Life

Yes, yes. I do list a lot of crappy products (go on, laugh; I don’t really care). Yesterday I had quite a struggle with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Terminal services (or more precisely with their way on how to deal with network printers). As most of you know, there a two (possibly three) different ways on how to do network printers. would be, to simply share a local connected printer by simply creating a share for the printer buy a smart printer with integrated print server a combination of 1. and 2. We luckily enough do have printers with integrated print servers, so that wouldn’t be a problem. But you get a problem if you’re trying to monitor the printer queue if you simply create a new TCP/IP connection from another target. You simply can’t tell who’s printing what. ...

As some of you know, the company I’m currently working for, recently acquired some thin clients to replace our old computers for the students to work on. Those PC’s are like P3 800 MHz with 512MB RAM and sadly don’t run Office 2007 anymore, so we replaced them with thin clients and are streaming those applications from a Windows Terminal Server cluster (created by and with 2X Application LoadBalancer). So far so good, getting them to display the applications ain’t hard, the real hard part starts when you want additional things from this Windows XPe (Embedded), like lets say getting them to display a German language. ...

Since we started utilizing Nagios’s power two months ago, I finally came up with a C-based ram-plugin for nagios. The biggest problem I had with the python and perl based plugins, that some distributions (yes, SLES and Debian) don’t install either Python or Perl. Since I wanted a manageable setup (as in unified code base across all distributions), I wanted it to work without installing too much. So I took the swap plugin and basically removed what wasn’t necessary and voila! ...

As some of you people know, we (as in the University) recently purchased some Thin Clients in order to replace some oldish’ computers and solve the software management at the same time. The Thin Clients ain’t bad, they are Wyse V90L’s and they (as in Wyse) use their own management software to manage and deploy those thin clients and software. The bad thing about that, is it’s using it’s own “Scripting Language” (if you can call it that way - it’s more pseudo scripting since you can’t do much with it besides some basic actions). ...

Somehow, there still seem to exist honest people on this world … I just found my drivers license in the mail, somehow the office responsible for the district I lost it in (it seems I lost it somewhere in Greifswald, since I got mail from the office in Landhagen) found it in their postbox and immediately mailed it to my address. YAY!

Apparently the TYPO3 version we are using, doesn’t play too nice with the MySQL MasterMaster replication. Sometimes, something like this is going to happen: 1 2 070826 0:44:32 [ERROR] Slave: Error 'Duplicate entry '75-222419149' for key 1' on query. Default database: 't3nb'. Query: 'INSERT INTO cache_pagesection 070826 0:44:32 [ERROR] Error running query, slave SQL thread aborted. Fix the problem, and restart the slave SQL thread with "SLAVE START". We stopped at log 'dbc-mysql1.000192' position 611861372 Well, as you can see from the last line in the log, the Slave-SQL thread found a duplicate entry and thought it is smart to just turn off the thread instead of disregarding the just made entry. So from now on, both databases drift since there ain’t no replication anymore until someone kick starts the replication again (someone being me). ...

Well, the title nearly says everything .. I managed to loose my second pair of car keys, today I somehow found out that I was driving without a drivers license, so I have to go to the registration office and apply for a new one, hopefully should be done in about 4-6 weeks. Oh hell, and I have to spend about 40 € on it .. Well, live kinda sucks if you’re oblivious. Anyway, work is giving me a ass-load of fun right now, so I’m kinda happy, though it’s Saturday evening, I’m sitting back home, just lost all my custom build Debian packages (yes, I happen to use that at work, right after SLES) and listening to Hed PE.

Since my talk with Robin on Thursday regarding the autogenerated userinfo.xml, I finally found some time today to get all the info’s I need out of userinfo.xml. Since I don’t really want to manually enter all those mail addresses from userinfo into LDAP manually, I figured sed might be my best friend. BUT sed ain’t easy .. But thanks to Fabian and Gilles, I learned something new about sed today .. Basically I searched for a way to transform userinfo.xml into a datafile for ldapedit. ...

As apparently the guys at Teamix read my recent blog post about their cluster solution, someone of their technical support called me on friday at work 😳 And pointed out That I’m free to express my thoughts about their product (which I recently did) That there is a better way to workaround this issue He also said, its something which they had asked multiple times. It’s as simple as editing the Virtual Server and changing the service inspection from “Connection” to “None” .. duh ...

So we bought some Fujitsu Siemens P5916 Intel vPro back in January/February for the Boss and his secretary. These boxes are quite nice, come with a Core 2 Duo (which is waaay to overrated for simple business applications like Word, Excel, Access and Outlook), but he insisted on having Windows Vista Ultimate ready PC’s. We got them, as expected completely blank. Wasn’t so much of a problem though, since we have a Select 5.0 6.0 contract with M$. Only problem was, they refused to install Vista (as in freezing after preping the HDD). So I called our local vendor, who told me " Go, grab the latest BIOS from the support page and perform a BIOS update!" - Which I wasn’t so happy about to hear and to do … That didn’t work, the box would freeze on boot now … ...