Windows Update Error 0x80024d007

I encountered some machines showing error code 0x8024d007 while trying to update through windows update. Trying to resolve this error I stumbled upon this Microsft document http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956701. But while trying to execute the "regsvr32 wuaueng.dll" the command exited with error code 0x80070005. After some googling and checking stuff I checked the REgistry permisions for the user I found out that the permission settings on the registry key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\SvcHost" was set on read-only for all local system users and no access was granted to the Domain's system administrator. Adding access to modify the registry key for the domain admin rfesolved the issue.

UPDATE: My photos on Shmaps guides

Update, also a third photo was published on Smapsh guides, this time 8th edition of antwer.

The foto is the one of the Pelican, see the smapsh page here

Want to see all the pictures that have been included in Shmaps guides go to my Flickr Shmaps Set

My photos on Shmaps guides

Shamps Guides has included 2 photos of my Flickr stream into their Guides

The one included in the Rome Guide is a picture of a fountain on "Piazza del popolo"and the other in the Brussels guide is a photo of the famous Atomium in Brussels.

The originals from the Flickr stream:
Atomium
Piazza del popolo

A third photo of a pelican taken at the Antwerp zoo has been selected to be included in the Antwerp guide.

The death of the SFP-module

This morning I had a surprise when entering the office one of our tape drives was down. leaving us to 1 drive. So first thing I connect to our Backups software and do a "drive up". The drive comes up again. Pffff.... we back on I think, unfortunately 30 min later the drive goes down again this time however I'm unable to pull the drive back up because the the path to the drive is missing. Connent to the Library web interface and get drive status, It says a nice "No light" on it FC interface ! Darn time to get to the data center. Change the Fibre with a brand new since the old had some narrow turns in it, but nothing changes. Next thing a drive reset , nothing. Drive diagnosis, no errors return. Ok so pull out the Fibre and put it in another FC-switch port, Bingo ! Light returns. So yank out the SFP module from the port where the drive was connected to earlier and put in a new one, reconnect the drive to that port, drive logs into the SAN. Back in business.

The "Weekly Overload Recreational Killer"-Virus

The Center for Disease Control has issued a medical alert about a highly
contagious, potentially dangerous virus that is transmitted orally, by
hand, and even electronically. This virus is called Weekly Overload
Recreational Killer (WORK). If you receive WORK from your boss, any of
your colleagues or anyone else via any means whatsoever - DO NOT TOUCH
IT!!! This virus will wipe out your private life entirely. If you should
come into contact with WORK, you should immediately leave the premises.

Take two good friends to the nearest LCBO and purchase one or both of
the antidotes - Work Isolating Neutralizer Extract (WINE) and Bothersome
Employer Elimination Rebooter (BEER). Take the antidote repeatedly until
WORK has been completely eliminated from your system.

You should immediately forward this medical alert to five friends. If
you do not have five friends, you have already been infected and WORK is
controlling your life.

Sysadmin Network

Beside my first helping tools "Google-ing" and the rocking "Community" I can also add "The SysAdmin Network" a new social network for Sysadmins

RTFM !!!

As always it's been a while since I wrote. This time about a situation I encountered at work. Let me explain shortly what happened. A software was installed on a desktop by our Hyperion guys, the software t must connect to a server on a different LAN, while the application tries to log on to the server it exits with a cryptic error.

So the application guy calls me for support, and starts explaining what happens. I reply him that probably the error is generated due to the firewall which is in between both LANs, I tell him I'll we'll have to open a request to the security team to open the needed ports for the software's communication with the server. The Hyperion guy puts up a strange face and asks me "Ports ? I don't know which ports, how do I know ?" At that point I really would have liked to answer "RTFM !!!" but of course you keep calm and inform the user that a perfect place to get the information would be the applications manual. At that point I find out that the Hyperion guys don't have the manual they have to download it, but to make this even worse he asks me "where can i find that in the manual ?". So you calmly tell him it could be in the troubleshooting section or maybe in another section.

The next day we receive a mail telling that the software needs 2 ports (8200 & 8299) so we forward the info to the security teams which promptly modifies the firewall. A test is done but nothing. Hmmmm, So you start reading the manual to find out that there's a section called "PORTS" in the manual with a subsection with the same name as the application, and strangely you can find that both ports (8200 & 8299) are mentioned but beside those another 10 ports are mentioned and 3 of them are dynamically defined by the application's server.

Is it possible that a person who is a consultant for a certain program isn't aware of how his software/application works ?

Slackware 12.2

Yes as you can imagine from the post's title Slackware 12.2 has been released. Have a look at the release notes for more info

Gnome 2.24 on Slackware 12.1

Currently downloading GSlacky 2.24, then I'll have a look at the new Gnome 2.24.

Nagiosgraph extra mappings for NSClient++ and NetBackup

In order to get more out of our Nagios, I installed nagiosgraph to create graphs of our service states. The only problem was it didn't generate graphics for the NSC++ client data. So I had to create some mapping for that data, so here's the mapping

# Service type: CPU LOAD
#   output: CPU Load 2% (5 min average) 3% (15 min average) 2% (59 min average)
/output:.*CPU Load ([.0-9]+)% \([^\)]+\) ([.0-9]+)% \([^\)]+\) ([.0-9]+)%/
and push @s, [ load,
              [ avg1min,  GAUGE, $1 ],
              [ avg5min,  GAUGE, $2 ],
              [ avg15min, GAUGE, $3 ] ];

# Service type: single disk CHECK_NT command
# output:e:\ - total: 557.75 Gb - used: 405.85 Gb (73%) - free 151.89 Gb (27%) | 'e:\ Used Space'=405.85Gb;278.87;501.97;0.00;557.75
# perfdata:'l:\ Used Space'=1.38Gb;8.00;9.00;0.00;10.00
# Perfdata order => Used space; warning free; Critical free; unknown; total space
/perfdata:'([^ ]+) Used Space'=(\d+\.\d+).*(\d+\.\d+);(\d+\.\d+);(\d+\.\d+);(\d+\.\d+)/
and push @s, [ diskuse,
              [ bytesused, GAUGE,$2 ],
              [ bytesmax, GAUGE, $6 ],
              [ pctfree, GAUGE, $5 ] ];


# Service type: Scartch tapes
# output Scratch count WARNING : available scratch tapes 2 less then 3
/output:Scratch count \w+ : available scratch tapes (\d+).*/
and push @s, [ scratch,
               [ count, GAUGE, $1] ];

Nagios Plug-In for Veritas Netbackup Scartch Pool check

To monitor the tapes in our library wich is a t a remote data center, we had a script running wich each morning mails us a report with the tapes count for each "Volume Pool" in our netbackup infrastructure. But as you may know sysadmins like to make their life easier so I wanted to be informed by our Nagios monitoring system when our Scratch pool was reaching certain tape counts so we could take action accordingly wihtout having to look to those mails each morning. So I came up with this little script.

#!/bin/bash

WARN_COUNT=$1
CRIT_COUNT=$2


SCRATCH_TMP=`/usr/openv/volmgr/bin/vmquery -b -pn Scratch_pool | wc -l`
SCRATCH_COUNT=$[$SCRATCH_TMP - 3]


if [ $SCRATCH_COUNT -lt $WARN_COUNT ];then
        if [ $SCRATCH_COUNT -lt $CRIT_COUNT ];then
                echo "Scratch count CRITICAL : availbale scratch tapes $SCRATCH_COUNT less then $CRIT_COUNT|scratch=$SCRATCH_COUNT;$WARN_COUNT;$CRIT_COUNT"
                exit 2
        else
                echo "Scratch count WARNING : available scratch tapes $SCRATCH_COUNT less then $WARN_COUNT|scratch=$SCRATCH_COUNT;$WARN_COUNT;$CRIT_COUNT"
                exit 1
        fi
else
        echo "Scratch count OK : available scratch tapes $SCRATCH_COUNT|scratch=$SCRATCH_COUNT;$WARN_COUNT;$CRIT_COUNT"
        exit 0
fi
exit 3

Now our nice nagios installation will warn me when I need to do something , so I just need to wait for a mail to take action, instead of having to remember each morning to look at those mails. find the "Scratch pool" look at the tape count.

VM-Ware VM uptime check

Trying to know which VM was active on a VM-Ware server (Free edition) I first opened to VM-Ware console and connected to the VM-Server and then checked every VM one by one to see if they were up.
But since the VM-server is running on a CentOS I decided to create me a small shell script to ask VM-Server to provide me the details by just issuing a simple command. Here's the source of this script for the those interested.

#!/bin/bash

NEEDED_VM=$1
VMWARECMD="/usr/bin/vmware-cmd"

  VM_CONFIG=`$VMWARECMD -l 2> /dev/null | sed -e "s/ /#/g"` # Get all registered Vitual machines configuration files

    if [ "$VM_CONFIG" != "" ];then

        for TMPCONFIG in $VM_CONFIG ; do
            CONFIG=`echo $TMPCONFIG | sed -e "s/#/ /g"`
            VM_STATE=`/usr/bin/vmware-cmd "$CONFIG" getstate 2> /dev/null | cut -d \  -f 3` #Get VM state
            VM_UPTIME=`/usr/bin/vmware-cmd "$CONFIG" getuptime 2> /dev/null | cut -d \  -f 3` #Get VM uptime in seconds
            UP_HOURS=`perl -e "print ( (($VM_UPTIME-($VM_UPTIME%3600))/3600).' h '.((($VM_UPTIME%3600)-(($VM_UPTIME%3600)%60))/60).' m '.($VM_UPTIME%60) . ' s')" ` #Convert uptime into a string H:m:s
            VM_NAME=`/usr/bin/vmware-cmd "$CONFIG" getconfig displayName 2> /dev/null | grep "displayName" | cut -d = -f 2` #Get the VM name from its configuration file


            echo -n "VM $VM_NAME is $VM_STATE "
            if [ "$VM_STATE" == "on" ]; then
                echo -n "for $UP_HOURS"
            fi
            echo ""

        done
    fi

The output is like this:

VM  Zenoss is off
VM  ZCS ZIMBRA DEMO is off
VM  CUSTER is on for 194 h 19 m 25 s

Light is comming

If you're a regular reader of my blog you'll be aware I entered in a dark period in my life about 2 months ago. Well since then I made some changes in my life as I wrote in previous posts, which helped me to keep my head up and going on. But now I can say that the darkness is starting to fade away steadily leaving space for heavenly light, and that light was brought to me by that splendid person I met. Somehow we seem to compliment eachother , just with our looks we seem to understand what the other is thinking. She makes my weekends fly by and makes me feel ... well I don't have words to describe how I feel ... Some times I'd like to possess the power to stop time to have these weekends last forever. But unfortunatelly that's something out of my reach, I can only hope weeks go by in seconds so that I can enjoy another weekend.I consider myself a fortunate guy for having found such a splendid person. I wish this will continue .....

M$ Vista & Wifi Part II

As I wrote in my previous post I have a strange behaviour of Vista with my Wifi, well seemed I found a work around, to have it connected. I need to open the utility program delivered with my Wifi card (Realtek RTL8185) and Disable the wifi card and reenable it and as by magic it connects wihtout a hassle. It's a bit of a nessy workaround but it makes my Wifi work, so I'm happy with it.

Wifi & Vista

Oh yes I failed the penguin, I'm running vista, shame on me. But I have no choice if I want to maintain the warranty on this machine, at least I will in the first moths of it's life then the penguin power will prevail. Event though I'm starting to consider to accelerate the process as this M$ Vista is behaving not extremely as it should. It seems it connects to the wireless network when it feels like it, like for example yesterday it jusdt refused to connect to the wireless network then today it felt like connecting wihtout a hassle. I forgive it as I have severeal wireless network on the same channel in my neighbourhoog but it's starting to be very anoying. Ok I must admit it's graphically nicer then XP but as for the usability it's far from perfect it's even worse if you're used to XP. First thing M$ seems to have fun in moving configuration tools arounf the place and to hide them where possible. Olso if it's possible make thing cryptic so peopèle keep out of the place. Give very generic error messages , and try to solve it in an automated way to then tell the user you failed fixing the problem without giving further information. Now I realy understand why vista is having trouble breaking thruogh without a forced move from M$.

Fantastic weekend

And another week has passed since my last posting. However this weekend ended the week in a fantastic way as the title says. Let's start from the end to get to the best. The weekend ended with a nice barbeque at a friends house in the mountains on a nice sunny day, with the peacfull suroundings of the mountains, followed by a little trip to a small local canion where I made some fotos that I definetly will put onto my flicker page. But this is nothing compared to what happened to me on saturday. Even though I'm generally quiet open with my postings I will keep this one a bit vague as I consider this a more private matter but I can give an overview. What happened is that I met someone, and revealed to be much diffrent than what she appeared. In the end I had a fantastic saturday wich lasted for several hours well in fact "several" is a bit of an understatement. I'm not going to pull out details eventhough nothing specials happened except for a lot of words flowing through the air, which is very strange as I'm not the person you would except to talk a lot, but for some reason I was far more talkative then what I normally am.

Next step into the wind

Since I finished the basic windsurfing course and I'm able to have fun windsurfing. I just need one extra thing and that's Kitesurfing. Seems realy cool and fun , but i definitely need to take some lessons to start kiting so that's next on my calendar a nice course of Kitesurfing. And than fun guaranteed at the see or lake. Another thing that's itching me is doing skydiving, I bounced upon a place where you can learn skydiving, for the moment i think I'll just make a tandem jump to see how that skydiving thingy is . Seems fun and lot of adrenaline :)

Fun with Ex-Colleauges UPDATED

I add this post a bit late since it's refered to thursday and right now is saturday. I must say I've had great time thursday meeting my ex colleauges and also 2 new colleagues. Unfortunattley I missed to see some of them cause I arrived a bit late at the appointment. I was comming from Mestre(VE) that day and only arrived at 21:00 at Milano Centrale and had to go whole the way to hame to get my car and then to the place "surabaya", so at the end I manged to get there at about 22:00, and we stayed there till around 01:00. The only downside of course for all of us was that we had to go to work that day. But then again I just had a great time, hope we do that again. And here are some photos ;)

Let the wind blow

Another weekend has passed by this time I went to Colico for a windsurfing course at "Son Of A Beach". The full course are 4 days This weekend I did the first, next weekend I'll take the 2nd & 3th if all goes as planned.
For the change I made some pictures of the environment there. You can find them on my Flickr page. We had only one problem on sunday, the wind stopped blowing at about 12:00 and thus WIND-surfing was a bit difficult :D

Happy SysadminDay

To all Sysadmins out there.

HAPPY SYSADMINDAY !!!!

do I hear "What the heck is sysadminday ?!" well for you who don't know about "sysadminday" have a look here .