Geoff @ UVM

Today, I received notification of a significant update to the Treo 700w. Among other things, this update integrates the Daylight Saving Time patch, and provides (sound the trumpets) integrated Dial-up Networking via USB or Bluetooth.

I followed the instructions and ran the update with the Treo connected to my Dell Latitude 620 running Vista Enterprise. All told it took over a half an hour to complete.

The provided updater reminded me to plug the Treo’s power supply into the docking cable, and then it did its thing..

The Treo reported the update being complete, but I followed the instructions and didn’t touch it until the desktop update utility said it was done.

Now I’ll have to give the Dial-up networking a try… sometime… when I’m in a place with some signal…

I have a few servers that seem to be choking on the KB833407 Critical Update. This is the one that “remove[s] unacceptable symbols from the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font.” I question the criticality of this update, but as I said, server of my systems are having trouble installing it.

I finally did a little research and found this helpful list of troubleshooting steps. I’ve tried the first tip, but I’ll have to wait to retry the installation (can’t reboot servers in the middle of the day, and I seem to recall this update requiring one).

This morning, I found that a virtual server had filled up it’s data drive. In order to grow the disk, I had to shut down the virtual server, then ssh to the service console and use vmkfstools -X , where newsize is the new size of the disk, specified like “20G”.

I then started the guest, logged-in, and used diskpart extend the basic volume to use the (new) unused space on the virtual disk.

Diskpart KB
and man vmkfstools

Here’s a first draft of a document I’ve written, mostly to make the ‘Your file server quota is [almost] full’ email alert short and sweet. But this is probably a reasonably generic topic, so it will get posted to the ETS website. Your comments are welcome.

update: This has been posted to the ETS website at http://www.uvm.edu/ets/faq/?Page=managing_network_storage.htm

Managing your network storage

This document contains recommendations for reducing the amount of space your files consume, specifically on the Campus File Services file server. The advice, however, should be generally applicable to reducing file space consumption across other services as well.

Network-accessible storage has many advantages over local hard drives. Files stored in these locations are often accessible from a variety of locations and methods. These files also are backed-up to a robust back-up facility, making it possible to recover overwritten or deleted files. These features aren't usually available on your local desktop or laptop hard drive.

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I’ve made it to Tech·Ed 2007, which gave me my first opportunity for air travel. Yes, I had never been on an airplane before Sunday. Yes, I lead a sheltered life. I wasn’t worried about flying, per se. I actually enjoyed that part. The part I get anxious about is logistics. Just ask my family.

I made it, though, without incident, and got to Tech·Ed registration on Sunday night in order to avoid the lines on Monday morning. Monday morning’s keynote was rather typical, which says a lot since this is only my second Tech·Ed. Christopher Lloyd reprised his role from the Back to the Future series in another corny theatrical intro. They played a bunch of Bruce Hornsby that I enjoyed, but I don’t know what album it was. I’ll have to find out.

One interesting part of the keynote was a segment by [insert name here] from Gartner research, who discussed the importance of the latest important business concept (aka buzzword), Agility. He had a visualization of a “traditional” (aka non-agile) organization as a circle divided into thirds, corresponding to Business, Applications, and Sysadmins, with brick walls between them. Business identifies a need and tosses it over the wall to Applications. They build or buy a solution, then toss it over the wall to the SysAdmins to deploy and keep running. Not agile. He also said we don’t have good metrics for agility, yet.

The rest of Monday went by really fast, and so did Tuesday. Now it’s Wednesday, and half-over. 🙁 So far, I’ve been concentrating on Server issues and Operations Manager 2007. I’ve been to a bunch really good breakout sessions, a chalk-talk, and worked through some Hands-On Labs, which have been helpful in getting more out of the breakouts. I’ll summerize those in another post. Now, my tummy is rumbling and I have to keep my energy up.

I got a called from my father the other day asking for a “favor.” His Dell Windows XP Home system refused to boot, giving the following error:

Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SOFTWARE

It would then proceed with a memory dump. I figured it was going to be an ugly repair-type install on top of the existing filesystem, followed by reinstallation of all the [Dell cruft and] applications he uses.

I was pleased to find, via a quick google search, Microsoft KB article 307545, entitled How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting.

I followed it step-by-step, using the recovery console to swap copies of the registry around to make the system bootable, then extracting a recent good copy of the registry and putting that into place. The last step was to use System Restore to revert the whole system to its state (corresponding to the version of the registry). That part didn’t work, for whatever reason.

But, the system changes very little and the things my Dad wanted to have working all worked fine. It’s good to exercise these DR chops every now and again, and impressing my Dad was fun, too. 🙂

I used a backup of a production database to create a test environment and ended up with an orphaned user in the database. It’s always a good idea to restore from your backup files occassionally, just to be sure that they are functional, valid, and that you remember the process.

However, because I restored to a different server with a fresh (Ok, it’s SQL 2000 SP4; maybe clean would be a better word) install, the SQL Login didn’t exist that corresponds to a user that is part of the database.

I used the sp_change_users_login stored procedure to list the orphaned account and SID. Then I used sp_addlogin to create a login with the same name, password and SID in the master database. Now the user can query away!

I started with KB 314546, and then referenced the books online for sp_addlogin.

I have only just tripped across the procedure for adding new fonts to the list of those that you can set for the windows console (command prompt). Scott Hanselman mentions the process in a June 2005 post on his blog, and links to a Microsoft KB article.

I had been a steadfast user of the Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, but I think Consolas looks better. Consolas is installed on my Vista system with Office 2007, and Outlook 2007 uses it as the default font for plain-text formatted mail.

Every now and then, I need to provide or verify firewall the configuration required for domain authentication to occur across a firewall boundary. Here’s a very useful KB article that enumerates the requirements. The wide RPC range is usually problematic, but we’ve implemented the RPC port reallocation according to KB 154596 . That makes it a little cleaner.