Epoxy Journal

Installing the VMware Data Recovery plug in on your workstation

2011-04-19T14:05:00.000-04:00

You cannot install the VMware Data Recovery plug in the same way you install the Converter or VUM plug ins. You can't just add it through plug in manager. You have to install it directly from the ISO. Would be nice, if that was mentioned in the docs. C'est la vie.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vdr_10_admin.pdf
http://vmware.com/files/pdf/data-recovery-evaluators-guide.pdf

Why does Java exist?

2011-03-02T17:46:00.000-05:00

Seriously, what goes into the decision to write an app in Java instead of something else? Is it pure sadism?

God, I hate Oracle

2011-02-10T16:36:00.000-05:00

Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

I'll bet you can't guess the password

2011-01-25T12:02:00.001-05:00

Remote control robots with Kinect? Hmm, maybe I should cancel my eBay listing.

2010-11-24T10:49:00.002-05:00

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Hacked-Microsoft-Kinect-Used-for-Controlling-Robots-168490.shtml

Just kidding. Somebody please buy my Kinect.

Pretty sure this would've pissed off some founding fathers

2010-11-23T14:15:00.000-05:00

Google wardriving - So what?

2010-11-03T12:53:00.000-04:00

It's not news that Google's streetview trucks have been looking for wireless hotspots, and inadvertently capturing some of the traffic on these networks, including personally identifiable information (PII).
The news is that today in the UK, the ICO called it a "significant breach".
Really? Breach of what? If you transmit your own PII on an unencrypted open network, then that's the breach right there. Now the bits are in the air ready to be sniffed. With the new firesheep plugin, it's so easy a script kiddie could do it.
I feel like I shouldn't have to say this in 2010, but apparently I do. Don't send any PII over an open wireless network.

To virtualize or not to virtualize

2010-08-18T10:36:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine asked how I feel about virtualizing Domain Controllers. My answer below;

I think they're perfect for virtualization. Most domains have less than a few hundred objects, so we're looking at light utilization. It's almost impossible to provision a server that won't have way more resources than the DC will ever need. You could try to get more bang for you buck by putting other apps on the DC, but who wants to do that?

I think the main considerations with virtual DCs are;
DRS - You can set a rule so that the VMs don't end up on the same host.
HA - Give the PDC high restart priority, so it'll be one of the first machines powered up in the event of a host failure.
snapshots - No point taking snapshots of a DC. You can't restore it from a snapshot.
time - make sure your PDC is syncing with a good time source. VMs drift, a lot.

At this point I think there are only 3 reasons not to virtualize any server.
1 - Software TOS doesn't fully support it. Thanks, Oracle.
2 - DMZ servers. I'm still not totally comfortable virtualizing my DMZ. I'll let my counterparts learn the hard lessons here before I venture into it.
3 - Big Iron. I'm pretty sure most admins hit the physical limitations of their hosts long before the vSphere configuration maximums come into play. Either way, some workloads are still too big to virtualize.

Siemens End User License Agreement authored by former Stasi agent

2010-08-10T16:02:00.000-04:00

That's how it sounds anyway...

"Siemens PLM may, during regular business hours and upon reasonable advance notice, conduct an audit to determine Your compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement. You will permit Siemens PLM or its authorized agents to access Your facilities, workstations and servers and otherwise cooperate fully with Siemens PLM in any such investigation and will take all commercially reasonable actions to assist Siemens PLM in accurately determining Your compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement. Siemens PLM and its authorized agents will comply with Your reasonable security regulations while on Your premises."

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/eula/united_states_eula.shtml

Happy System Administrator Appreciation day!

2010-07-30T11:13:00.000-04:00

http://www.sysadminday.com/

Green IT on the cheap

2010-07-28T14:51:00.000-04:00

We've all heard they hype around "Green IT" it usually involves spending a lot of green on SANs, blades and vSphere licenses.Today, I implemented a Green solution requiring no additional purchasing. First some back story.

It's been an unusually hot summer this year. My server room is too hot in February, it's way too hot now. On particularly bad days I turn off my Backup server, since it's basically idle during the day. It occurred to me, that it might be a good idea to only have the server running while it's needed. Backups begin at 7pm, and usually run until almost 3am. So, we're talking about a machine that's completely idle for 2/3 of the day during the week.

So here's what I did. First, I went into the NIC settings in the BIOS, and in Windows and made sure Wake On Lan was enabled in both of those places. I'm already familiar with WolCmd.exe, see my previous post on WolCmd. So I know I can turn the server on. I set up a scheduled task on my monitoring server to bring up the backup server 15 minutes before backups are scheduled to begin. So, how do I shut it off? I started looking into the job properties in Backup Exec. There is a Pre/Post commands option in the job properties. This allows me to run windows commands through Backup Exec. So, when the job finishes it will execute the command shutdown /s. Be careful when configuring this, the default for pre/post commands is to run the command "On each server backed up". That would be bad. You must change the option to "On this media server". Voila! Now my backup server will consume 2/3 of the energy it used to consume, and all using software/hardware we already own, and a free utility.

Glad my IT mentor told me to always "measure twice, cut once"

2010-07-23T16:44:00.000-04:00

I just finished configuring a router for DMVPN. I'm shipping it offsite on Monday. I decided it would be a good idea to do a show run, and go through the config line-by-line to ensure that it is what it should be.
Had I not done that I might have forgotten entirely about the Serial interface. They don't need the WIC at this site, but I wouldn't mind having it. It'll come in handy in the CCNP lab I'm building under my desk.

This might be my funniest Experts Exhange respone.

2010-07-08T14:05:00.000-04:00

http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Operating_Systems/Server/Windows_Server_2008/Q_26315984.html#a33165029

Google voice transcription

2010-07-01T15:20:00.000-04:00

Want to. I don't know yet. Yeah, thanks very much. I'll wait. Hello, selson hey, I guess like a vehicle dinner. Contraceptives. Alright, well I tried to deliver some stuff but alright. Bye.

Well, they did say bye at the end. Other than that...

Another happy customer

2010-06-11T11:42:00.000-04:00

Guy had multiple KMS servers. Wanted to turn two of them back into clients. Been there done that. What a pain in the neck. I had multiple admins in multiple sites using KMS keys like they were the old volume license key. Like I said in the EE thread, I don't know if this is the best way to do this, but it worked for me.
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/Office_Productivity/Office_Suites/MS_Office/Q_26251088.html?cid=1131#a32970316

Experts Exchange Bragging

2010-06-11T09:37:00.000-04:00

I know, I know. EE has it's share of haters. It used to drive me nuts googling for a solution to a problem and hitting EE's paywall. Then I learned how easy it is to get free access by signing up as an "Expert".
It's really not that hard to maintain 3,000 points a month. A lot of times there's a super easy question that can be answered with a little googling, and a link to a technet article. You just gotta be quicker than all the other snipers.
I think EE is good for me professionally, because it gets me thinking about problems that I might not encounter otherwise. Also, it helps my customer service mindset. A lot of times people are asking how to do things that I would recommend against doing at all. Those are my favorites, because I have to think of the best way to achieve what they want to achieve whether is seems like the "right way" to me or not. Sometimes, I tactfully tell them that it might not be the best way to go about things. Sometimes, I'm too lazy to bother. After all, folks are looking for technical advice, not a lecture on the fine art of system administration.
So here's my accepted or assisted answers from today.
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Security/Operating_Systems_Security/Windows/Q_26231118.html?cid=1131#a32901664
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hardware/Servers/Q_26251168.html?cid=1133#a32964937
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Networking/Misc/Q_26162387.html?cid=1133#a32662778

Excel nested if statement

2010-06-10T10:01:00.000-04:00

My server inventory spreadsheet includes physical and virtual servers. There is a column for total cores, clockrate per core, and a columnt that multiplies the two. This is useful for physical servers, because it gives me an idea of what impact this server might have on my cluster if virtualized. Granted, it only shows me how many total GHz the server has available to it, not how many it actually uses.
For virtual servers, I don't record the clockrate per core, because that'a a dynamic number. Depends on which host they're currently on. If I record a n/a in that column, my multiplier formula returns #VALUE!. Ugly. If I leave the clockrate per core column blank, the muliplier returns a 0, which isn't accurate.
So, today I created a simple nested IF statement in my formula. It will look at the clockrate per core column, if the value is less than 1, it'll return n/a, if the value is greater than 0, it'll multiply the two columns. Trust me, it's less complicate than it looks, and you only have to get your formula close to this. Excel will fix it for you.
=IF(AN2<1,"n/a",IF(AN2>0,(AN2*AM2)))
AN2 is the clockrate per core column
AM2 is the total number of cores

Powering on a server remotely. wolcmd

2010-05-28T11:40:00.000-04:00

Ok, I know there's actually a lot of ways to skin this cat. Especially, if you're server has ILO, or DRAC. What if it doesn't have that? Or what if it does, but the goober that installed the server never configured it? Or what if you're the goober, and you configured it, but you don't remember the IP or password of your ILO card?
Enter wolcmd. It'a tiny little executable, run from the command line. I used it for the first time today, as I'm stuck at home, and I wanted to power up one of my ESX hosts. It was literally this simple.
wolcmd macaddress ipaddress netmask
If you don't enter a port number, wolcmd uses the default, port 7. Of course, you have to actually have Wake on Lan configured on the nic already for this to work, most NICs are already set up that way out of the box.

Disk space vbscript

2010-05-27T14:26:00.000-04:00

I've got to inventory disk usage across a handful of servers for the purpose of evaluating virtualization candidates, and justifying an additional shelf of storage for my ESX SAN.
So, I could laboriously log into each server and record disk usage, but where's the fun in that?
Now, I'm no scripting guru. I started out trying to do this with batch, but that just wasn't working. I found this vbscript, that gave me the percentage of free space. This got me close to what I needed. I hacked around a bit with the script, until I got something that gave me total, free, and percent free. I'm using psexec to run this against all my servers and kick out a text log.
Blogger might wrap the last 3 lines. They're not supposed to be wrapped, but you know how to fixt that in notepad, right?

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
    & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colDisks = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
    ("Select * from Win32_LogicalDisk Where DriveType = 3")
For Each objDisk in colDisks
    intFreeSpace = objDisk.FreeSpace
    intTotalSpace = objDisk.Size
    pctFreeSpace = intFreeSpace / intTotalSpace
    Wscript.Echo objDisk.DeviceID & " " & FormatNumber(objDisk.Size/1073741824,2) & "GB Total" & vbNewLine
    Wscript.Echo objDisk.DeviceID & " " & FormatNumber(objDisk.FreeSpace/1073741824,2) & "GB Free" & vbNewLine
    Wscript.Echo objDisk.DeviceID & " " & FormatPercent(pctFreeSpace) & " Percent Free" & vbNewLine
Next

Linking Excel to SQL

2010-05-26T17:45:00.000-04:00

Today I was asked to audit BES accounts. Yay. I need to send a list of BES users to all the subsidiaries and ask their IT folks to confirm or deny whether these folks are still breathing. The standard trick of highlighting all the accounts and choosing Export Asset Summary Data is not going to work for me. I need the Mail Server field to be exported so I can divide the list up by site. So, on to Google. It seemed a lot of people were recommending querying the SQL database directly. Awesome. I know very little about SQL. I don't know what all these scripts with their joins and selects are going to do do my BES. I do know Excel though. Though I'd never done it, I knew you could use Excel to query SQL directly. So, back to Google. Found this helpful article. Did as the article instructs, and Voila! I was connected to the BES SQL database through Excel. Now I just have to choose which db and table I want to look at. For db I went with BESMgmt. Just seemed kind of obvious. There's a lot of tables in that sucker. Hmm, which one do I want? vUserConfigStats looks promising. yUp! That's it. I found myself presented with every field of information related to each BB. Right down to their email signature. Sweet.

btw, there was actually an easier way to do all of this, but I got yelled at for it. I figured, instead of dealing with the potential human error in asking local IT staff to manually verify the account. I'd just disable redirection on every BB that hadn't contacted the BES in a few weeks. More than likely, those are not active accounts anymore. For those that are still active account, easy enough to just re-enable redirection when they complain.

Please, shut up and take a nap.

2010-05-21T14:12:00.000-04:00

In this (month old) post, RIM is reported to tout the fact that BlackBerrys will soon be able to make calls over WiFi, enabling travellers on WiFi-enabled planes to make voice calls. Oh, yay. :(
I think I'm going to avoid WiFi enabled planes for as long as I can. In this ever-connected digital world, 40,000 ft. up is the only refuge we have from ringtones, overheard conversations, and all the beeps, buzzes, and donks announcing incoming texts, emails, IMs and tweets. Is it such a bad thing to have to read a book, or take a nap for a few hours?

The optional requirement; Running batch files as a scheduled in Server 2008

2010-05-20T15:52:00.000-04:00

Got a weird one today. Someone in IS was trying to get a scheduled a batch file to run every morning for some Business Intelligence thingy. He could run the batch file manually, and it ran with no problems. The Task Scheduler, however, completely failed to start the batch file. So he turned to his super-cool sysadmin (me) for assistance.
I spent about 15 minutes banging my head against the wall with this one. I double-checked permissions, looked in the event logs for errors. I didn't see any obvious reasons why this task wouldn't run the batch file.
So, I once again turned to the Google, the sysadmin's best friend. As I began to type, autosuggest told me that I was not alone in dealing with this issue. I typed server 2008 task, and google suggested scheduler .bat.
The first link was this thread on Technet. Beware, this thread goes round and round, and most of what they suggest sounds like a pita. Being lazy, I went with the easiest suggested solution. "Make sure that the task is set to "start in" the folder that contains the batch file: open the task properties, click on the "actions" tab, click on the action and then the "edit" button at the bottom. In the "Edit Action" Window there is a field for "start in (optional)" that you set to the path to the batch file."
That was it. So the optional start in field, is required when running batch files. Awesome.

So much for that idea

2010-05-20T11:25:00.000-04:00

To me, the coolest thing about Citrix XenClient is the Citrix Synchronizer. "Synchronizer provisions, enables policy enforcement, backs up and manages images."
Cool, right?
Too bad Synchronizer only runs as a XenServer virtual appliance. I don't feel like standing up a XenServer to play with Synchronizer, which leaves me with no reason to play with XenClient.
Too bad, Citrix. Why couldn't you just make this an installable app, and let me install it wherever I want?

XenClient; Bare metal hypervisor for laptops

2010-05-20T10:37:00.000-04:00

This is really cool. This is exactly what I've been waiting for VMware to come up with. I didn't expect Citrix to be the first out of the gates with it. Guess what I'm going to be installing on my new E6410 today?
Also, this post mentions Clonezilla, and Linux Mint. Clonezilla sounds like exactly what our helpdesk has been looking for, and I've been hearing good things about Mint for a while. I'm going to give both of them a try.
http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2010/05/xenclient-baremetal-desktop-virtualization/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+standalone-sysadmin%2FrWoU+%28Standalone+Sysadmin%29

How to defeat Dell Latitude On

2010-05-18T16:45:00.000-04:00

When the Latitude On feature came out last year, I was not into it. Maybe I'm paranoid, but a small linux installation living on each laptop with access to the hard drive, and network interface sounds like it could potentially serve as a foothold for an attacker. I don't want to have to worry about securing two operating systems on each laptop. I was dismayed when Dell told me that there was no way to forgo this feature.
They told me that it could be turned off in the BIOS, but I didn't want it turned off. I wanted it gone.
Well, turns out there is a way to make it gone, by just doing what I do all the time anyway.
Latitude On is available in two ways. Either installed on a piece of flash, or installed to the HDD.
When speccing out the global standard for the E6410, I went with the HDD version. The flash version costs more, why pay more for something I don't want?
I received a demo model from Dell "to confirm that this configuration will work for us" (I just wanted a new laptop).
As I always do, I used killdisk to zero-fill the drive, then re-installed Windows. I always make sure that all partitions are destroyed on new machines, including the MBR. I don't know what country they made this in, or what kind of crapware might have been pre-loaded on it. Plus I hate Dell's ugly wallpapers.
This, of course, wipes out the partition where Latitude On lives. Latitude On? nOpe!