Owner: Jason Slater Weblog URL:http://www.jasonslater.co.uk Join Date: Mon, 23 Apr 2007 06:11:39 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: blogging about technology Site statistics:Click here
Monday Monday ... so good to be... 2007-05-14 10:30:00 Monday is upon us again. I've returned from having a few days off and had to deal with a number of user problems already.Sharons 40th birthday party went well, weather forgiving, it was hosted by the Restaurant Severn next to the Ironbridge. I chose the venue primarily based on a review in the Shropshire Star, but we also dined there to check it out. Eric and Beb Bruce put on a fine custom menu for us and the whole thing was a treat - definitely somewhere to recommend, and I am sure we will return in the future.I have my exam at Uni tomorrow then I am free until October whereupon I start my final year project. It will be a load off as the time spent working on these modules is consuming and takes valuable time away from the family.I got my expected rejection letter from the countdown office. I messed up the two numbers games, even though I got two of the three conundrums and even a nine-letter word in the word games. I guess their thinking is you need to be reasonably good at all thre Read more:Monday
, Monday Monday
Passwords 2007-05-18 19:52:00 Of course there is the funny side but when I get an email from a manager of a department that tells me "if all else fails I'll just give my staff my password" then the humour stops and the alarm bells start ringing. It seems a never ending battle explaining to users about levels of authority and why passwords are there in the first place but when it drip feeds into people who should already know better then you know you've got your work cut out for you. Two factor authentication has to be the answer as, in my opinion, passwords have pretty much had their day as security methods alone. At least with two factor authentication if a password is released it's useless without a hardware token. Their has been a recent request to release our VPN secret key (which I hold dear) to a third party company owing to the fact that our ERP system is used by an associate company and the third party want their remote users to access the system but want to install the remote access software themselve
In Search Of... 2007-05-17 15:31:00 Excuse my poor sketch but hopefully you get the gist. I've seen these things in a few sites on my travels but whomever I enquire doesn't seem to know what they're called or where to get them.They are devices a little like trailing sockets but they are designed in a wedge form factor to sit on a desk surface and contain a socket, lan socket (and sometimes a retractable lan cable), and sometimes a phone socket.Typing the following into Google 'plug socket lan connection hot desking' leads me to Teleadapt which has similar devices but I can't seem to locate them in the UK - any ideas? The closest name I have found for them so far seems to be On-Desk Power/Data Module. Read more:Search
Day one ... again ... again ... again 2007-05-17 09:39:00 It's day one again and I'm going to take each day one day at a time. Low-carbing that is. The first two weeks are always tough but after that it gets much easier. I have some strip cheese, a peperami, and some coke zero to get me through this morning but this cold I've caught isn't going to help. Roll on the grumpy few days.
Reflecting on the power outage 2007-05-21 17:12:00 A cause for concern, a needed plan of action, and the feeling of an early omen sent to keep me on my toes, are what I'm feeling about the recent power
loss. This is the third such power outage
in a week and it's time to really take heed of those warnings and do something about them, the next time I may not be so lucky.Firstly, I have to be more vigilant than ever about backups. That is a given.Secondly, I need power at my desk-side. Most of my tools are on my laptop so a suitably sized UPS needs to go on the shopping list to give me a good few hours juice. Selected other users also need juicing up - I can't have another afternoon of users twiddling their thumbs for hours on end.Third, I need better sight of things. This means getting another PDU, and loading up the necessary monitoring software - not only that but I need to be using the monitoring software. I need to know instantly the draw of power on each and every UPS. The small Belkin UPS died under the pressure and I need to kn Read more:Reflecting
Power Failure 2007-05-21 13:13:00 Everything is now back online following the power failure. The Email Server, Mailsweeper and the VoIP Phone System gave me the worst frights. Out of these I thought the phone system was dead for a time but it finally came back online after much seeking out of serial data cables to access the CLI.We already have a slew of UPS and PDU equipment but I've managed to get authorisation to add to the defensive arsenal thus giving us at least a little more breathing space should the unexpected happen again.Yet again, this re-inforces the needs for good back-ups. Fortunately I had them in hand so felt confident that, all but the hardware on the VOIP system, that we could get back working quickly.
Catastrophic Power Failure 2007-05-21 11:27:00 I'm currently dealing with what I deem to be a Catastrophic
Power Failure. In my book this a power outage that exceeds the UPS protection with no indication of when the power will return. It seems our local substation has ceased serving us power, someone is one their way but a fixed time cannot be given by the power provider. All the onsite UPS have now exceeded their backup time and powered off taking most of the servers with them and I wasn't onsite at the time to ensure they were shutdown properly.A larger company might be dusting off their DR plans right now but I don't have that luxury, even the coffee machine isn't working - now that is serious.
Terminal Emulation AT386 2007-05-21 04:52:00 Getting Terminal Emulation
, to our AT386 implementation, right is a headache. Our legacy in-house ERP is text only and we standardised on AT386 to allow the use of colour in the ERP which introduced huge benefits. The terminal emulation software we'd historically used was James River ICE.TCP which rendered the codes perfectly however the changes in the licensing methods, and a few other minor problems with the software, led us to evaluate other solutions. Some of these have included Powerterm, Telnet2000, Netterm, and AbsoluteTelnet. Of these, Netterm and AbsoluteTelnet have been the most promising - Netterm is great for its ability to really lock down all the options but needed a lot of experimentation to get the terminal emulation right whilst AbsoluteTerm got the terminal emulation right first time but has an annoying feature of rendering every font in its bold form (ok, we force bold as an option but that's bold colour but the emulation software insists on a bold font). *** UPDAT
Time Synchronization 2007-05-21 03:43:00 First thing this morning my usual drive mapping failed with the warning "An error occurred while reconnecting P: to \servershare$Microsoft Windows Network 2457: This server's clock is not synchronized with the primary domain controller's clock.This connection has not been restored."Checking the File Servers clock and the PDC clock I found they were over 9 minutes apart. This is a curious thing as I was under the strange illusion that all the domain servers synched to the PDC in preference (and that the PDC got its time from an authoritative time source - although in this case from the Internet). When the clocks get more than 5 minutes apart is when these problems start to occur.Running, w32tm /resync on the fileserver returned the obtuse message "RCP Server is unavailable. (0x800706BA).Manually changing the time on the fileserver to be the same as the PDC resolved the problem temporarily but the indication is of a deeper problem. Checking out the Services I noticed that the Windows
Power me up 2007-05-25 09:26:00 This morning we received notification that the Smart-UPS 2200 XL should arrive within the next few days, specifically the 25th. One hour later the thing was sitting at my desk side. Now that's what I call good communication - nice one 3Complete. The extended batteries are going to take a little longer but at least the device is up and running now happily powering my Rock laptop and reporting that I have 158 minutes power left - factor in the laptops own battery backup and it should last at least 160 minutes. All joking aside, my Rock is a desktop replacement so the battery doesn't last very long I've typically gotten around 15 minutes out of it.I had to fiddle with the registry to show the UPS tab in Power Options (XP) as the UPS service wouldn't start at first - the details are here but remember to backup your registry before fiddling with it.HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesUPSValue Name: ShowUPSTabData Type : REG_DWORDData : 1 to show UPS tab, 0 to hide the U
Countdown 2007-05-24 13:12:00 Your numbers are75 8 5 10 3 2Your target is 236 ... Go ....I got 235 by (75 x 3) + 8 + 2I'm working on a little program to help me with these. You might like it too, it is here. Read more:Countdown
Firewall 2007-05-24 13:05:00 When supporting users I often find their firewall disabled. The usual reponse is one of a) it has never been enabled or b) it was disabled to test something and was never switched back on. Believe me, your firewall is your friend - it is constantly watching your back for suspicious activity - so trust it, embrace it and enable it ... Do it Now! Read more:Firewall
Power Up! 2007-05-24 10:17:00 The new UPS is on order - the minefield array of options is enough to make me want to climb into a wheel and generate my own power using a dynamo arrangement - move over hamster this things only big enough for one of us.I opted for a APC Smart-UPS 2200 XL rather than the 5kva Option. In addition to this I opted for two extra batteries UXBP48 which theoretically gives me over 9 hours of juice. Yes, you read it right - 9 hours. I just can't wait to test that! The price worked out only marginally higher than the usual APC Smart UPS 5000 I would go for and whilst not being able to support such as high load, the load it does support should run on and on and on and on...These batteries seem behemoths (and I've ordered two of them) and for something I want to keep by side of my desk for powering my laptop during emergencies may seem a little overkill but I'm sure I'll be thanking the gods when I'm able to shut everything down safely from the machine I have all my useful tools stored on.
Impulse Buying 2007-05-24 10:10:00 I had to pick up a USB 2 Card earlier so I nipped out to Staples and Maplin. It's been a while since I've been to Staples and they seem to have rationalised their product lines somewhat. I was in complete impulse surrender mode and picked up a new desk Journal - but to be honest not a lot else grabbed my attention. The problem I have with Staples is that most of the interesting things are locked away or alarmed so you can't readily play with them. It's a shame because I was in the mood for a novel purchase. The staff are friendly enough and offer help but I don't know about you but sometimes I like to have a bit of peace when looking for the gizmo of my current dream.I experienced much the same in Maplin where I got the USB 2 card from - it wasn't easy to find the card which necessitated me looking around all the aisles but again not a lot grabbed my gadget fancy. Is this middle age setting in? Am I emerging from the gadget fest? I did pick up a 320 Wallet CD Holder but is this t Read more:Buying
Remote Access Two-Factor Authentication 2007-05-24 06:44:00 I've decided to proceed with the 25 user ActivIdentity starter kit for the two-factor authentication. The decision on ActivIdentity has primarily been driven by recommendation by multiple vendors and the easy point of entry for me, the decision to go ahead has been driven by the likely need to hand over our VPN secret key to a third party at some point. We can, and will, switch on username/password authentication but that's not enough as users may share details. I need the token - the tokens with the starter pack will be the keychain tokens.I am anticipating quite a cultural challenge in implementing this technology and I need to decide where best to deploy the various components on our infrastructure - but that's the fun of the job. Read more:Remote
, Access
, Authentication
, Remote Access
The exploding SME blade market 2007-05-24 04:48:00 So, the SME market is about to explode with Blades is it? It is according to Emmet Ryan, writing for The Register, article here. As I see it blades are competing with Virtual Servers for the same market place and unless they come together seamlessly there is going to be trouble. Sure, I love the idea of plug-and-play servers - frankly anything that makes my life easier and keeps the systems up is a winner with me but you have some convincing to do as I'm slowly becoming drawn to the wonderful world of Virtualisation. Virtualisation lets me buy a high spec server and run multiple OS on it 'virtually' - space is short, power is minimal - leading to longer UPS life, configuration is simple and services, once all crammed on a single server, can be installed on multiple instances.For an SME to show a good level of interest the product has to be attainable. Give me a low point of entry and let me add to it as time allows. This is how get got NAS. A Storage Server with empty MSA30 attached
Scanning 2007-05-23 07:12:00 Most of this morning has been tied up scanning documents. I'm creaking with service schedules, annual invoices and registration documents. To help my paper-less drive I'm scanning them all in and storing each set in dedicated Acrobat PDF's, sorted by technology, e.g. Mailsweeper for SMTP, Symantec Anti-Virus. The idea is that if I have a query relating to a particular product I can pull the PDF and it will (hopefully) contain all reference material, documentation, license codes, and so on to let me deal with the query more efficiently.The obvious other way of storing the documents would be by Supplier as a number of differing technologies are supplied by the same suppliers (in the case of Mailsweeper for Exchange, Sonicwall, and Mailsweeper for SMTP). I think I'll cross that bridge as I come to it. For now I just want to get the data in a more usable fashion rather than desperately flicking through endless reams of paper to try and locate paperwork.Our Scanner is a HP 2250 Scanjet Read more:Scanning
Event Log Utility 2007-05-23 03:51:00 I was rolling through my blog history and remember talking about Event Logs. I still haven't found a useful utility for combining all these event logs together and organising them into some common sense order. Often items are posted as Warnings that aren't, or as Errors that can 'be safely ignored' or Informational that actually contain messages of impending doom.I've come across GFI EventsManager recently which seems an exciting product but honestly the price is out of my reach. We operate around 15 servers so you're talking over 2 grand investment, which is a hard to justify investment when there are way more important things I could spent 2 grand on. There are other solutions of course, TNT Software offer ELM Event Log Manager and Prism have Event Tracker but the lack of pricing information on these websites lead me to assume that these products too are likely to be about of my reach.One possibility would be to merge my requirements for Event Log Management and Syslog manageme Read more:Utility
Unlicensed Software 2007-05-23 03:35:00 Computer Weekly report that a BSA study has found that 41% of UK SME's believe there is no risk from using unlicensed software, the article is here. What?!? Who did they ask in these organisations? In our business there is absolutely no way on earth that anyone is going to be allowed to use unlicensed software, I even cringe at the thought of freeware and shareware. We use thin-client technology for clients and trap all executables coming in via mail or the web so there is little chance of anything straying onto the network. AV software also checks the fileserver and the terminal services machines for inappopriate or undesirable files and fortunately none have been discovered yet. We have had a number of approaches in the past from FAST and the like and I welcome them - we have nothing to hide and everything is above board thank you very much.Anyway back to the point. It would be interesting to know what make-up these SME's were - were they one man bands? two people or three? SME is Read more:Software
Quality 2007-05-22 15:10:00 People who can't see above their steering wheels are like those people who have the fastest cutting edge PC then use it for sending emails and word processing. I'm still making use of my 2.53 Ghz machine and have only recently upgraded to a TFT monitor after years of staring enviously at the have's. I was driving home crammed in Sharons little tiny 106 when I saw the biggest, almost tardis like, car you could imagine with a head poking just above the steering wheel ramping it up down the middle of the road - and it was me that had to pull almost onto the kerb to let them by.Life is a strange beast at the best of times and often throws you a curve-ball or two, and sometimes a number of them at the same time. Fire-fighting through the daily grind aiming to attempt to make a difference when those around you have allotted you the slot of 'IT guru' and assume you have little else to say about anything equates, for me at least, to said curve-balls. I've lost count of the times when I' Read more:Quality
Readying Sharepoint for Prime Time 2007-04-17 16:33:00 Before I can go prime time with Sharepoint
(open it up to users - especially remote ones) I need to configure it and lock it down.
Back on Track 2007-05-28 10:20:00 Everything looks back on track now. The preservation install went ok and I only had to reconfigure the printers, and reinstall a few drivers, phew. I'm now testing our ERP to ensure it works in all the forms we support. I thought about upgrading to a newer version of Microfocus Cobol but after my recent experience with AIX I think I'll leave well alone for now. Read more:Track
So much for the AIX update 2007-05-28 08:22:00 The last update set failed and rebooting the machine crashed it - completely. It failed to mount the /usr directory and running the various maintenance shell checks didn't help. I have run a preservation install on top of the machine to take it back to oslevel but a number of features are now missing and need adding manually such as Jetdirect printing, SAMBA, etc.I've just reconfigured the machine and rebooted it - risky business but it has to be done - I can't risk a production machine that doesn't boot reliably. If it doesn't then its back to the drawing board with a complete rebuild. I'm hoping to stave that off as I don't fancy being here until midnight judging by how long it took saturday and sunday.
IBM AIX 5.3 Updates 2007-05-28 06:01:00 On the trail of updates for AIX 5.3 this morning and I've found them here. I am currently on Maintenance Level 5300-02. I found this out by running the following command at the prompt.oslevel -rThe packages can either be downloaded using a java tool or using FTP. I had some problems with the Java tool so I elected for the old fashioned but trustworthy FTP approach. Always remember to ensure you have a good backup before embarking on big updates like this.After downloading the relevant update pack and copying it over to the AIX machine I have to run the following command to index the updates ready for AIX to work with them:inutoc /downloadfolderThen I can either run smit update_by_fix or smit update_allA reboot is recommended after installing the updates. Read more:IBM
Low Carb and all that 2007-05-28 05:37:00 There are three problems I have found with low-carb dieting and they are:1) It takes a good two weeks for me to 'get in the swing' of low-carbing and at any point during that time I can easily fall off the wagon.2) I started to yearn for goodies as low-carb food can get a little dull and it is so time consuming preparing food all the time instead of having quick snacks3) As soon as I come off the diet the weight goes back on double-timeHowever, low-carbing does work for me I've got as low as 19st 8lb (from 26st 4lb) - but I've weighed myself this weekend and I'm back up to 24st 9lb. I just need a good two week run at it to get me back into the 'zone'.
Scanning 2007-05-27 08:12:00 I've took to scanning all my regular paperwork so I can store related information in easily accessible PDF's. Our HP8250 scanner is ok but it's a little on the slow side for fast document scanning, it can take about 10-15 minutes for 20 sheets for instance.I like the 8250, it excels for fine artwork scanning which was its intended purpose but I need an additional fast scanner for getting paperwork (generally A4 double-sided) in (in colour), converting it to Adobe PDF and sending it to the relevant folder. I'm not looking for a DMS (Document Management System) or OCR at this stage, just something to get the paperwork off my desk quickly and usable. Read more:Scanning
Microfocus Server Express v5 2007-05-27 06:53:00 I'm now up to date with the latest version of Server Express
v4 including all patches. The next step is likely to be an upgrade to v5. Details of v5 can be obtained here. The Unix product matrix can also be obtained here.
What the L IBM ? 2007-05-27 06:39:00 Whilst downloading patches for my recent upgrade to AIX 5.3L I notice an article by the Register explaining that IBM
is planning to drop the L and migrating what is essentially AIX 5.4 to become AIX 6.1, whilst also adding a timeline for the release of AIX 7. So, here I am moving up from AIX 4.3 to 5.3 with the hope of bringing my systems bang up to date and it might actually turn out that I'm now two releases behind. Eek.I think it's time I found an IBM pSeries/AIX Seminar to get a proper update of what's going on.
UPS 2007-05-27 06:29:00 Unlike Monk who likes to shop around on the Internet I have always trusted one particular brand for uninterruptible power protection. They have such a huge product range that working your way round what's available can be tricky and they often assume you have some level of understanding of Wattage and the like, but the products perform well and the management software including the network shutdown software does the job. UPS is something that's often bolted on to a network infrastructure but I would always recommend building it in right from the start, that way you get the immediate benefit of power protection whilst also having a solid foundation upon which to safely expand your network.
Cobol Reloaded 2007-05-27 03:52:00 Time to take stock of where I am. Aix 5.3 is loaded and working, Microfocus Cobol 4 SP2 is loading and working. I've downloaded the latest patches for MF Cobol and these are to be applied this morning.I haven't risked recompiling any programs yet but I've configured all the key elements including ADIS, KEYBCF, TERMINFO, and the logon scripts. I've also created some remote printer connections but I'll have to get the rest of them on by the end of the day - and I'm only here till 2pm today.I've been unable to get the license manager working but it seems that even though it is referenced correctly in /etc/inittab it is not loading automatically. Manually running the rcscript starts the service correctly - I will need to pick this up with MF support on Tuesday in case it points towar a bigger problem. Read more:Reloaded
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