IT

Purple Screen - part 2

Kent J. Chen — Fri, 16 May 2008 23:16:53 GMT

Support from VMware is pretty good. I submitted the support ticket after having encountered two "purple screens", and got reply almost immediately the same day with the request asking me to run a built-in tool called VMware-support on ESX server to collect all log information first.

Since ESX is based on Red Hat Linux, I had to run the diagnose tool right on the server and used WinSCP to download the result file to my laptop and uploaded it to their FTP server. While I was waiting for the news from VMware, I noticed that there were some warning messages popping up during the boot process telling me something about the BIOS, "machine type mismatched" more accurate. I thought it might be the reason causing the "purple screen", so I just went ahead and updated the BIOS for the server, and the server was running fine the rest of day without any further "purple screen". Next day, I got the answer from VMware that proved my thought as the log file I collected specifically pointed that there were hardware incompatible issue on the server.

It turns out, the purple screen shouldn't happen at all if the hardware are all compatible with ESX. Since the ESX server is heavily relied on the hardware layer, it would be good and healthy 1) make sure all hardware are compatible; 2) firmware for the hardware needs to be up-to-date.

Another lesson has to be learned and remembered.

Purple screen

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 08 May 2008 21:37:24 GMT

Blue screen is the trademark for Microsoft Windows, so the purple screen is for VMware ESX? Can't believe it failed on me like this.

Synchronize and keep the time accurate in Active Directory

Kent J. Chen — Tue, 06 May 2008 06:11:54 GMT

By default, in an AD-based network, the domain controller gets its time from the BIOS clock and all computers in the domain including servers synchronize their time with the domain controller. The BIOS clock can be wrong for many reasons so it's a good idea to set up the domain controller, primary one specifically, to synchronize with the external time server. To do so,

First, pick up one or two rock solid SNTP time server. Here is a list that you can look at.

Second, log in to the primary domain controller and synchronize the time server for the domain controller with an external source. In short,

w32time /monitor - to check what has been set up?

w32time /config /manualpeerlist: /syncfromflags:MANUAL - to configure.

w32time /update - to update the time services on the server.

w32time /resync - to re-synchronize with the external time server that was set up earlier.

All other computers in the domain then will get their time synchronized in a timely manner or after the reboot. Or, you can also set up the group policy in AD to force all computers to do so.

Remote Desktop Keyboard Shortcuts

Kent J. Chen — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:23:32 GMT

This is so damn useful. I can't believe that I wasn't even aware of these shortcuts even existed after I have used remote desktop so much for so many years. Thanks Mark for pointing this out, and sure will save me many days down the road.

What's the dirtiest jobs in IT?

Kent J. Chen — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 07:06:03 GMT

Take look these 7 dirtiest jobs in IT on InfoWorld, and how many of them am I doing now? Sadly, quite a few.

Dirty job No.7, Legacy systems archaeologist, is always part of my life and so far there is no sign I can get away of it. My assistant is doing the dirty job No. 6, Help desk zombie. Thanks to remote desktop, I am not fully classified as an On-site reboot specialist, the dirty job no. 5, but I am an off-site one most of the time. I am not so much an Interdepartmental peace negotiator, the dirty job no. 4, but am occasionally. And fortunately, that's all. So far, I don't need to worry about these other 3 dirty works, Enterprise espionage engineer, Datacenter migration specialist, and Sludge systems architect.

Oh, by the way, if you are a datacenter migration specialist, the dirty job no.2, you better look at and get one of these datacenter containers which sure will clean up your dirty job.

Backup your emails, properly

Kent J. Chen — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 07:06:40 GMT

Well, considering the specialty of emails and its difficulty of finding and restoring, the word "backup" shouldn't really be considered and used. How many times you have successfully found and retrieved emails from your backup copies? And how much work needs to be involved to keep a good and useful backup copies for your emails? Preferably and ideally, every single email should be backed up at the time when it arrives in your inbox, not sometime after because then it's harder for you to certain whether or not they are all up-to-date. And that's why the idea of archiving was introduced and widely used these days, both for your personal emails and working emails. Time saved for finding old emails and thinking/doing email backup is just huge. Deleting emails without worrying about losing them permanently is just sweet.

For personal user, simply sign up another free email account on Gmail, or Yahoo, or whichever has the huge storage capacity, and set up the forwarding in the current email account to forward all incoming emails to the new signed email account. Make sure to still keep the copy in the current email inbox though. Most of public email service providers all provide this such feature, except hotmail. Hotmail, the first widely-adopted web email service, seems quite out-dated these days, even after a major upgrade to live mail. It lacks so much useful features comparing to its major competitors like GMail and Yahoo Mail. Basically, if you are still a user of hotmail, you are limited to yourself only use Outlook family to back up your emails because hotmail doesn't offer the forwarding feature to its users. Or it's time for hotmail users to switch over.

For corporate users, if you are an IT pro who manages your own corp email server it's time to implement an email archiving solution. With an easy-to-use reliable email archiving system in place, you can have a more efficient light-weighted running email server, implement email retention policy office-wide fairly easily, and educate end users how to organize emails more efficiently without worrying about losing any emails, etc. Besides, it's not an expensive solution anymore.

Why can't get my wireless identified in Vista?

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:52:55 GMT

How often does your wireless connection get dropped, if you are using Vista? If you are same as me, facing this kind of annoying problem every day, blame on Vista. It's one of those Vista-incompatible devices on your network causing this problem, the wireless router in particular.

Vista validates your network connection every time when the computer tries to connect to the network. If your router is not Vista-compatible and you are trying to connect via wireless, it most likely will not get identified the first place and won't be assigned a valid IP address as the result. In order to get work, you will need to go through the diagnose process to manually request for the IP address. Or, if you are tired of doing so, you can either look at your wireless router vendor's website to see if you are lucky to find the latest firmware that works for Vista, or end up buying a brand new one. Check to make sure it's Vista-compatible before pulling out your wallet.

IE 8 beta is out for test now

Kent J. Chen — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:57:18 GMT

I am not a fan of IE so I would pass and just wait until the final version comes if there are no new big hits like the new pro-standards role in IE 8. It was released recently with some pretty exciting improvements and features. And I am testing it now, same as many of others, to wish this new promised to be standard-compliant version of browser would be as good as it was promised. It is sure that the biggest achievement of this version of IE is the new pro-standards role but it also has some neat features like activities and webslices that sound should bring us the some new experience when surfing the web.

So far, after doing some quick test, it seems faster than IE 7 but some of my websites don't display normally as they do in Firefox but I haven't dug that far to discover what caused it.

Top 5 Reasons to Upgrade to Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services

Kent J. Chen — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 04:56:37 GMT

Windows Server 2008 has a lot of new features but terminal services is one of the areas I am interested the most in this new coming OS. While keeping wondering why Citrix is still alive I am also very curious what Microsoft brings us can really make us to just stay and get rid of Citrix when coming down to use Terminal Services. Tony Soper's top 5 reasons why using or upgrading to Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services answered some questions.

1. Terminal Services RemoteApp applications appear no different than local applications, tightly integrated with the task bar and new Windows Vista features like 3-D flip. Terminal Services RemoteApp helps improve the end user experience and reduce training requirements.

2. Terminal Services Gateway provides a highly secure connection between internal applications and data to users outside the firewall. It delivers critical applications and data to mobile employees without additional VPN infrastructure.

3. Terminal Services Web Access helps simplify application deployment by making applications available from a web page or a SharePoint portal without installing them on the local PC. Speed application deployment by quickly connecting users with the applications they need.

4. Terminal Services Session Broker delivers session-based load-balancing to a Terminal Services Farm. Terminal Services Session Broker helps bring better uptime and performance to your Terminal Services environment.

5. Terminal Services Easy Print leverages the client-side print driver (no server side driver needed) to enable fast and reliable printing to a local or network-attached printer. End users can more productively work from remote locations.

Very good improvements for sure! Except the No. 1 which is still a significant improvement when mostly using it internally, the others are definitely dead important, in terms of both security and usability.

What's your backup plan?

Kent J. Chen — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:52:14 GMT

"There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who have experienced catastrophic hard drive failure, and those who *will* experience catastrophic hard drive failure."

Someone quoted this in Jeff Atwood's What's your backup strategy, which is so true. Sooner or later, you will be facing the disaster caused by fragile hard drive. Knocking on the wood if you are trying to say you haven't. So if you don't have any backup plan yet, it's time to think about it very seriously. Even though you already have one in place, it's time to review to see if it's still effective. Or unless you are "lucky" like Raelyn Campbell who filed $54m lawsuit against Best Buy for losing laptop, you would be screwed if one day you so rely-on hard drive fails on you.

So what choices out there are available for us as personal use? Well, basically it's all based on what you need and how much data you want to be backed up. Some cost might be necessary needed in some cases.

First of all, buy an external hard drive, pick as much space as you can afford or pick the one like WD Passport that doesn't require power supply if you want to carry it around.

Then, configure your sync tool and either manually run it once a week or so or schedule it to be run regularly if possible. There are many sync choices out there but I am using and quite happy with Microsoft's SyncToy which is free, easy to use. It never failed on me. The con, though, is that it doesn't come with the schedule feature so I have to run it manually.

However, if you prefer to use tool that is more like backup, you might end up having to buy a commercial copy as Windows built-in backup tool usually doesn't work too good. The one in XP is ok but Vista is much worse. And I wasn't so lucky to find any good free ones either. Jeff's choice on Acronis True Image looks pretty good, which backs up the system to a bootable mirror image of the hard drive, that can be booted up later on when the primary one fails.

Going one step further, if you want to have a backup stored offsite, rather than at home, MozeHome is definitely the number one choice. It's free for under 2G data which should cover most of the cases, and it lightly runs on your computer and backs up your data without your attention once it's configured.

If you have more than 2G data, the chances are you might have a lot of photos included that you also want to back up. If that's the case, then you have to consider Flickr or SmugMug as your plan. Both are really popular photo gallery sites that offers so much rich features for photos but be prepared to pay to get the full services that you can store the full original size of your photos over there.

Right, we have yet covered Video. YouTube or sites that office the similar service seems to be the only choices at the moment. Getting your Videos backed up offsite will be a really time consuming job though.

Overall, MozeHome rules all, it's the best and easiest choice to the backup problem that everyone faces. Oh, how about emails? I will be covering it in my next post...haha...it's too late now.