Absoblogginlutely!

Zero Downtime Migration seminar in Cincinnati tomorrow

By Andy on Friday, October 23, 2009

I’m currently reading The Network Migration Workbook: Zero Downtime Migration Strategies for Windows Networks as can be seen on my Goodreads shelf. So far it’s been very useful and there have already been lots of tips that would save our company time (and therefore) money in doing migrations. Even if we didn’t go down this particular route for migrations, the tips applied would be very beneficial for other types of migrations, especially when it comes to planning and quoting for the migration itself. The only hard bit is to get the customer to agree to the restrictions in the plan – it is vital to quote for *only* the migration – everything else results in another helpdesk ticket, project or work order.

I’ve been reading the book for a couple of hours straight through – I’ve resisted the lure of jumping to the checklists – and still have some way to go, which is why I’ve not posted a review of the book yet – but so far I’m definitely recommending it – but note that some significant time needs to be invested for each person in the migration project from the sales person, to the project manager to the team lead down to the tech doing the work. In some companies this could be one person – in our company it’s probably three people.

Anyway, the point of this blog post was to mention that the author is going to be at An Introduction to Zero Downtime Migrations – and More in Cincinnati tomorrow (Saturday) for an all day training event which I am attending. It was worth the cheap admission to get an in person overview of the book and also some tips and previews of the other books he has written – I’m particularly intrigued by the Network Documentation book as this is something that is typically hard/time consuming to do yet so valuable when troubleshooting customer networks (and is NEVER provided by the client). If you’re going to this training day, be sure to say Hi.

If you want to browse Karl’s store then you can click on my affiliate link or click through directly to the books from the links above (not affiliate linked). Currently the cheapest place to buy the book is either used from Amazon or new from the Good Little Books store. It did amuse me to see that someone has the Zero Downtime book listed for $1165 and a used version for $564 which is crazy when the book brand new is currently $250 (will be $300)

Hosting

Retrieving Geocities data for local storage

By Andy on Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Remember Geocities? Many years ago I had a website with geocities and that is how I first learnt to code html. I remember the days of trying to get the grey background just right – the white background used to be the default colour but all the cool pages had grey backgrounds – just shows how much has changed.

Anyway, Yahoo is now finally shutting down geocities – there’s about a week left before they pull the plug, so if you haven’t downloaded your site yet then hurry up. Unfortunately they turned off ftp access to the server a long long time ago and the recommended (and painful) way is to visit each page and do a view source and save the file.

The much easier way is to download wget (if you don’t already have it) and then retrieve your files by running wget with a variety of switches.

The two syntax’s I’d recommend are

“wget –p –r http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/1880 –include-directories=/Hollywood/1880 –k “

or without the –k option.

The –p option retrieves all files required to display the page, –r gets the specified page and everything in it, but we’re limiting to all files within the 1880 directory only – this way you don’t start downloading all the files from other sites that you linked to (and the whole internet).

The –k option changes the source of the web page so that links refer to pages on the local drive as opposed to linking to pages on the web.

I would recommend you download the site twice into different subdirectories – one with the –k and the other without so you have a record of your original code and a working directory locally too.

And yes, the Hollywood1880 site is mine from about 1994-1997

Also don’t forget that dreamhost are still doing their two years of free hosting for former geocities customers so you can move your site to them for free but you have less than a week to get this done.

Bugs Microsoft Registry Windows XP Work

Nothing happens when clicking on the start menu – fixed.

By Andy on Thursday, October 15, 2009

A while back we had a client that was migrating out of their existing domain and into a new SBS2008 installation. One of the things I learnt (too late) was to disable folder redirection before doing a migration otherwise clients will still point to the old server. Unfortunately I did not have access to the old server/domain but I had got a copy of the redirected folders and thankfully there was no real data on the server to be migrated from the redirected folders.

However to fix the redirected folders I had to use csccmd to remove references to the old server which was easy enough using “csccmd /unpin2:\\oldserver\share /recurse”. I then changed the registry entries in HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Explorer \ User Shell Folders to point to the new location. This worked fine for every machine except one. This particular machine had a very strange symptom in that when clicking on the Start/All Programs button the machine would pause for about 20 seconds and then nothing would happen (to the end user). Behind the scenes the Start Menu, Startup and Programs entries in the registry would get deleted. I tried to use ProcessMon from sysinternals to monitor the registry setting but I either got too much registry information to work out what was going on or nothing at all (depending on the filters I had applied).

Anyway, yesterday I stumbled across Ramesh’s site which mentioned running “regsvr32 /i shell32.dll”. I tried this, clicked on the All programs and nothing happened – again. I rebooted and the problem persisted. I then ran it again and was about to reboot the machine again when the user logged into the machine so I had to stop work (I was doing all this remotely using rdp). I logged into the machine this morning and checked the registry. Somehow the registry items were no longer blank but were repointing back to the original server. I reset them back to the new locations and now the All programs button works as designed. I think the trick was to run regsvr32 and then reboot before clicking on the All programs button. (Either that or reboot twice and then check the registry settings and correct them)

Work

MSPWorld Las Vegas November 12,13

By Andy on Wednesday, October 14, 2009

I have been given the chance to go to MSPWorld Las Vegas from November 12-13th this year with work. Hosted by the MSPAlliance, this will assist in enabling us to

· Meet, greet and network with like-minded professionals
· Preview and test drive different technologies and platforms
· Learn how to build and/or expand your successful Managed Services practice
· Increase profit margins
· Learn how to market your services and reach the end-user
· Learn about hot new trends and markets and have access to ground breaking analysis and research

The boss’s went last year and came back with some great ideas and Level Platform’s software. This year I’m going to take a good look at the options and technologies available, looking especially from a management side of things and hopefully making sure that the product is actually any good. There is a lot of opportunity to network and get hands on demonstrations on products and hopefully ask those awkward questions like “Does this work with Lotus Notes” 😉

Currently the technical track is looking pretty empty with only 1 technical presentation but some of the other tracks look good but this does mean more time for seeing products on display.

If you are going to be there then let me know and make sure you stop by and introduce yourself – I’ll be one of the few people running Lotus Notes on the laptop and speaking with a British accent.

Itunes

Itunes sync of smart playlist podcasts update

By Andy on Wednesday, September 23, 2009

I now have my itunes syncing unheard podcasts into a smart playlist – my smart playlist is no longer empty on my ipod. Although I didn’t get a direct answer from a variety of places, Thanks go to GotKnowHow that gave me the final key to getting things to work.
I had to do the following:-

I ended up deleting all of my old podcasts (that has given me a lot of disk space back).
Created/modified my smart playlist called Unheard Podcasts to ensure I have the following set –
- Playcount is less than 1
- Kind is MPEG audio file (removes video)
- Genre is podcast
- Live updating is on
I selected my ipod in itunes, then the podcasts tab and unchecked “automatically include all unplayed episodes of all podcasts”.
Down the bottom of the screen under “include episodes from playlists” I made sure my “Unheard Podcasts” playlist was selected.

After a sync it all seemed to work.
I’m not sure what the final step was, but this combination seems to work.

ipod Itunes Rants & Complaints

iTunes 9 = empty smart playlists on portable devices

By Andy on Wednesday, September 23, 2009

I upgraded Itunes to version 9 last week, synchronised my ipod nano, took it to the office and found no music in my “unheard podcasts” playlist. This is a playlist that consists of podcasts with a play count <1 and that are of type audio so it doesn’t try to sync the unwatched video podcasts.

It turns out that this seems to be a bug and all “smart” playlists can be blank on portable devices. Thankfully it is easy to tell if you are affected – just create a smart playlist with content, sync it to your device and then look in itunes under the smart playlist for the device to see if it is empty.

There is an update to Itunes 9.01 – although this hasn’t fixed the issue – I see that they didn’t rename the playlists feature to “stupid playlists”. The other work around of turning of the liveupdate function in the playlist setting didn’t work for me either.

For those of you who are wondering why I even have this playlist, it’s so that I have all the unheard podcasts in one location so when driving it will automatically switch to the next podcast (or I can skip to the next one). If I use the podcast feature and get to the end of the podcasts from that particular author, I would have to switch to the next podcast manually – not something that is easy or legal to do whilst driving.

In another rant, why did they make the option to mark items as new/not new now watched/unwatched? I don’t know that many people who watch mp3’s and I think most people have far more mp3’s than they do video files.

Oh – and stop offering me the iphone configuration utility, safari4 and MobileMe. If I’ve unchecked it once that probably means I don’t want it – grrr.

Microsoft Work

Network Migration Workbook arrived.

By Andy on Friday, September 11, 2009

The Zero downtime migration strategies for Microsoft Networks book by Karl and Manuel Palachuk has arrived in the post this morning. An expensive book but I’m hoping this will reduce the number of weekends I have to work. Even if the book saves me 5-6 hours once, it will be well worth it.
590 pages to read, full of checklists and stuff – I’m looking forward to going through this. Unfortunately it came 5 days late for last weekends migration.
I’ll be writing a review later when I get a chance to start reading on it.

Security Software Reviews

Adobe Reader download still at 9.1

By Andy on Wednesday, September 2, 2009

I can’t believe that after all this time the Adobe Reader offered from adobe.com is still version 9.1 requiring another 27.6mb “upgrade” after the initial installation.

Seriously – how hard is it to provide an installer with the latest version of your software when old versions are extremely vulnerable to attack?

In case you are wondering, this is not my machine – so I don’t really have much choice on what pdf reader is installed. At home I am using Sumatra pdfreader as it is one small 1.4mb portable exe file rather than adobe’s 27mb download. It’s a tag ugly due to the bright yellow page displayed when no pdf is opened but once a pdf is opened it looks great.

Shopping windows7

Extra screen goodness.

By Andy on Tuesday, August 25, 2009

I got a nice Acer 22” widescreen monitor at lunchtime today. Unfortunately I had to take back the 23” gateway monitor that just would not work. However the display on the Acer is stable and works great. I thought I would try my graphics card back in the computer too (I couldn’t get it to work with WindowsXP properly), so this evening I plugged it in, hooked up the new and my old monitor and now have a 1680*1050 and a 1280*1024 desktop. This is REALLY nice. Even with just the larger monitor I could browse the web and have notepad (or Live Writer) open next to a decent sized firefox window but now I am really spoilt. The only thing I have to work out is which screen should go where on the desk.

By using the dedicated card my System performance index has also gone from a whopping 1 (thanks to the lack of built in 3d graphics on the onboard vga controller) to an outstanding 2!

I went from 3.9,4.7,1.9,1,5.4 to 3.9,4.7,2.0,3.0,5.4

I can (if I really want) run the aero interface now. So far I’m not that impressed – the 3d flipping is painfully slow, but at least the aero peak functionality (the little icon to the far right of the taskbar now works). I do wish I could move this next to the start button though. Having said that, Windows-D still works to give me the same affect.

Bugs Extensions Firefox Skype

Firefox slow, especially gmail? – remove skype extension.

By Andy on Saturday, August 22, 2009

Ever since I updated the home computer to run the RTM version of Windows7 my gmail and greader experience has been very frustrating in Firefox. GReader just had no idea what data to display in the right hand side of the screen and gmail would just stick in the “please wait”, “loading” or “still working” status after sending an email (but would actually send the email).

Rebooting firefox into safe mode, or running ie8 worked fine so I knew it was not the computer but had to be an extension. Fortunately this was 100% reproducible so I was able to do some diagnostic tests.

I disabled all the likely culprits – flashblock, adblock,greasemonkey, better gmail, web developer, noscript but I still had the same problem. It wasn’t until I disabled the skype extension that the performance of google reader was back to normal and I could now send mail again. Seeing as though I only really use Skype to call my parents I don’t need the extension so it is now disabled. For some reason the uninstall button is disabled.

I did find a thread on the Google Help forums with the same solution which was nice to know that I wasn’t the only one with the problem and I came up with the same solution.