Extempore

Ages ago, I installed Reason and have been playing a bit with it. Few days ago was actually the first time I created something relatively complete. It contains a sample of Public Enemy’s “By The Time I Get To Arizona”.

You can download it here

Feel free to leave any comments for it.

When having Microsoft SQL databases, its log files can grow quite a bit, potentially slow down the database server and eat up disk space.

To shrink a database, one can run the following line:

EXEC D_ShrinkDBLogs 0,100,1000,'with truncate_only','DB_NAME'
(change DB_NAME with the database’s name)

To shrink all databases, one can use “sp_MSforeachdb” which is an undocumented sql stored procedure:

EXEC sp_MSForEachDB 'D_ShrinkDBLogs 0,100,1000,''with truncate_only'',''?'''

To run this, the following stored procedure need to be installed. It can just be copy pasted from the code below (or download from this link):
Continue reading…

When installing Debian on a HP BL465 server, we sometimes run into the problems that after installing, GRUB won’t boot up anymore.

First off, it’s not a Debian specific problem, we had this problem with other Linux distributions also, but decided to standardize on Debian across the organization.

Installing to the MBR fails, and you have to install grub on /dev/cciss/c0d0, although upon rebooting after the installation, Grub throws out an error that it cannot boot off (hd1,0).

When you encounter this, you need to edit the configuration (by pressing e in the initial grub screen), and change the (hd1,0) to (hd0,0).

This did the trick for us,

Thanks,
Michael

At Nakheel, we needed to load balance a new sharepoint instance. Our new sharepoint is single sign on, and was running on 2 web servers which needed to be load balanced. We played around with Apache for a while, and it’s awesome proxy balancer, but it gave us the problem that it was always asking for a username and password.

Apache was used, since I have a reasonable amount of experience with it load balancing servers such as Webrick, etc. After a few frustrating hours of messing with NTLM, Christian proposed a few alternatives for this.

Having this in mind, we decided to go for HAProxy, to provide load balancing and a reverse proxy for our sharepoint instance. The good this is that it is a very simple tool, it accept HTTP conenctions, and forward them.

Below is our simplified /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg file

global
        maxconn 4096
        user haproxy
        group haproxy
        daemon
        # debug

defaults
        mode    http
        option  forwardfor
        log     127.0.0.1 local0 notice
        maxconn 2000
        contimeout      5000
        clitimeout      50000
        srvtimeout      50000

backend sharepoint
        balance roundrobin
        option redispatch
        cookie SERVERID insert nocache
        server sp1      172.30.16.11:80  cookie spsrv01 weight 30 check
        server sp2      172.30.16.12:80  cookie spsrv02 weight 30 check

frontend httpid
        bind *:80
        acl hosts_sharepoint hdr_end(host) -i intranet.domain.com
        acl hosts_sharepoint hdr_end(host) -i intranet.domain.com:80
        use_backend sharepoint if hosts_sharepoint
        default_backend sharepoint

The configuration is very straightforward, and it got rid of our continuous username/password boxes, especially under firefox.

Hope this helps,
Michael

Eh? I mean, seriously.

At work, we started using Nagios to monitor the hosts and their services for any issues, so we can, proactively, take actions when we see trouble coming (hard disk that fills up rapidly, restarting services, etc).

Recently we change the Nagios host to another IP address and found ourselves having to change a few dozen NSClient.ini files on the server. Even though we use DNS names as monitoring host (only nsclient access on port 12489/tcp is allowed from a certain host), NSClient by default caches the IP address (Using cache_allowed_hosts, which is set to “1″ by default) so we were bound to change quite some files.

To do this, we have to do the following: Continue reading…

At work, we have a lot of HP Blade servers, and manage these through HP Onboard Administrator. By default, the server names are adapted from the Windows hostname, due to HP Insight Management agent tools. When running Linux, there doesn’t seem to be a option, or at least I couldn’t find one.

While questioned a few times on HP forums (such as this thread), questions rose to “installing windows on the server, then reinstall Linux”, it is possible in the web interface to be set. It’s not obviously placed, and hence might require some searching. Continue reading…

I received from several BlackBerry IM contacts the following message:

Hello, greetings from RIM (Research In Motion) proprietors of BlackBerry. This message is to inform all of our users, that our servers have recently been really full, so we are asking for your help to fix this problem. We need our active users to re-send this message to everyone on your contact list inorder to confirm our active users that use BlackBerry Messenger, if you do not send this message to all your BlackBerry Messenger contacts then your account will remain inactive with the consequence of losing all your contacts.

We apologize for the inconvenience but this is the only way possible to resolve this problem. Sincerely Research in Motion. For more information visit:
www.blackberry.com/inactiveuser

Of course it doesn’t take much to realize that this is a chain-mail type of IM. The web page itself doesn’t exist. Wonder how many people forwarded it..

All hail, newspapers and radio’s stated that VoIP calls are now allowed in the UAE, but.. -and there’s a catch always- only “through licensed operators”.

In layman terms, VoIP calls will be billed and the prices will be set by those operators. So we’d have to wait and see if there will be big savings on VoIP calles, if any at all. The licensed operators would be:

• Du
• Etisalat
• Thuraya
• Yahsat

Of course, skype and vonage and the likes remains blocked, as they don’t generate revenue for the local market. Normal for a country with a large number of expatriates, whereby the telco’s main revenue is from overseas calls.

Thank you,
Michael

Hi all,

In our intranet development environment we run Microsoft Virtual Server, it was setup by the consultants who developed our Intranet’s first phase. Now, the second phase is about the start, we dusted off those servers and found out that the virtual machines all had no network adapters installed anymore.

After cursing, and making a plan of migrating this to VMWare’s ESX (sorry consultant) next week, we found out that the only way of solving this was to remove the virtual adapters from the Virtual Server console, and adding them again. In the client machine’s, a static IP assigned adapter was trying to fetch an IP address (yeah, go figure). By just setting it to dynamic (dhcp), and then reassigning the static address, it was solved.

I guess Microsoft is about just re-trying it, rebooting, re-adding. But we’ll be switching to ESX anyways.

Thank you,
Michael