Andy Kemp

Rename a Ubuntu Server

Andrew Kemp — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:38:06 GMT

So now I have managed to change the Server IP address the next thing was to change the host name. The hostname is defined in the two following locations:

/etc/hostname
/etc/hosts

To change it you need to edit both files:

sudo nano /etc/hostname and sudo nano /etc/hosts

As with the interfaces file after each edit press Ctrl+X to save and exit.

I restarted the server after changing it but I guess there is a restart of a service you can do.

Changing the IP Address from DHCP to static on ubuntu server

Andrew Kemp — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:53:52 GMT

One of the most simple things that only really took me a google search to do was to change the IP Address of my Ubuntu server from a DHCP assigned address to a Static IP address.

This is done through editing two files:

/etc/network/interfaces
/etc/resolv.conf

This is done through using the following commands:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

then making the following changes to the file:

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 192.168.1.100
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        gateway 192.168.1.1

press Ctrl+X to save and exit from that file. Then modify the resolv.conf file:

sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

annd the following line for each DNS server:

nameserver 192.168.0.1
nameserver 192.168.0.2

Again press Ctrl+X to save and exit from the file.

then enter in the following command to restart the networking service:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Thats it the IP address has been set to a static.

Webmin for Ubuntu Server

Andrew Kemp — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:53:24 GMT

I’ve been playing around with Ubuntu Server for some time now, and slowly getting use to the Command Line Interface (CLI) However that might change from now on…

I came across a tool called Webmin. This is a web interface that provides a GUI for some of the services that are installed on the Ubuntu Server.

At the moment 1.490 is the latest version.

To install Webmin you need to type the following in to a putty session:

wget http://garr.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/webadmin/webmin_1.490_all.deb

once that has downloaded you then need to type the following:

sudo dpkg -i webmin_1.441_all.deb

That should be it, however if you encounter errors when installing all you need to do is run the following command immediately:

sudo apt-get install –f

then hey presto thats it Webmin is installed you can then browse to your server using https on port 10000, so for mine I went to https://prometheus:10000 I logged in and then I could manage the server from there:

From this you can manage MySQL, SSH, Apache2, Samba and other services through the web GUI.

I am still having some issues when creating new websites through the Apache2 so I am sticking to the CLI for that just now but for things like databases and Samba its pretty good.

I had to install an extra module for VSFTPD but there isn’t much to do on it once it is configured.

Error Pushing out Sophos to clients saying registry could not be accessed

Andrew Kemp — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:35:03 GMT

I had an error pushing Sophos out to a few clients, it says that you need to disable simple file sharing but that still does not work. it turned out that the problem is down to access on the registry:

http://www.sophos.com/support/knowledgebase/article/39357.html

that is the Sohpos Knowledgebase on the problem, seemed to fix the problem for me.

Nokia 5800 XM Apps I use the most

Andrew Kemp — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:21:22 GMT

so I’ve had my 5800 for about 4 months now, ok so I am now on my 5th 5800 since getting it, but the problems have been down to the custom firmware that Virgin Mobile put on. only once have I actually had an issue with the phone itself.

Any how my newest replacement is back up and running :) and thanks to Google Sync I do not need to worry about backing up my phone calendar, contacts or email as that is all pulled from my Google Apps account using the Mail for Exchange app.

Any how I thought that I would put a post up about the apps I use the most now, I did one a wee while back but I think that that has changed now, so here they are:

Mail for Exchange
Sports Tracker
Nokia Maps
Gravity
Mobler
AccuWeather
Nokia Messaging
UKRails
Facebook

I have got a few other apps installed but these are the ones I use the most, the first 4 I would say I use on a daily basis the others, more than 3 times a week.

Out of these 9 apps Gravity is the only 1 I had to purchase, but it is worth it. As far as I am aware it is the only native S60 v5 twitter client out there. It is similar to TweetDeck in some ways with its columns, and you can also connect to Facebook from it too. I’ve found I’d use gravity over the Facebook app for my phone. yo ucan get a free trial from www.mobileways.de and also purchase it from there. I found I could not cope with out it after trailing it for 10 days so felt compelled to purchase it for £8 from the OVI store however if you do buy it do it from mobileways.de and not OVI I had problems with it not being registered.

If you have any other apps that you use please let me know and I would be keep to try them out.

Installing Search Server Express 2008 on Server 2008 R2

Andrew Kemp — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 20:58:43 GMT

If you try and install Search Server Express on Windows Server 2008 R2 you will get the following compatibility error:

It wasn’t till I tweeted about the error that I managed to solve the problem. With thanks to ToddKlindt pointing me in the right direction mentioning that Office SharePoint SP2 needed to be slipstreamed I managed to fix the problem. I had guessed that was the case but I was looking in the wrong direction, I was looking for a Service Pack for Search Server not for Share Point.

So the answer was to Slipstream Office SharePoint 2007 Server SP2 in to the Setup of Search Server.

To do this I needed to:

Extract the SearchServer.exe file

Create a folder in your C:\ called Search
copy the SearchServer.exe to C:\Search
run the following command from a run command: C:\Search\SearchServer.exe /Extract:C:\Search\SearchSP2\

Download officeserver2007sp2-kb953334-x64-fullfile-en-us.exe from here
Extract the Service Pack files

Copy the Service pack file to C:\Search
run the following command: C:\Search\officeserver2007sp2-kb953334-x64-fullfile-en-us.exe /Extract:C:\Search\SearchSP2\Updates\

Once you have done that you can copy the C:\Search\SearchSP2 to a network location or CD and install Search Server Express from there.

I have not tested it but I am guessing that it is a similar process for Search Server 2008 too.

Google Sync

Andrew Kemp — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:55:20 GMT

When I received my Nokia 5800 XM a few months ago I was really impressed that I could use Mail for Exchange to connect to Google Sync for my Contacts and Calendar entries on my Google Apps account. The one thing missing on that trio was my Email, not really a problem as I then setup a Mailbox on the phone to connect to my Googlemail through IMAP. Well this how now changed. Google have completed the trio! I went in to the Mail for Exchange profile and enabled email and viola! it synced the email.

The only draw back now with the Nokia 5800 XM is that the default mail client does not support HTML. I have got Nokia Messaging up and running that supposedly supports HTML, but the emails that come through don’t look like they should do, in fact they still look like plain text.

There are several email clients out there for S60 5th OS’s that support HTML Email but it would be nice if it was supported in their own email client.

Edit in Datasheet does not work after installing Outlook 2007

Andrew Kemp — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 12:38:59 GMT

We are in the process of rolling out Outlook 2007 to our users, to enable them to better connect to SharePoint, however, since installing it on a PC with Office 2003 installed the option to edit a list in a Datasheet did not work, all we got was a page saying Error. Then when you clicked back Internet Explorer would crash, not a great start to the Rolling out Outlook 2007.

Well the issue is down to two versions of the edit in Datasheet control being installed on the Computer, one version for Office 2003 and the other is for Office 2007 (although it was only Outlook we were installing). MS say it is down the the incompatibility of the controls that enable you to edit in Datasheet. Several posts I came across suggested that I should rename the OWSSUP.DLL file in the c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\ folder but no joy with that it still did not work.

I tried several things but to no avail, it still did not want to let me edit in Datasheet.

I eventually came across a post by someone who had a similar problem to me but had installed Project and not Outlook. He suggested that after installing the Office 2007 Application you will then need to do a re-install of Office 2003, not a repair install but a re-install.

So I tried that and it worked!

All was running smoothly till I tried to edit a document stored in SharePoint, Internet Explorer Crashed on me again. This turned out to be linked to the OWSSUP.DLL. I renamed that file in the Office12 folder and all was working like a charm.

Outlook 2007 uses Word 2007 to render CSS not IE

Andrew Kemp — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:39:10 GMT

A news letter email that was sent out internally recently wasn’t displaying correctly in Outlook 2007, it looked fine in Outlook 2003. After some digging around it turned out that MS had made Outlook 2007 use Word to render its CSS and HTML Emails as opposed to using IE to render them.

To me this was a step back in time for the evolution of email.

A simple click on the other actions and view in browser displays the email correctly, however, its not the best option considering that we are going to be rolling out Outlook 2007 to the Firm in the coming months.

This is the MSDN article about the “Introduction to HTML Parsing and Rendering in Outlook 2007” :

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338201.aspx

They have also provided a validater tool for CSS:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338200.aspx

But this really doesn’t help the fact the design of the news letter has now got the be re-written to support the new rendering.

With the pending release of Office 2010 people have been asking if it will be the same with Outlook 2010 and the answer is, Yes. despite all the complains MS has received, they want to keep it the way it is.

For many of us I guess this is frustrating, having to re-validate all the CSS and HTML that is in your templates, but it is only a one off and you will not need to do it with Office 2010. Once we had got over the “inconvenience” of it we just had to knuckle down and get on with it. But MS do it again!

Scheduling Backups of SQL Express Databases

Andrew Kemp — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:27:26 GMT

We recently installed a new printing application called UniPrint. This application enables us to use the “Following Me” printing., you send a print job to your printer and if that one is in use or broken you go to the next nearest printer to you and enter in your PIN and your print job comes out at that printer.

The application has a SQL Express Database behind it, we could have pointed it to a DB on one of our SQL Servers but we wanted to keep the whole thing together so we installed SQL Express. Once the server had been installed and configured we added to the backup schedule for the weekly backup. Also like anything running on a Database I wanted to schedule daily backups of the Database, but SQL Express does not have the SQLAgent as part of it so you can not schedule jobs to run, but you can run jobs manually.

Although the server is not a critical server it would be nice to be able to back up the Database on it on a daily basis automatically.

What you can do is generate script and run that using a batch file and schedule that to run every day, however the problems I had were:

the filename was always the same so it would overwrite the exisiting backup file
for some reason I could not back it up to a UNC I had to do it to the local drive and default location.

So what I ended up doing was to run the script from a batch file and then immediately after run a VBScript that would copy the backup file to the network share and apply the day of the week to it for example: sqlbackup.bak would be copied to sqlbackupMonday.bak.

The reason for this is that come the Weekends tape backup we can backup all 5 backup files from the network share, then when mondays SQL backup runs it will overwrite the file that is already in the share. so we will always have 5 days worth of backups available.

I had never had to write a SQL Script before I was used to doing everything through the management console so I didn’t really have any idea of where to start.

After some digging around on the net I discovered that you can use the management studio to generate the SQL Script for you. All you need to do is set the backup job as you would do through the Management Console (right click on the Database, Tasks Back Up) and then click the Script button:

It will then generate the SQL script needed to backup the database:

BACKUP DATABASE [DsPcDb] TO  DISK = N'c:\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Backup\DsPcDb.bak' _
WITH NOFORMAT, INIT,  NAME = N'DsPcDb-Full Database Backup', SKIP, _
NOREWIND, NOUNLOAD,  STATS = 10
GO

Once I had created the script I copied and pasted into notepad and saved as C:\uniprint_backup.sql.

The next step was to create the vbscript to copy the file across and rename it on the target end:

Dim objFSO
Dim objshell

wkday = (weekdayname(weekday(date)))

        Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
        Set objShell = Wscript.CreateObject("Wscript.Shell")
        Set objFile = objFSO.Getfile("\\tmsrv-uf1\c$\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Backup\_
        DsPcDb.bak")
        objFile.Copy("\\tmsrv-sq7\backup\data\uf1\DsPcD"& wkday & ".bak")

I saved this as uniprint.vbs and then created a batch file that first of called the SQL script and then called up the VBScript:

sqlcmd -i c:\uniprint_backup.sql
C:\SQLBackup\uniprint.vbs

Once I had saved the batch file I then added it to a Windows Scheduled task to run once a day Monday to Friday.

And there you go, not the best way to automate it I am sure but it works for me.