Extempore » windows

Keeping windows services’ running, ghetto style

Michael Hendrickx — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:05:06 +0000

A small post, but so I can have it as a reference if I ever encouter it again. We’ve setup a Windows 2003 Domain, and run DNS on both the Domain Controllers. We have terrible issues with DNS always shutting down, and disabling itself, so it won’t boot up again.

While we are breaking our heads on how this happens, we made a small two-liner script to enable a Windows service over the command line. We’ve put this in the recovery tab, and scheduled it as a task to run every hour.

The code to enable the DNS service, and to restart the service is below:

sc config DNS start= auto net start dns

I know it’s very ghetto way of keeping DNS running, but we’re figuring out why DNS always shuts down. Until then, this provides us necesarry DNS uptime

Thanks,
Michael

MS08-67 released out of the patch cycle, new blaster coming up?

Michael Hendrickx — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 03:23:37 +0000

A newly discovery vulnerability made Microsoft release a security patch aside from it’s usual cycle, the notorious Patch Tuesday. This “Patch Tuesday” is normally every second Tuesday of the month.

MS08-067 fixes a bug in the RPC handling of the Windows Server service.

The bug was deemed as “critical” on pre-Vista machines, which is still the majority of Windows clients.

Google map secret backend API broken?

Michael Hendrickx — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:20:25 +0000

Hi all,

Some of you might have been aware already about (and alpha testing) the Windows Mobile client for places.ae, which will allow you to find out the closest restaurants, petrol stations and such (pretty much the same functionality as the blackberry mini site). These searches happen using triangulation of celltower ID’s on a mobile phone.

Now, in the backend, we were utilizing google’s API for mapping these cell towers to a location, which in return gives us the ability to locate you. This services was moved to another URL silently, which kinda slows down the Windows Mobile development. I guess too many users were using it, using non-google programs.

If anyone is working on more-or-less the same, please get in contact with me. For the others, the windows client will be delayed for a little while then.

Thanks,
Michael

Microsoft to enter the clouds

Michael Hendrickx — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:03:21 +0000

Microsoft is entering the cloud computing zone pretty soon. It was announced yesterday and will hit the public a month from now with it’s new OS, Windows Clouds (yeh.).

It’s feeling the ppressure from easy to use, browser only, applications such as Gmail, google docs and the like.

I wish Microsoft (or anyone) would come out with an enterprise cloud platform, not on the Internet. I am sure there are more users who wish to make a storage cloud on their network. Or am I the only one?

Thanks,
Michael