Artem's blog

Count number of repeating characters in powershell, ugly and dirty way

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 02:41:00 +0000

Recently I was asked to write a script to count the number of times each letter appears in a text file. This script ignores case sensitivity. I am working with a copy of War and Peace from Project Gutenberg. It reminded me of the MapReduce/Hadoop tutorial I'd followed on the Apache website to count the number of words in a collection of books. Here's the script, please suggest a better approach if you dare:

#Artem Ervits - version 0.0.1
#this script counts a number of times each character appears in a file, case insensitive

$names = Get-Content "C:\Users\are9004\Desktop\wnp.txt"

$a = 0; $b = 0; $c = 0; $d = 0; $e = 0; $f = 0; $g = 0; $h = 0; $i = 0;
$j = 0; $k = 0; $l = 0; $m = 0; $n = 0; $o = 0; $p = 0; $q = 0; $r = 0;
$s = 0; $t = 0; $u = 0; $v = 0; $w = 0; $x = 0; $y = 0; $z = 0

foreach($name in $names)
{
for($i = 0; $i -lt $name.Length; $i++)
{
if($name[$i] -contains 'a')
{
$a++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'b')
{
$b++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'c')
{
$c++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'd')
{
$d++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'e')
{
$e++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'f')
{
$f++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'g')
{
$g++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'h')
{
$h++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'i')
{
$i++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'j')
{
$j++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'k')
{
$k++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'l')
{
$l++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'm')
{
$m++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'n')
{
$n++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'o')
{
$o++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'p')
{
$p++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'q')
{
$q++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'r')
{
$r++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 's')
{
$s++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 't')
{
$t++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'u')
{
$u++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'v')
{
$v++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'w')
{
$w++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'x')
{
$x++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'y')
{
$y++;
}
elseif($name[$i] -contains 'z')
{
$z++;
}
}
}

if($a -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "a: " $a
}
if($b -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "b: " $b
}
if($c -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "c: " $c
}
if($d -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "d: " $d
}
if($e -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "e: " $e
}
if($f -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "f: " $f
}
if($g -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "g: " $g
}
if($h -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "h: " $h
}
if($i -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "i: " $i
}
if($j -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "j: " $j
}
if($k -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "k: " $k
}
if($l -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "l: " $l
}
if($m -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "m: " $m
}
if($n -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "n: " $n
}
if($o -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "o: " $o
}
if($p -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "p: " $p
}
if($q -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "q: " $q
}
if($r -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "r: " $r
}
if($s -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "s: " $s
}
if($t -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "t: " $t
}
if($u -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "u: " $u
}
if($v -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "v: " $v
}
if($w -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "w: " $w
}
if($x -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "x: " $x
}
if($y -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "y: " $y
}
if($z -ne 0)
{
Write-Host "z: " $z
}

and result:

a: 202517
b: 33301
c: 52720
d: 109627
e: 306370
f: 51143
g: 47026
h: 167025
i: 59
j: 2574
k: 19109
l: 88239
m: 51805
n: 135728
o: 185395
p: 44332
q: 2303
r: 142130
s: 140990
t: 204563
u: 65295
v: 23465
w: 59197
x: 3769
y: 46263
z: 1795

This is only English dictionary with 26 characters. Enjoy!

Identify uncompressed tables in SQL Server database with Powershell

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 18:49:00 +0000

Today I will illustrate how to check whether data compression is enabled on your SQL Server. This script is highly flexible and you may adjust it to your liking. I will only concentrate on compression today, in the next installment I will show how to modify this script and get other things done on your database server.

#This is how you comment in Powershell v.2 for big paragraphs

Artem Ervits

Database Services Group

Check whether compression is enabled

Ver. 1.0.1 01/04/10 Added prompt to enter server name

Ver. 1.0.0 12/07/10 Initial Script

#cls is an alias for clear screen

cls

#you may take input from a list of servers in your txt file but we’re going to concentrate on one server at a time right now.

#$hostname = Get-Content "C:\servers.txt"

echo
"Please Enter Server Name:"

#This next line will prompt you to enter a SQL Server Name.

$hostname

= Read-Host

#we’re making a SQL connection in this step

[

System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(’Microsoft.SqlServer.SMO’) | Out-Null

$sqlserver

= New-Object (’Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.Smo.Server’) $hostname

#we’re looping through all databases on your server.

foreach

($db in $sqlserver.Databases)

{

#System databases and any SQL Server Reporting Services DBs will be skipped in this condition.

if($db.ID -gt 4 -and $db.Name -ne "ReportServer" -and $db.Name -ne "ReportServerTempDB")

{

#we’re looping through all of the tables in the database because data compression is a table property

foreach($table in $db.Tables)

{

#if compression is enabled, we will skip the table.

if($table.HasCompressedPartitions -ne $true)

{

#here we’re outputting the name of the database and the table that are not compressed. This is useful for when ‘someone’ has created a table on your db and you need to make sure that all tables are compressed.

Write-Host "----------------------------"

Write-Host "Database Name: " $db.Name Write-Host "Table Name: " $table.name Write-Host "Compression On: " $table.hascompressedpartitions

}

Write-Host
"----------------------------"

#that’s all folks!

New Android developer

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 06:40:00 +0000

I am finally writing mobile apps people! I am happy to announce that I finally sit down to develop mobile apps based on Android. I have tons of ideas and no time to implement them all. My friend and big inspiration, Felix is the driving force behind this and I am picking his brains as well as providing him with app ideas. Stay tuned for release!

--Artem

New Linksys E3000 stock firmware and DD-WRT support!

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 06:36:00 +0000

I was left out of aftermarket firmware game once I got a new Linksys router as a birthday gift. This is no longer a problem because DD-WRT now supports my E3000. I prefer Tomato firmware myself because I find it more stable but as they say, beggars can't be choosers.
I also found that there were three more stock firmware updates available on the Cisco site. I have a new project to do!

Tomato

DD-WRT

--Artem

Another reason to hide SSID

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 06:30:00 +0000

With recent news of Google collecting SSIDs and passwords while mapping Google Street View, comes this tip from Pauldotcom.com. Apparently, if you plug in the mac address that comes with SSID on a Google map, Big Brother can zero-in on your exact address. Add this to your long list of paranoia. Reconfigure your routers not to broadcast the SSID!

--Artem

SQL Server on Solid State Disk

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Fri, 21 May 2010 22:09:00 +0000

Hello, it's been awhile :)! I had a pleasure attending a workshop for running Oracle apps like PeopleSoft on SQL Server. Yes, there are shops that do that. The workshop also covered J.D. Edwards, Siebel and SAP applications on SQL. Even though I don't deal with any of these apps, I have learned a lot from just attending. Contact me if you would like to get the trainer's information. Anyway, the most amazing part of the workshop was when the instructor showed us his server setup at home. His Windows 2008 server contained SSD storage and one SQL Database resided on it. He ran an undocumented command BACKUP DATABASE DBonSSD TO DISK = 'NUL:' just to display reads that occur during backup and the speed was an amazing 1300 MB/s. Then just to show the difference, he ran the same command on a database that resided on local disk, the speed was 80MB/s. I am convinced! If you're interested, the SSD vendor is Fusion IO and I am sure you won't have a problem finding it. So my recommendation, get SSD for SQL and attend this workshop when it is in the area. The workshop organizer is Mission Critical Computing Inc.

You should watch Engadget Show with Steve Balmer

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:36:00 +0000

I watched the show the other day and came away really impressed. I hate to admit but I actually liked Steve somewhat. He was soft of honest and funny about Microsoft. He talked about Windows 7, Zune, Windows Phone, XBOX and other stuff Microsoft is busy with. It was a good interview.

No chairs were harmed during the filming of the show...

Ubuntu 9.10 is here - time to triple boot a Mac!

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:32:00 +0000

I picked a great day to fix my dual/triple booting problems. For the past two days, I was having problems with reinstalling OSX 10.6 due to partitioning and repartitioning. Finally, I stumbled upon a tip to reset my PRAM. That worked and I described the steps in my previous articles. Today in the morning I reset my PRAM, reinstalled OSX, applied the latest Time Machine backup and then installed Windows 7 64-bit with Bootcamp. Then I downloaded Ubuntu Desktop 9.10 ISO from the Ubuntu site. Burned it to CD and then booted to it pressing "C". Ran the usual install, during partitioning I chose the following:

advanced settings
resized bootcamp to allow for free space
gave 8gb ext4 partition and assigned to root
2gb swap partition
the rest ext4 for /home

ext4 8gb /
2gb swap
ext4 /home

When it finished installing, I rebooted (I installed refit earlier) and chose the Windows partition. Once picked, grub appeared. Picked the first in the list, which was Ubuntu and then I was in. Ran into many problems because Macs don't play too well with Ubuntu. Followed tutorials on Ubuntu forums and got it running. Installed propriatory drivers and got wifi and video working fine. Trackpad is taking time getting used to. You need to 1-click to drag a window.

After all that, I rebooted and picked Windows partition and instead of choosing Ubuntu, picked Windows (last entry in the list). Now I am blogging from the Windows partition. Installed all the apps I need using this great tool called Ninite. Now I got a fully working triple-boot.

Happy hacking!

Case of rogue audit log

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:34:00 +0000

We are very lucky to have System Center Operations Manager in our shop. I can easily access tons of information that is typically hidden from DBA. At some point, I was able to find this strange phenomenon. One of my servers had low disk space and I started researching this. Turns out, msdb grew to 16gb. I started looking into this problem and found a table with a name Apex in msdb database. The table alone was 16gb. I googled the named of the table and found out that this is a log auditing application. It was removed awhile ago but add remove by itself won't cut it. There are server-side traces and events enabled as well. The funny thing is that this application is only installed on one node and not the other. Extended Stored Procedures were called every time SQL would start on this node. I followed instructions I found on Google to remove the extended procedures, DLL, exe and some left-over stored procedures, then I truncated the table and deleted it. My msdb is now 35mb. Whew.

Watch out, this application gets installed in msdb database, if you have it in your environment, monitor the size of your msdb!

Good luck.

MacBook Pro problem when you fresh install

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:20:00 +0000

Windows 7 launched on October 22nd and that's about the time I got my 64-bit copy. First thing I wanted to do was install it on my MacBook Pro. I started up Bootcamp and began to repartition. I ran into a problem partitioning more than 40gb volume. I started researching the issue and it turns out that due to fragmentation, it won't allow for larger space. Yes Macs also suffer from fragmentation! I had two options, purchase software to defrag the hard drive or do a fresh install of Snow Leopard. I opted out for #2. I erased my drive, formatted it and within an hour I had a brand new installation. Then I restored from Time Machine backup and my machine went back to the exact way it was when I began, minus the fragmentation. I must say that Time Machine is an amazing piece of technology, even though I've heard otherwise. I created a few partitions, one for Windows, one for Ubuntu 9.10 (coming shortly today!!!) and one for Data (partition formatted in FAT, accessible by all three). One thing led to another and it didn't work out too well for me. I decided to reinstall again and just stay with Mac OSX and Windows in Bootcamp. At this point fresh install started failing. I tried every which way to reinstall but was not able to. I even deleted the whole OS and installed Windows exclusively. I looked in the error log and message was that installation was unable to bless the disk and boot from it. Then I started researching again and found out that sometimes Intel Macs's PRAM get corrupted. Symptoms were similar to mine so I decided to try. To reset the PRAM you have to hold "Command + Option + P + R" together at boot-up, before the chime and continue holding until Mac restarts. After 2nd chime, your PRAM is reset. I tried that and it worked. Then I reinstalled the Mac and what do you know, I was able to reinstall! I am restoring from the backup as we speak.

Other good things to know:

force CD to eject command: "turn off the Mac, hold the power key for 10 seconds and when you hear chime, hold the trackpad until CD ejects".

boot from CD: "put CD in, reboot, hold "C".

That's that, happy hacking and Happy Ubuntu Day!

Doing "print screen" on a Mac is a pain in the ass

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:53:00 +0000

I am catching up with blogging today and I need to take a screenshot of my screen. I have a Macbook Pro with Ubuntu in a virtual machine. There is no printscreen button and a quick search returned "Apple + Shift + 3". Mac fanboys think that's easy and better than PC? So here's a problem. If you want to take a print screen in VM, that key combination doesn't work. What do I do besides opening the screenshot application and doing it half-assed way?
I am sure you can edit key bindings but that should not be that way. If you know of any other ways, let me know.

Windows Apps on Ubuntu Karmic Koala in 1-2-3 steps

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:29:00 +0000

I used to be a big user of Google Notebook. I loved this product and needless to say when Google decided to scrap it, I was pretty bummed. Fortunately, there is another product called Evernote. It is pretty much the same type of web application but it also has a desktop front-end. Evernote has apps for Windows, OSX, iPhone and Palm Pre. However, there is no Linux client, other than the web application... Until now.
I heard about this tip from the Fresh Ubuntu Podcast, who in turn got it from Leo Laporte on Floss Weekly. So here it goes:
1. Download Evernote 3.1 Windows executable from their website.
2. Install wine1.2 package from the Ubuntu Repositories. "sudo apt-get install wine1.2".
3. In Terminal type "wine Evernote*.exe".

That's it and it works fine.

Run T-SQL Queries in Powershell quick view

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:44:00 +0000

My Favorite SQL Server Log Analysis Tool has been updated

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:31:00 +0000

Performance Analysis of Logs for (#SQL Server 2000/05, #IIS, #Exchange, #MOSS, #Active Directory) has been upgraded! Latest build is as of June 12, 2009, version 1.3.5. I have used version 1.3.4.3 prior to this but I'm about to install this latest version and take it for a spin. Can't wait to see what's new in this release. With PAL for SQL Server, you need to generate a .BLG file with pssdiag for SQL 2000 or SQLDIAG for 2005 and then use it as input for PAL. It will run a VBscript and generate an HTML report that you can submit to your manager for review. It shows all the important performance stats for SQL, disk performance and memory. I use it to find my performance hogs. No major changes seen so far. Get yours at Codeplex.

Aslo good for log analysis of IIS, Exchange, BizTalk and other Microsoft Technologies. Requires .NET 2.0.

Enjoy.

Power Manager 2.24.2 in Ubuntu 9.04

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 01:50:00 +0000

I can't believe I've never seen it in Ubuntu but something possessed me to look at power manager today and I found a few new goodies. This feature reminds me of perfmon in Windows only for power manager. It shows a lot of information regarding power management such as: power history, voltage history, charge/discharge time profile, charge/discharge time accuracy. It presents a nice graph with trends. This is another great way to see the performance of your laptop battery and one more plus for Ubuntu!

I get this error more often than I want to see

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 01:25:00 +0000

Today I tried to install SQL Server 2005 SP2 Cumulative Update 13 on one of servers and I received an error "Error code: 11009 No passive nodes successfully patched". This is a Windows 2003 32-bit cluster and after six successful installations of CU 13, it had to fail on a production server. Luckily this production server is not yet in production (he he) and thankfully Microsoft included rollback inside the update. It did update workstation tools but not the engine.
Usually it fails when task scheduler or WMI is not running on the passive node. In today's case both services were running and I am yet to hear from Microsoft web support about the issue. What I did last time to fix was take the passive node out of the cluster and patch individually one by one each node. This was a special case because for some weird reason, the application vendor requires task scheduler to be a cluster-aware service and it must fail-over so I had to find another solution and that's what I had to do if I didn't want to touch the task scheduler. Well, I searched for the hell of it today and found this very helpful result. It is really quite genius, I must say. I can't believe I didn't think of it before. This article is as of April 20th, 2009, which is way after I had my last issue. The article describes that this issue first appeared after Cumulative Update 6 and plagued DBAs since then. It is fixed in SP3, more reason to upgrade! Anyway, my previous workaround is described there as method 2 but method 1 is pure DBA happiness! What I did today to quickly patch was pause the passive node, patch the active node, unpause, failover, reboot, patch the now active node with rebooted node now paused, reboot it and test! Voil-la you now have a working database engine version 9.0.3325!

SQLDIAG and PSSDIAG

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Fri, 29 May 2009 21:38:00 +0000

Most of the time I work with SQL Server 2005 when I need to collect statistics and create a nice looking html document with #PerfMon stats. In that case I run SQLDIAG with detailed statistics enabled. Command at the prompt is: SQLDIAG /i SD_Detailed.XML. This time around I was asked to run a performance report on a SQL 2000 Server. It's been a long time since I've done any work of this type so here are a few things I've learned from working with it. Apparently SQL 2000 doesn't support SQLDIAG. In that case I need to run PSSDIAG. You may ask why do I need to run either one, there are other tools available. Well, SQLDIAG and PSSDIAG create a .BLG file that I can feed into PAL tool that will create a really good html formatted document with plenty of information on performance. Well, my problems started right away. It is not as flexible as SQLDIAG and I stopped taking 2005 for granted after I've messed around with PSSDIAG for 2000. Apparently I need XML parser SP2 to run PSSDIAG on SQL 2000. Running it without that will give you an error message "cannot instantiate XML DOM". Oh ye, double-clicking the PSSDIAG executable will give you a nice "Buffer Overrun" error message. How about that! If anyone has encountered similar issues, please let me know what are your thoughts. If you're wondering whether I was able to collect the data, the answer is no. I need to wait seven days as per our change control policy for any modifications to our production environments. So even a 5mb file (XML parser Sp2) has to be installed during a scheduled maintenance.

Take care and have a great weekend!

Update on get-process | kill

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Fri, 15 May 2009 02:51:00 +0000

Got replies on #twitter by @jsnover, @r_keith_hill re: get-process | kill command. It is fixed in #powershell v.2, will only kill user-
specific processes. Will test in Windows 7, also was told to use -whatif tag. -whatif tag tells you what the command you're about to run will do. Now that's neat! Thank you fine gentlemen for your help.
Twitter is a wonderful tool!

--Artem

Never do this in PowerShell!

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:27:00 +0000

I was playing with #powershell the other day and found this "neat" trick. If you type "get-process | kill", it will reboot your box i.e. kill all running processes. Goes to show how important it is to know what you're doing with #shell. Use at your own risk!

--
Artem

New feature in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:22:00 +0000

If you go to Terminal in #Ubuntu 9.04, and type "screen" no quotes, you will get quick info on CPU, Memory and some other info. Pretty neat! I heard this on LinuxOutlaws podcast.

--
Artem

Run Powershell Inside Cygwin

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:44:00 +0000

#Cygwin in simpler terms is a bash shell for #Windows. You can run all your favorite bash tools like #rsync, #ssh, etc in cygwin. Turns out, you can run #powershell also. Yes powershell! Simply type “powershell” in cygwin, no quotes, and you will enter a powershell environment. Else, you can type a full command like this >powershell “get-eventlog System”. At the end you will be brought back to bash shell. In the first example you will stay in powershell. One caveat though, I don’t see tab completion in cygwin and file names are case sensitive, so you must specify the names exactly how they’re defined.

______________________________________________________________________

New Ubuntu Look

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:30:00 +0000

Jaunty is out of the door and first traces of Mark Shuttleworth's promise to bring a beautiful OS that can rival Mac OSX are surfacing. I must be honest, when I upgraded I installed ubuntu-restricted-extras with Microsoft Fonts, but I never did enable them. I ended up using default fonts. These fonts are easy to read and really do look cool. Themes that are shipped with 9.04 are also great. The one I ended up using is called "Dust Sand". It looks a little like OSX theme but it is different. I prefer it over the default "Human" theme. Slight opacity is also a nice touch that comes with this theme. I really dig it..

Newly-found Gems

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:16:00 +0000

There were a lot of changes to my podcast collection since the last time I talked about them. I recently found Knightwise (KWTV) and Category5 TV. These two podcasts concentrate on users and provide really good tips and resources for people learning Ubuntu and other software. Knightwise has a really good attitude and blogs from Belgium. You can also find him on Facebook. Category5 TV is another great resource. These guys are in Canada and I found them when they were featured on Ubuntu UK podcast. What I don't like about Category 5 tv is that you need to register on the website and go through a few clicks to get through RSS feeds. Once you do though, you have a lot of choices to pick from. For the people with a lot of time, I suggest to subscribe to a full feed. For the short attention span people like me, I am going for the meat, that's what it is called. However, if you subscribe in iTunes, there is no feed h.264 feed for iPhone yet. So you should settle for Miro for now. I prefer to take my podcasts to go, so I will wait until then. I was really impressed with the past few episodes featuring VIrtualBox and Compiz effects. Head on over there and check these guys out. I recommend!

There can be only one...

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:39:00 +0000

Well it happened. I finally wiped my Ubuntu installation after three full years of work. Let's take it back to the end of March for a minute. Beta of Ubuntu 9.4 was just released and what do I do, upgrade my Ubuntu 8.10. I've had problems before with my upgrades of Beta Ubuntu but never like this. What happened this time is that when everything completed successfully, I tried to boot into Ubuntu and at logon screen I realized that my mouse and keyboard were not working. I could see a cursor but I could not move it. I rebooted into recovery mode and tried to fix it with my limited Linux command knowledge. It didn't work. Then from that time and on until yesterday I would boot into root shell with networking and run "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get dist-upgrade", hoping it will fix my broken system. It didn't work. That's why for the past month and a half I had to use XP exclusively :(. I really missed Ubuntu. So yesterday I spent the whole day backing up my existing setup. By the way let me mention that I use XP only for iTunes and I use iTunes only for my iPhone. I really wish there was another solution that I could use on Ubuntu for everything iTunes does with iPhone.

So the first thing I did was I installed Macrium and made an image of my whole hard drive. Then I installed Cobian Backup and backed up all my files on XP. Then I backed up my iTunes collection to DVD media. Then I made an iso of all Windows updates with "Offline Update" application and burnt it to DVD. Lastly, I found driver backup with yahoo search and backed up all of my laptop drivers. Then on the Ubuntu side I used Grsync to backup files from the Ubuntu partition. Now let me reiterate, I could not login to a working X session with my broken Ubuntu. What I did was, download a new Ubuntu 9.4 Release Candidate iso with Bittorrent (highly recommend this for much better speed (1.5mb/s for me) and of course you're helping others out). Made sure it was not an alternate installer because it lacks Live Media. My machine is fairly new and it supports live media so I was fine there. I burned this iso to CD and booted into it. Installed Grsync and backed up my home directory to an external hard drive. Of course there's an easier way to do it with Bash shell in the original installation but since I am a noob I needed a bit of GUI magic. Then I used the same Ubuntu 9.4 RC CD to install a new system wiping both old XP and Ubuntu. So after three years with a stable Ubuntu installation it finally did me in. I guess I didn't learn my lesson upgrading to a Beta level software since the last time it broke my system. Well at least last time I was able to fix it.

Of course there's a point to this whole story and it is that I learned so much with this whole tedious process. When I installed a new Ubuntu and restored from Grsync backup, all of my old settings and files came back, including a Windows 7 Virtualbox image. Grsync also backed up my Firefox tab sessions, AMAZING! It worked perfectly! Of course some of the crap from the old system also came back. I always heard that fresh install is better than upgrade but was always hesitant to do it. Now that I didn't have a choice, I learned something new. Fresh install and then restore from backup takes much less time than doing an upgrade, especially the week of a new Ubuntu Release, which happens to be tomorrow, WOOT! I am planning to burn a new iso of Ubuntu in a few days once it goes gold, again downloading with bittorrent (next two weeks regular downloads are going to be slooooow) and burn to CD. In my home directory set an option to view hidden folders (any files with a period in the front i.e. ./VirtualBox), remove all of the folders I don't need, take a backup of that and then fresh install again. This will leave my box stable and clean.

Tomorrow Ubuntu 9.4 is coming out and I am going to celebrate by wearing my Ubuntu polo shirt. The funny tidbit is that I am going to a SQL Server User group at Microsoft headquarters in New York tomorrow after work as well :).

The backup applications I used worked great. Macrium in comparison to other imaging applications lets you make an image of your system while you're logged in, other imaging applications make you reboot. Cobian backup is great, you can make a regular backup or compressed with zip or 7zip archive types, split archives into many files, etc. Check out the application for more options. Offline update is a tool featured on Lifehacker.com that I used a few years ago. It fetches all of Windows Updates for 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003, 2008, make an iso or many different isos (many languages are supported) burn to CD or DVD. Then when you fresh install Windows, put in the CD/DVD and it will guide you through the update. It will bring your system up to date much faster than with Windows Update, which requires an internet connection. This tool also skips the Genuine Advantage Check, which I think is a bloatware. Same options are available for Microsoft Office, definitely recommend this tool! Driver backup is a great little tool to backup your drivers, I didn't test the restore but backup is pretty fast. Free tool but author is asking for donations. Grsync is a GUI front end for rsync that comes preinstalled with Ubuntu. Helps noobs configure their backups and restores. Oh yeah and for the title, well There can be only Ubuntu, no Windows!

sweet..

Am I seeing double?

noreply@blogger.com (Artem) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:28:00 +0000

With all this conficker mumbo jumbo, my security admins restricted blogger.com access. Well, guess what, with it, they took my rights to blog from work. So just to confirm this I yahoo’ed my blog name “Artem’s blog” and found my blog and another Artem’s blog. I had to rub my eyes because topics covered are almost identical to what I would cover, Ubuntu, apps, etc. Turns out there’s another Artem in Ukraine, (I am in the U.S.) that blogs about similar topics. This is pretty funny and I’m kind of proud to have a namesake with similar interests. So everyone, please check out his blog and subscribe. You can also find him on Facebook at Artem Kudymovsky. Here’s a link to his blog.

p.s. I just looked through his articles, there’s a post where he says he changed the title of the blog from Artem and Darya;s blog to Artem’s blog, that explains why I didn’t find it before.