There was a request to have a new tool custom report tool created for our Bugzilla installation so I had to re-deploy a copy of Bugzilla onto our development environment. Installation was a bit tricky with a specific Perl module (YAML) being the main issue. The install script keeps saying that this is missing:

Checking for YAML (any) not found

Checking the system, YAML is indeed installed and available. What is actually broken is the CPAN.pm file in the Bugzilla package – it doesn’t require the module.

To fix this, add the YAML module into the CPAN.pm file found in the bugzilla/lib directory. Search for:

use Text::Wrap ();

And replace with:

use Text::Wrap ();
use YAML;

Running the install script now works with no errors.

This turned out to be simpler than I had first imagined. Reading the Microsoft documentation looked like we had to make changes to the DHCP, however this was not the case.

To make it clearer, our current environment looks like this:

1. DHCP is a Linux CentOS Server
2. WDS and DHCP servers are on the same subnet
3. Client machines are on various subnets
4. Cisco core switch and router stack

For our setup, we only needed to make sure the Cisco ip helper-address was set to point to the IP address of BOTH the DHCP and WDS. Once this was done, everything went as intended.

We’re deploying a new WDS (Windows Deployment Service) server at work and at first everything looked alright until I ran into my first snag – I wasn’t able to start the role / server after I installed it.

Looking everywhere on the manuals and guides provided by Microsoft didn’t help either. All they say is to add the role to the server and then configure the server with deployment images etc.

Upon closer inspection, it seems like you need to initialize the server before it will even start. In order to do this, you need to run a command via an elevated command prompt window:

wdsutil.exe /initialize-server /reminst:<path to WDS data files>

I created my own folder for the WDS data files and then plugged that into the command. WDS started up with no further issues.

Next posting… how to get WDS to work with multiple subnets. I’ll post that when I get it sorted out!

Another quick post regarding a nagging issue I’ve had for awhile now. Every time I wanted to connect to my local optical drive it would complain with the following error immediately:

Remote device disconnect
The remote device on <host> connected to <path> is disconnected.

Digging around I found that the cause of this is because of Windows 7 permissions again. Running the application as Administrator or checking off the “Run this program as an administrator” under the Compatibility tab of the vSphere Client shortcut solved the issue!

Hope this helps you all as well.

We use replication for our MySQL server and perform a snapshot rsync to re-initialize the slave servers. One difference today was that I had to create a whole new server from scratch and perform the same re-initialization. Everything worked fine until I tried to start the server:

Fatal error: Can’t open and lock privilege tables: Table ‘mysql.host’ doesn’t exist

The server was new and had not been initialized yet. I had copied all the data files including the my.cnf files and had expected the MySQLd to work! Well, doesn’t always happen that way eh?

Anyways, all that I had to do was to tell MySQLd where the data is located:

mysql_install_db –user=mysql –ldata=/datadir in my.cnf

MySQL came up and is replicating again!

So, I was deploying a new server and added the default CHECK_HTTP Nagios plug-in as follows:

define service{
use <Preset Service Type>
host_name <Server Name>
service_description HTTP
check_command check_http
}

However, the check would come back as an 403 Forbidden error. I know we have some restrictions set on our http.conf to allow only internal IP addresses to the Apache server, but the Nagios server is in the internal network. Poked around the settings and configurations for awhile and could not see any issues as I was able to browse the default Apache page.

Looked a bit more and found that the CHECK_HTTP is actually looking for an index page in the root html location. So I ended up creating a dummy page for Nagios and the checks came back fine! I’m sure you could make something nicer but this is all I did in the /var/www/html directory:

echo "This is a dummy page for <Server Name>." >> index.html

Works like a charm!

Short post… just for reference:

gunzip < [backupfile.sql.gz] | mysql -u [uname] -p[pass] [dbname]

So, tax season is around the corner and I just got my RRSP returns and I was able to get some money to get myself some new toys. I wanted to get a smaller keyboard that had an ergonomic layout along with a number pad that would sit on my left hand side (to allow space for the mouse). So, I decided to get a Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard 6000! The keyboard set looked great, the size was a bit small but all-in-all looked decent and was for once decently packaged!

Then came the hard part, actually trying to get it to work. There was an issue with pairing the devices. I was able to pair them separately and they responded well. However, every time I try to use both devices at the same time, the previous device would stop responding. For example, I was using the keyboard and I turn on the number pad, the keyboard would no longer work. The keyboard would only work after I turned the number pad off! The same was try for the keyboard if I had the number pad on first!

Took me over a few hours and could not find anything. A lot of people had posted online that the way to resolve this was to pair the devices separately. Meaning to pair one, turn it off and then pair the second one. I thought, well, sort of makes sense, why not? I gave it a shot, but knowing how computers work, it is never that easy. The problem continued to stay!

I thought back and forth and couldn’t find a way until I thought, maybe this cheap Bluetooth dongle I bought at the local computer store was the issue. I went and took another dongle I had in the house and plugged it in. Right away, Windows picked it up as a Broadcom Bluetooth device and I thought to myself, well at least it doesn’t say generic Bluetooth device now! Next, I re-paired the devices and guess what? It worked right away!

So in the end, it was the dongle that was causing the issue. Long story short, if you are unable to use more than one device at the same time, take a look at the dongle that you have and try to get it replaced as a solution!

Have fun!

As old as it may be, we still use a sendmail API from way back to NT4! Having said that, there was a slight blip when we migrated to a new Server 2008 R2 server, the dll file was missing! I had to copy the file from the old server and move it to the new server.

1. Copy CDONTS.dll from another server to C:\Windows\SysWOW64 and C:\Windows\System32
2. Run regsvr32 c:\windows\SysWOW64\cdonts.dll
3. Run regsvr32 c:\windows\System32\cdonts.dll
4. Grant the appropriate permissions on C:\inetpub\mailroot\pickup (I granted USERS group Modify permissions). You could get permission denied if the folder security isn’t adjusted.

You don’t need to restart the server at all, just hit your site and again it will work!

Here’s a fun tip! I just found out today by chance that Google’s Chrome browser will do automatic site searching! If the site you are viewing has a search functionality, all you have to do is type the domain.com follow it by a space and the item you want to search! It will automatically direct you to the search function with your search in the query string! Neat!

For example:

shopbot.ca core i5

pointed me directly to:

http://www.shopbot.ca/m/?m=core+i5

Neat little trick… once again, hope this helps and have fun!