Flyhpr's Stupid Thoughts

The Code Project - Detecting the UpTime of Web Server - ASP.NET

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin I.) — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 16:00:00 +0000

I am working on writting a service to monitor the uptime on a server without the benefit of a real management package. I ran across this quick app that I am going to use as a start to my app.

Windows 2003 Black Login Screen

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin I.) — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 01:24:00 +0000

We had a server at work that whenever you tried to access the console or TS into the server it just displays a black screen. You could do a ctrl-alt-del and if you tabbed just right you could log into the server. The server then functioned correctly. We finally got around to dealing with it the other day. I did the standard Google searches and checked out Microsoft's knowledgebase but had no luck. I finally broke down and called Microsoft. Turns out this is a known issue, but not enough people have called in for it to become a knowledgebase article.

The cause of this issue is because the colors for the Default user are all set to black (0 0 0). This was caused by the system drive running out of space. The disk space issue was caused by a Computer Associates product that went out of control and filled up the drive. To correct the issue I had to export the "HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Colors" key from a working server and import it into the broken server. Once I changed the registry entries the server started displaying the login screen just like you would expect.

You can use RegINI to do this remotely. Save the following setting in a file caled registry.key and use that as an RegINI input parameter to remotely make the changes.


HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Colors
    ActiveBorder = 212 208 200
    ActiveTitle = 10 36 106
    AppWorkSpace = 128 128 128
    Background = 102 111 116
    ButtonAlternateFace = 181 181 181
    ButtonDkShadow = 64 64 64
    ButtonFace = 212 208 200
    ButtonHilight = 255 255 255
    ButtonLight = 212 208 200
    ButtonShadow = 128 128 128
    ButtonText = 0 0 0
    GradientActiveTitle = 166 202 240
    GradientInactiveTitle = 192 192 192
    GrayText = 128 128 128
    Hilight = 10 36 106
    HilightText = 255 255 255
    HotTrackingColor = 0 0 128
    InactiveBorder = 212 208 200
    InactiveTitle = 128 128 128
    InactiveTitleText = 212 208 200
    InfoText = 0 0 0
    InfoWindow = 255 255 225
    Menu = 212 208 200
    MenuText = 0 0 0
    Scrollbar = 212 208 200
    TitleText = 255 255 255
    Window = 255 255 255
    WindowFrame = 0 0 0
    WindowText = 0 0 0

You can download the Windows 2003 Resource Kit from Microsoft. This contains the RegINI application in it.

Then just run regini -m \\<> registry.key to correct the colors on any server you wish.

Enumerating members of an Active Directory Group

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin I.) — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 02:56:00 +0000

Enumerating members of an Active Directory Group

I was doing a Google for info on setting up delegation, and ran across this article. I have run into this before and my solution was not nearly as elegant. I am going to convert this to C# and will post my new version of the code.

Free Photo iPod

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin I.) — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 19:25:00 +0000

I have seen the GratisNetwork links places, and I thought I would give it a try. I signed up for the CompleteHome offer. I have plans to cancel the trial subscription after 15 days. I have it on my calender to get this done. Hopefully that will be long enough to get the $20 Lowes gift card.

To get the iPod I only need ten other people to follow this link and sign themselves up. I am asking for your help to get this done. If you get the same offers I got the CompleteHome offer seems like to best bet. I will update you as I get more referrals and when I finally get my iPod.

Linux Driver Support Sucks

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin I.) — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 16:52:00 +0000

We have 6 new IBM x306 servers with IBM ServeRAID 7e HostRAID adapters sitting in our data center. I have been trying to get SUSE 9 installed on one of these servers for several days now. The servers have the new Intel 3.2 GHz EM64T processors. I downloaded an eval of SUSE to see if it fit our needs. We have been handed these servers and were told they were going to be Apache web servers for our new development paradigm. Now they still haven't communicated that paradigm to use lowly support people, but I do what I am told most of the time.

I made my first wrong assumption by thinking that a new OS version should have all the necessary drivers I would need to get this up and running. I am not using white box hardware or some off brand SCSI card. This is all IBM branded stuff and they fully support SUSE. It came up and told me that it couldn't find any hard drives. I decided to then go to IBM's website to get new drivers. Well... they don't have any posted for SUSE 9. I tried a few Google searches, and found a driver on Adaptec's German site. I download it, but couldn't do much with it because my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive. I copied the file to another machine and created the floppy from the image file. I popped it in the server and tried it, but SUSE didn't even detect that there were any updated drivers on the floppy I created.

At this point I broke down and called IBM. They were not of much help either. They don't have a published driver so he said he would do some research and get back to me. At this point I am pretty miffed and thinking to myself "How do people think Linux is going to take over the Data Center when it is so damn complicated to just get the OS installed on a basic server". I went back to SUSE/Novell's website and did another search of their discussion forums. This time I just searched for Adaptec. Well I guess I was trying to be a little too specific with my searches because I finally got a hit for what I needed. The post pointed me to Adaptec's Beta driver site for IBM servers to download drivers for the x306. This finally got me a driver that I was able to use.

I now have two servers with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 installed. Now I have to learn a new OS that I haven't really touched since 1995 when Slackware was the king of Linux distributions.

I am not a programmer, but I play one at work.

noreply@blogger.com (Kevin I.) — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 19:42:00 +0000

I am officially Sr. NT Systems Engineer. I am responsible for the health and well being of about 190 Windows based servers. We run about 90 of those on three IBM x445 8-way servers running VMware ESX.

Since our team has a need for some tools to make our life easier we have resorted to writing them ourselves. I started out with simple batch files and then moved on to Perl. I switched over to VBScript when the rest of my team didn't want to use Perl. No I have stepped up to VB.Net and C#. The development side of the house is a little wary about us writing our own applications. The problem is that we sometimes have to tell them how their code works.

I think it is great experience for sys admins to know how to program and programmers to know practical systems administration. Not this I rule the box and do what I want, but really having to work in a heterogeneous environment where everything touches each other and downtime is unacceptable. Then maybe they would be a little more cognizant of the system resources their code is using up.

Anyway I am officially taking a C# class next week. This is really because there are not any MS admin classes that I want to take that will help me out with my career. I think I am better off learning how to code in a more modern language than I learned in college. Pascal and Lisp were great for adding numbers, but they don't build a GUI very well. I have been working on hacking stuff together myself, but one of our real developers took the code and made it much more elegant. I will post on that one later.