Law school day1.

The first official day 1 has passed.
It was interesting as well as impressive to learn some formal “law” techniques as well as terminologies.

So far more questions are raised than answered and there is already an assigiment published on the web page.

Yay? or Nay ?

Not that I have much social life these days but from what senior students are saying I need to kiss my social life good bye.

“Welcome to the legal insitituions, be repepare to drop all your common knowledge and learn the real technical law terms.”

Where is my battery!

I’ve recently purchased TX2522AU (HP Tablet Laptop)

Love the features but it only comes with 4 cell battery.
Obvious problem with these model is that AMD CPU it comes with isn’t very good at conserving power and 4cell will last may be an hour.

I’m planning to use the tablet within the lecture and that may go UPTO 3 hrs…

Its not a big problem (although bit expensive), I simply need to buy spare battery.

Problems..
1 The biggest Tx2000, TX2500 ‘s spare battery are only 8 cells. Blame the size, but while other laptops offer 12 cells or even bigger types, 8? isnt very big for a SPARE
2 I never realised that it is SOOOO hard to find spare battery.  search google.com.au (restrict to AUS only) and see how many KC991AA (model # for 8cell).
there arent many!!!!
3 I’ve decided to order via HP online directly. I mean they’re the vendor. Im expecting to have them. To my surprise, I had to call HP and find out that HP themselves do not have stock, nor can provide me with ETA on arrival. Best bet was to “Call back and try again in wks time”

Solution

I’ve decided to order from US.

Why is so hard to get battery for HP ??

XenApp 5.0? what 5.0?

“XenApp 5 For Windows Server 2003 does not include any server side updates.”

I have read numerous forum posts and certain discussion but FINALLY found formal(?) written notice from Citrix site that XA 5.0 for W2K3 is indeed 4.5 FR1.

Thanks to WANScaler (now called Repeater products) I need 4.5 FR1….(or 5.0)

STOP 50, STOP AB

Its not the first time I have seen STOP AB.
It seems that it end endless battle for Microsoft to patch up STOP AB issue.

To my knowledge, there are numerous STOP AB patch (post W2k3 SP2)
and I have found last wk that they have released bland new patch on March 09.

yay… talking about patching server again….

If you’re another person who’ve seen STOP AB and STOP 50
use kb959828 patch
make sure there is no NT4 Printer Drive on your terminal server

(that kb959828 may be valid for another 6months or so..)

Juniper Firewall.

We have High Availability configured firewall cluster in our environment.
For some reason, it was configured to use 10Mbit for the DMZ interface. Most may argue that 10Mb on DMZ where we do not host much service (other than Citrix) is more than adequate to match the need of the environment.

well firstly, I didnt know NSRP requires to change its “monitoring” interface.
and second, NSRP monitored interface had to be changed MANUALLY on both FW.

If you get error as system not in sync, check below and make sure monitor interface is identical on both.

http://kb.juniper.net/KB9817

Law~

I have been advised that the Law school text book would cost fortune from a close friend. Unfortunately, I have ordered a batch of books for the my first semester and bill was wooping $550.

Wow….

Ok costs of the book blew me once, but my colleague simply reminded me the fact that I have to READ them all

good news is that I’ve just started to read “Understanding Law” and it is quite “interesting” material to read.
Perhaps because I have been reading not much but IT materials in past decade or so.

career change?

I started to find recently, this down term is finally starting to bite IT as well.

Not that it was unexpected but think when your close friend gives you behind story of how other companies are cutting down their IT related people.

Honestly, I don’t feel too comfortable either. This is even when my position is relatively safe as I am one man army in my role (Citrix support) and whole IT Operation is done by 5 people. (Already gone through reduction prior to myself joining the company)

another reason for not feeling good is that I only professionally worked since 1999 Dec, thats around 9 years of career time and I’ve already experienced two down terms. I don’t believe I am old but things are rosy nor will be rosy forever.

Well, I wish there is easier way or simple solution to save guard the future, but so far, I can only think re-arming myself with more knowledge is the way to go.

so I decided to apply for Law postgraduate. (yes… its crazy), lucky me, since I have a bachelor degree, getting an admission was not as hard as getting in to bachelor degree.

Question is… can will I survive for another 6 yrs of educationm after 7 yrs of undergraduate cource to graduate for a degree?

BTW, I have learnt that it is not too hard to start “Juris Doctor” (graduate degree for law) or even diploma of law to satisfy academic requirement to be a lawyer in NSW. It will only cost TIME, MONEY(dip,law is actually cheap) and effort to study.

Now, to commit or not to commit…

when 3.5 isnt good enough

I like new functions in framework but every new version has SOMETHING thats missing where I need most.

.net 3.5 came out with nice/better wrapper for the AD modification, yet it didnt give me the function to modify all the properties especially the tsprofilepath.

well I’ve found the alternative but you need to import DLL(Interop.TSUSEREXLIB.DLL) from here

then use the code below

using TSUSEREXLib;
using System.DirectoryServices;
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace Set_Terminal_Service_Properties
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
string acctName = “chrisca”;
string tsHomeDrive = “H:”;
string tsHomeDirectory = “\\\\servername\\tshomedirectory\\”;
string tsProfilePath = “\\\\servername\\tsprofilepath\\”;
int enableLogon = 1; // enable terminal service logins

DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry
(“LDAP://CN=Chris Calderon,CN=Users,DC=corp,DC=contoso,DC=com”);
ADsTSUserEx oUser = (ADsTSUserEx)entry.NativeObject;
oUser.AllowLogon = enableLogon;
oUser.TerminalServicesHomeDirectory = tsHomeDirectory + acctName;
oUser.TerminalServicesHomeDrive = tsHomeDrive;
oUser.TerminalServicesProfilePath = tsProfilePath + acctName;
entry.CommitChanges();
entry.Close();
}
}
}

Alternatively, my code looks like below (need reference to System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement in .net 3.5)

var context = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain);
var user = UserPrincipal.FindByIdentity(context, IdentityType.SamAccountName, UserNameBox.Text);
Debug.WriteLine(“UserNameBox” + UserNameBox.Text);
ResultBox.Text = ResultBox.Text + Environment.NewLine + “ScriptPath ” + user.ScriptPath;
Debug.WriteLine(“user.GetGroups().Count()” + user.GetGroups().Count());
Debug.WriteLine(“user” + user.DistinguishedName);
foreach (GroupPrincipal group in user.GetGroups())
{
ResultBox.Text = ResultBox.Text + Environment.NewLine + group.SamAccountName;
}
DirectoryEntry de = new DirectoryEntry(“LDAP://”+user.DistinguishedName);

ADsTSUserEx tsu = (ADsTSUserEx)de.NativeObject;
Debug.WriteLine(“tspath” + tsu.TerminalServicesHomeDirectory );
Well using Interop will be messy but I think its better than writing process execute code to start vbs. (Alternative method is to use invokeSet, but I could not find better example so I’ve passed using it.)

Above original Code is refered from here

vmware nightmare

Firstly, I love virtualisation. ESX, Hyper-V, Xen Server, VirtualBox anything.
But I when its not working as designed (due to whatever cause), I just have to scream out that I am utterly disappointed.

Just two days ago, we have had SAN Array upgrade on the mirrored cage. SAN is mirrored hence we were able to run the whole system without shutting down ESX as it fall back to 2nd array without issue (thanks to Datacore SANMelody)

Problem became apparent when ESX failed to log back in to the primary SAN Array and only logged in to the secondary SAN Arrays.

Ok… what do we do.

1 panic
2 panic
3 panic

well lets put a jokes aside, conclusion with speaking to vendors were to reboot ESX server or to reset SAN switch.

well we have V-motion so shutting down ESX werent big issue (as we thought)

Moral of the story – dont perform V-motion when system is unstable.

First we perform migration on test server without issue, (in fact 4 times) then we perform migration on the mail(exchange) and it failed. By this time, VC had lost connection to ESX and we were force to connect directly to ESX via VI or SSH.

well lucky enough we still had 1 stable ESX which manged to get mail server migrated and started up ok in 40min.

Aftermath – complaints from executives, blame from vendors that SAN swtich firmware is old, vmware update (3.5u2) is not installed.

I guess we got a lot of work to do…

give me your key.

104bit WEP key can be obtained within 1min with 20MB of sniffed data.

Wow… now WEP isnt safe at all ?
I knew with enough data (like 2Gig) you can calculate and pull out WEP key but only 20MB now?

University of Kobe and Hiroshima will be releasing the details soon including WINDOWS based program as well. I guess we just have to keep our eyes open for now.