Wallace and Gromit

Celebrating their 20th birthday …

http://happybirthday.wallaceandgromit.com/splash/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_and_Gromit

Uh-Oh to gmail

I hope it wasn’t me that broke it :

Geographs

I can’t remember now how I came across the Geograph web site, but the idea of it is something that I really like – to photograph every “square” in the UK, and from the in the square to outside the square.  It’s great, and there is a ton of stuff in my local area that has already been photographed, but it doesn’t hurt to add more (called supplementals).

The main site is : http://www.geograph.org.uk

You can see my profile as http://www.geograph.org.uk/profile/27955

Gmail Add-On

I know there are about 10,000,000 different ones, but today I saw this :

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46938

It’s pretty damn good if you ask me!  Makes the real estate down the left hand side of gmail much more useful.  Try it yourself, if you use Firefox with Greasemonkey

Changing Screen Resolution Quickly in Ubuntu

Yesterday I plugged in an external monitor to my laptop when it was running Ubuntu 8.10.  It didn’t pick up the external monitor

I did some digging this morning, and it might not solve the problem, but it seems like a super-cool application anyway :

If you have an external monitor or projector you occasionally attach to a notebook computer, you might be used to switching resolutions on a regular basis. Unlike with Windows, this isn’t just a right-click procedure—you must navigate the System —> Preferences menu.

A good solution is to use Synaptic to search for and install resapplet. For some reason, although it’s officially a GNOME applet, resapplet doesn’t appear on the standard applet list. Instead, it must be configured to start at login. To do this, click System —> Preferences —> Sessions, ensure the Startup Programs tab is selected, and click the Add button. In the Name and Command fields of the dialog box that appears, type resapplet. Leave the Comment field blank. Then close the dialog box, and log out and back in again.

You -can- just press Alt-F2 and run the applet from there, and it does indeed sit next to the network activity icon in the system tray type area.

Unbright Idea – Upgrading from 8.04 to 8.10 Ubuntu

I decided to upgrade one of my older desktop machines from a perfectly nice, working 8.04 version of Ubuntu to 8.10.  The upgrade went quite slowly, downloading all the bits and bobs seemed to take an age, but the upgrade did eventually start to run.

I checked on the PC a while later, and it seemed to have gone to sleep, which i thought was odd, so I rebooted it.

After the grub menu, I got :

[1.204117] Kernel panic – not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0,0)

I thought I was going to be in for the “big reinstall”, and hoped that there wasn’t any data that I was going to lose.

I found a solution though !  I was able to boot into one of the older kernels, and ran the following :-

sudo dpkg –configure -a

That churned away for about 30 minutes, doing TONS of stuff, and finished.  A reboot later, and all was working well.

I sort of got the idea of what to do from this post (http://ubuntu-utah.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=961695)

VMWare Time Synch

Found this to be very useful if you want a permanently time travelled VM

time.synchronize.continue = “FALSE”
time.synchronize.restore = “FALSE”
time.synchronize.resume.disk = “FALSE”
time.synchronize.shrink = “FALSE”
tools.syncTime = “FALSE”

Set all those in the .vmx file, and you should be good to stay, in the past.

Dryden

One of the many area of interest in the US if you’re into strange “craft”.

http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/index.html

There are many web sites on the net which talk about strange crafts, and whether governments (particularly the US government) have harnassed any alien technology recovered from crashed UFO’s.  Alot of stuff is also attribute to secret test planes, some of which Dryden have published photos of (a long time after the initial hull-a-balloo has died down).

A good description of Dryden is on : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryden_Flight_Research_Center

Clearing Up PST Migrations

I have been doing some work on PST Migrations over the last few days to discover what happens under circumstances.   The work has been interesting, and varied.  There is at least one bug that I have escalated, but this post is really just to track an interesting little bit of SQL that I did.

My repro involved locating 11,000 PST files that I created.  I had to do this several times.
The first hurdle then is that I didn’t really fancy creating 11,000 PST files manually, and copying and pasting them in Windows Explorer is also a bit of a pain.  I wrote a little VBScript which will copy a single PST many, many times .. here it is :

loopcounter=0
maxloop = 10000

dim filesys, demofile
set filesys = CreateObject (“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)

set demofile = filesys.GetFile(“c:\temp\psts\file1.pst”)

do while loopcounter  < maxloop

demofile.Copy(“c:\temp\psts\file1-A” & loopcounter & “.pst”)

loopcounter = loopcounter + 1
loop
The problem with running PST migration multiple times (or rather the PST Locator) is that by default it only scans remote machines hard-drives once every 24 hours.  The easiest way, I found, to get around this is to reset the date of the last scan, so after each locator-task run, I executed the following SQL :

Delete  from pstfile;
Update pstlocatortask set hardsearchlasttime = ‘2008-09-01 03:00:00.000’

NBU Migrations or not

I just finished helping an engineer get NBU migrations working from Enterprise Vault (EV).  He had set everything up in text book style, but still he was not getting anything migrated.  His event log was saying :

0 Saveset(s) were collected into 0 Collection(s).

0 file(s) were migrated to secondary storage

The run completed in 0 hour(s), 0 minute(s), 0 second(s).

At first I thought that this was because he has only test data.  By default we don’t collect if we don’t find more than 15 files in the “hours” folder for each day.  i.e. we’re going to create a CAB file for the day, but won’t unless we find at least 15 files in that day.

First of all we added this registry key, and restarted the storage service :

MinimumFilesInCollection

Location	HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE  \SOFTWARE   \KVS    \Enterprise Vault    \Storage
Content	DWORD Maximum value: 25000. Minimum value: 1 Setting a value of 0 forces the default (15) to be used .
Description	When creating collections, MinimumFilesInCollection controls the minimum number of saveset files in a collection. The collection is not created unless there are at least this number of savesets to be added.

Still no joy.

We then dtrace’d storagefilewatch and evstgofflineopns to see if that would tell us what is happening.  The output of that DID show us what is wrong :

EV:M Collector is walking the directory tree for Partition 12039DD547090F34A899831D7AFCC68651q10000dbawl11.nbuev.vxindia.veritas.com
EV:L The Collector for Partition 12039DD547090F34A899831D7AFCC68651q10000dbawl11.nbuev.vxindia.veritas.com is parsing directory E:\Enterprise Vault Stores\vaultstore1 Ptn1\2008
EV:L The Collector for Partition 12039DD547090F34A899831D7AFCC68651q10000dbawl11.nbuev.vxindia.veritas.com is parsing directory E:\Enterprise Vault Stores\vaultstore1 Ptn1\20081
EV:L The Collector for Partition 12039DD547090F34A899831D7AFCC68651q10000dbawl11.nbuev.vxindia.veritas.com is parsing directory E:\Enterprise Vault Stores\vaultstore1 Ptn1\200813
EV:L The Collector for Partition 12039DD547090F34A899831D7AFCC68651q10000dbawl11.nbuev.vxindia.veritas.com is parsing directory E:\Enterprise Vault Stores\vaultstore1 Ptn1\2008139
EV:L The Collector for Partition 12039DD547090F34A899831D7AFCC68651q10000dbawl11.nbuev.vxindia.veritas.com is going to Collect file E:\Enterprise Vault Stores\vaultstore1 Ptn1\2008139\135500000000000~200801030937410000~0.DVS
EV:M The Collector for Partition 12039DD547090F34A899831D7AFCC68651q10000dbawl11.nbuev.vxindia.veritas.com determined the file E:\Enterprise Vault Stores\vaultstore1 Ptn1\2008139\135500000000000~200801030937410000~0.DVS as not safe for Collection
EV:M The Collector for Partition 12039DD547090F34A899831D7AFCC68651q10000dbawl11.nbuev.vxindia.veritas.com did not create a Collection as either the Collection was too small or it did not contain enough files. Collection size = 0 bytes, number of files = 0>

This means that the vault store is set to keep safety copies.  By default we won’t put the DVS files in to a CAB file if they’ve not been made safe, ie backed up.  A quick workaround on this test system was to run :-

attrib -A *.* /s

That was run from a DOS prompt in the folder on disk containing the vault store files.

After that, a collection run happened successfully, and data begun migrating to NBU.