses, it said it had 2 data sets, but the RRD only had one. Here’s how I fixed the issue.