iPaq oddities

I have had an iPaq for a while now. Great little tool for jotting down notes and keeping a bunch of emails, appointments etc. For the most part it works flawlessly but last week I had a problem when the iPaq was insistent that I enter an answer to my security question.
The security question is only supposed to come up after three unsuccessful pin attempts and the iPaq had been sitting in my rucksack all day.

I entered the answer to the question and the device decided to wipe itself which lost all of my appointments, email and so on. This is not too much of a big deal as a quick resync back at home solved that particular issue and any stuff I work on is stored on an SD Card and backed up weekly.


Once the data was synced and everything back to normal I assumed this would be the end of my problems but no, the iPaq decided that it didn't want to recharge and that it didn't have any Bluetooth hardware installed. A reset of the iPaq by pressing the reset button at the bottom failed to resolve the issue and running the self diagnosis software on the iPaq said everything was ok.

Some messing around with drivers proved to be fruitless as the iPaq was insistent that it didn't have any Bluetooth hardware.

Eventually I gave up and did a hard reset which involves some gymnastics as you have to press the calendar and iTask buttons (located on the far left and far right hand side) whilst jabbing the reset button with the stylus. This puts the iPaq into 'brand new' mode so you have to go through the really annoying tutorial. Once this was done and the data restored the iPaq worked just like normal again. I am still at a loss as to what caused the initial problem.

Farnborough Airshow

I had a nice (if somewhat hot) day at the Farnborough airshow on Sunday. The atmosphere was good, the flying excellent and even the transport was not too bad!

Here are a few shots:












A Red Arrow arriving at Farnborough











F16 Landing after an impressive display











V22 Osprey. One of the stars of the day.










The A380 - Quite a beast!!

The photos will be uploaded to my photos site in a few days. I will add the URL to this blog article then.

**EDIT: A selection of photos has been uploaded here**
http://www.gdwnet.co.uk/photos/farnborough/airshow.html

ISP's who shun email

I've been using Broadband for over five years now. I signed up to Freeserve when they first started offering 512K and been with them as speeds got faster and they changed thier name first to Wanadoo and now to Orange.

In March I had an offer from Wanadoo to upgrade my line to 8mb which Orange honoured just a few days ago. The thing that really amused me was the email I recieved just today:

"The not so good news is that for about half an hour on 18/07/2006 between 8am and 6pm, you won't be able to go online. Sit tight though, we'll email you as soon as it's done and let you know your new speed."

and this arrives on the 19th July. Almost 24 hours after the work has been completed. How 'useful'.

"Please don't reply to this email. Call us on
the number above instead or write to us at
Customer Support, PO Box 486, Rotherham,
S63 5ZX"

Wait a minute. You are an ISP. Why don't you have an email address?!

Welcome Home Orbiter Discovery

I've been an avid fan of the space programme for some years now and over the past two weeks I have been following the STS-121 mission to the International Space Station.

Discovery landed safely around 14:15 UK time. Well done to Discovery and her crew for a fantastic mission and well done to NASA for allow such open access into all aspects of the mission. Following it has been quite thrilling.

NetBackup and _vxfiVspCacheFile

I've used various backup tools and one of the STRANGEST is Veritas/Symantec Netbackup. This software is strange for a variety of reasons that I may go into one day but for now I'll concentrate on one issue and that's the way it backs up files that are in use.

NetBackup has an add on called 'OTM' this stands for Open Transaction Manager and it backs up open files by copying them byte for byte into a special file called _vxfiVspCacheFile. Sometimes NetBackup does not do the decent thing and delete this file when it's done and on several occasions I have seen this file grow to some horrendous sizes. Recently I saw this file hit 91GB in size and eat nearly a third of the disk space of a server.

The simple fact that BACKUP SOFTWARE has the potential to seriously ruin your day by eating up so much disk space would seem to indicate that NetBackup has some issues to overcome. There are various ways of limiting the size of this file but I would have expected some internal logic to work out the best place to put such a file and to ensure that it cleans up after itself.

The worst situation is where the _vxfiVspCacheFile is locked in use by system and so cannot be deleted, because it's locked by system there is no service or application that can be killed to remove the handle on the file fortunately sys internals provide a solution for this problem.
On their website is a wonderful tool called process explorer. This tool will run just by double-clicking the .exe file and will show every file, directory, token and other resource in use by the system.

To kill _vxfiVspCacheFile its just a matter of running process explorer, clicking on SYSTEM then finding the file handle, right-clicking and selecting CLOSE FILE HANDLE. This allows the file to be deleted and thus gain back all that disk space until NetBackup goes and does it again......!

Final set of ISO woes!

Ok, I promise that after this final entry on CD/ISO imaging woes I won't mention it for sometime!

On my last blog entry I wrote about a little applet called DeepBurner and I mentioned how its useful because its' lightweight.

Well, It turns out that lightweight or not it actually has a few issues when creating bootable CDs and bootable ISO's as those ISO's sometimes have 'boot I/O failure' error messages.

More goggling shows several apps that by themselves will do PART of what I hat but not the whole thing. ISORecoder is a good example. This tool extends the CD burning wizard built into XP so that you can create ISO files but you cannot create BOOTABLE ISO files.

I own a copy of MagicISO and this certainly can do the job but its not lightweight enough to do the job. I did consider rolling it up into an MSI so I could do clean install/de-installs as needed.

More goggling (is goggling a word?!) revealed a tool used by Microsoft called CDIMAGE. Apparently this tool is 'for internal use only' but has leaked out onto the net.
I managed to track down a GUI version of the tool and have a play with it.
It's lightweight, Allows creation of bootable and ANSI format CD's, comes in both GUI and DOS formats and it works consistently.

Yes, I think I my ISO/CD creation woes are over for now.........!

Boot CD woes and DeepBurner

As you may have read in my Nero blog entry I have had some fun and games making bootable CD's for windows autobuilds.

The problem is down to the character set. Several files that need to be copied have names like cyclad-f.inf and these get changed to cyclad_f.inf and so the installation process gets upset that it can't find the files that it needs.

The Nero blog article talked about making some changes to the way Nero burns boot CD's and for the most part this has worked for me until I started messing around with Windows 2003 and the BETA of SP2. For some reason Nero will not give me a working bootable CD where as Magic ISO will. The only problem with Magic ISO is that it requires a license and is not installed on every machine I use whereas Nero is licensed and installed. A quick hunt round the web found an application called DeepBurner.

The beauty of deep burner is not only will it create a bootable ISO file without mangling the file names but that there is a PORTABLE version that can be put on a USB Pen drive or similar and does not need installing on the target machine.

This flexibility can come in very useful when trying to throw together a quick CD for installation or similar.

7/7

Today is one year on from the July 7th terrorist attack in London.

I was in a meeting in London when the terrorists hit and I remember the incident very clearly. At first a lot of people thought it was a power problem on the tube network but it very quickly became obvious that something serious and utterly unexpected had occurred.

What amazed me about the whole incident was how the people I worked with just took the incident in their stride. The police and emergency services responded amazing quickly yet also retained their composure and were helpful in directing people to stations that were open in order to get home. I will also remember that my local overhead rail line ran a service that evening. Despite the thought that there could be additional bombs they STILL ran a service in order to help people to get home.

The legacy of that days lives on in the various trusts and charities that have been setup by the relatives of the people that were killed that day.

We should always remember that there were many victims that day. The families of those that were killed, the people that saw and had to deal with the aftermath, those that were just going about their daily business and had their lives forever changed and of course, those that have been caught up in the aftermath and been unfairly searched, detained or even accused of terrorism related activities and been innocent.

I firmly believe that this countries government needs to do more to stop the seemingly endless amounts of hatred from people who LIVE here. I don't know any country that would put up with such a venomous outpouring and TOLERATE it and then allow these self same people to CLAIM benefits from the state!!
We seem to have lost our way on this all in the name of free speech and human rights and this has too stop. Religious freedoms have nothing to do with outright hatred for the country you live in.

Let's not see a repeat of that terrible day one year ago today.

Active Directory DNS zones

Almost everyone who has played with Active Directory knows that DNS is important. In fact, DNS is so important to Active Directory that it simply is a must for Active Directory to work.

By default Active Directory creates a Active Directory integrated DNS zone. This is quite a clever method for replicating within an Active Directory domain as any changes to DNS are replicated to other DNS servers using Active Directory replication technology.
It also means that there is no such thing as a primary or secondary DNS server. A change can be made on any DNS server and that change will be replicated to the other DNS servers for that domain.

All well and good so far.

But take the following scenario that I wanted to setup:

A test network with Active Directory DNS intergrated zones.
A live network with Active Directory intergrated zones.

From the live network there needs to be resolution of servers in the test network and the test network servers need to re able to resolve things on the internet.

On the test network its quite possible to set the DNS forwarders to be the ISP's DNS servers but that would be a waste of bandwidth as the DNS server on the production network is already doing this task. Therefore the test network DNS server can have it's forwarders setup to use the production DNS servers.

The second problem is how do we get name resolution from the production network into the test network? There are two ways of doing this:
1. Create a stub zone
2. Create a secondary zone.

One of the neat things you can do even with Active Directory integrated zones is to create a secondary zone from an Active Directory zone. This allows for a read-only copy of that zone to exist on the production network. As soon as the Active Directory integrated copy is updated (via dynamic DNS for example) our secondary zone has a copy of that entry.

Webmin - A free Unix/Linux Administration Tool

As part of my VMWare test network I have a Linux Fedora Core 5 install acting as a router and firewall. The linux install is as lightweight as possible so everything runs in INIT 3 mode (no KDE or GNOME because it's not needed).

For administration I'm using webmin. This VERY clever web based administration tool is great for quickly changing configurations and performing daily tasks. It's updated every few months and via the webmin console it's quite easy to keep webmin updated.

Webmin can be downloaded from here

Installation is easy. I tend to use WINSCP to copy the file to the /tmp directory then run the installation by using Putty to SSH onto the server then typing the command:

rpm -i webmin-1.280-1.noarch.rpm

I'm in the process of creating a Redhat unattend built similar to the ones I use for Windows that will allow all of these stuff to be done automatically. More on this soon.