geekmungus

The ramblings of a computer geek.

A repository of information that i've found from my experience, anything interesting I find i'll post up here so that someone else might find it useful!

My posts will be classified by subject area on the left hand column, select the subject area or search the site using the "Search this site" button at the top right. The most recent posts are listed for each topic area below, hope you find something of help!

VMWare

VMWare ESX 4.1 to 4.1 U1 Upgrade Network Card Gotcha! We recently upgraded our ESX hosts to ESX 4.1 U1, upon applying the 4.1 U1 update and then rebooting the server we found that the network adapters had ...
Posted 23 Jun 2011 11:11 by Tristan Self
VMWare ESX/ESXi 4.1 Upgrade to 4.1 Update 1 "Incompatible" Update I've been upgrading our ESX hosts to the latest version. From ESX 4.1 to ESX 4.1 U1 (Update 1), its been a little more complicated than i ...
Posted 20 Jun 2011 12:06 by Tristan Self
Moving a VM from local storage to the SAN This is a way to move the VMDKs for a VM from local storage to the SAN.First you need to get your SAN hooked in, once you do this ...
Posted 12 Jun 2011 07:22 by Tristan Self
VSphere 4 Cheat Sheet I'm still trying to get VMWare 3.5 installed completely and servers virtualised. But utlimately it would be nice to use vSphere4 in the end.Heres a good PDF ...
Posted 12 Jun 2011 07:17 by Tristan Self
Enable Jumbo Frames on Hardware ISCSI HBA vmhba If you need to use jumbo frames on your ISCSI you need to run this command from the command line of the ESX host:esxcfg-hwiscsi -j enable <vmhbaX>e ...
Posted 12 Jun 2011 07:04 by Tristan Self

Showing posts 1 - 5 of 7. View more »

Microsoft Windows

Windows Cannot Obtain the Domain Controller Name for Your Computer A Windows XP machine doesn't apply computer GPO on boot, all seems to be well and the GPOs can be run once logged on and all appear to be ...
Posted 25 Jan 2012 08:12 by Tristan Self
Service Principal Names (SPN) - A Basic Overview and Delegation Service Principal Names (SPN) - A Basic Overview For kerberos to operate correctly, it needs to make use of SPNs. Service Principal Names are built up to link a domain account ...
Posted 15 Jan 2012 08:23 by Tristan Self
Explainations of the Windows 4GB Limit, PAE, AWE and Large Page Support Microsoft has produced some good documents about each of these topics, see these links for details: Windows 4GB Limithttp://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb613473(v ...
Posted 13 Jan 2012 02:05 by Tristan Self
Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 - Server Recovery After a power cut one of our Windows 2008 R2 VMs was dead, even though it was cleanly shutdown by the UPS something must have happened and it would not ...
Posted 15 Dec 2011 05:53 by Tristan Self
Microsoft Outlook 2010 RTM - "Send As" Broken Upon setting up a "send as" permission a mailbox for a user I got stuck. Even though the permissions on the user object were correctly setup for "Send As" when ...
Posted 23 Sep 2011 01:20 by Tristan Self

Showing posts 1 - 5 of 23. View more »

Linux and Nagios

Using Tail to watch a log file If you ever need to watch a log file to see if something goes into it, here is a cheeky command to do that. The -f says to watch for ...
Posted 13 Dec 2011 00:19 by Tristan Self
Postfix SPF Error postfix-policyd-spf-perl SERVFAIL Workaround We had an interesting one with Postfix, we were recieving mail fine from all other domains. Then one domain (in this case domain.co.uk) started not to get through ...
Posted 27 Sep 2011 03:42 by Tristan Self
How to setup Software RAID on Ubuntu Linux My instructions on how to install software RAID on Ubuntu Linux, following these instructions when building the server. Document is attached to this post.
Posted 12 Jun 2011 07:40 by Tristan Self
VI - Search and Replace with a pathname Find and replace with VI on a pathname is a bit tricky you ned to use escape characters.In this case /bin/mail should be replaced with /usr/bin/mail ...
Posted 12 Jun 2011 07:21 by Tristan Self
Nagios - check_icmp With Nagios using check_icmp is the way to go, it better and faster, below is an example configuration directive for setting the check-host-alive command which will be ...
Posted 12 Jun 2011 07:15 by Tristan Self

Showing posts 1 - 5 of 9. View more »

Microsoft DPM

Sharepoint 2007 with DPM 2010 - Item Level Backup Items not Appearing for Restoration When Backup Sharepoint 2007, with DPM 2010, it catalougues MOSS items every 24 hours , if you need to force this operation to be able to restore item you can use ...
Posted 15 Oct 2011 00:56 by Tristan Self
Recommended DPM 2010 Hotfixes and Patches Correct Microsoft DPM patch levels are critical to the server operating properly. You should ensure that the primary and secondary servers are both running exactly the same hotfixes on DPM ...
Posted 24 Aug 2011 00:33 by Tristan Self
DPM 2007 - Volume Missing After a power cut, (before the UPS was installed!), on booting back up the DPM 2007 server, the server showed loads of replica disks saying "Volume Missing", before i crying ...
Posted 12 Jun 2011 07:01 by Tristan Self
Microsoft DPM 2007 (ID 998 Details: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host (0x80072746)) PROBLEM:The operation failed because of a protection agent failure. (ID 998 Details:An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host (0x80072746))SYMPTOMS:Had this problem occouring when ...
Posted 12 Jun 2011 07:00 by Tristan Self
DPM 2007 - Adding More Disk Storage Error - 0×80042420 I was adding more storage to our DPM 2007 server. We currently have a MD1000 with 15 x 1TB SATA disks, but i needed to add some more storage so ...
Posted 12 Jun 2011 05:11 by Tristan Self

Showing posts 1 - 5 of 6. View more »

Cisco and Networking

Cisco 6509 Damaged POE Modules We had a severe lightning storm with power cuts and multiple lightbolts hitting our buildings and grounds around our core server rooms. Luckly the UPSes carried the load and gobbled ...
Posted 30 Jun 2011 03:22 by Tristan Self
How to Configure Ghostcasting across/between VLANs In this example the ghost server is on IP address 172.27.5.73/24 and is in vlan 205.The ghostcasting clients (i.e. a workstation I want to ...
Posted 18 Jun 2011 07:58 by Tristan Self
Cisco VPN Client to PIX not Passing Traffic Tried to connect up to a pix using a Cisco VPN Client, the connection connected fine, but when I tried to VNC or RDC to something had no joy. Checking ...
Posted 14 Jun 2011 11:21 by Tristan Self
Cisco 4500 Series not Showing Ports Going Up or Down (with Terminal Montior) On our Cisco 4500 series switches we could not see when ports where going up or down, even when using "terminal monitor." We use this technique to identify ports and ...
Posted 13 Jun 2011 07:43 by Tristan Self
ip helper-address Not working on Cisco 3750 Switch I had a cisco 3750 switch that i wanted to enable some vlans for voice on, but only having one DHCP server on a completely seperate vlan to the voice ...
Posted 12 Jun 2011 05:27 by Tristan Self

Showing posts 1 - 5 of 6. View more »

General IT

QR Code Generator QR codes are cool, fact.Generate some of your own to stick around the place, then get a barcode reader on your smartphone to start using them.http://code.google ...
Posted 19 Aug 2011 07:48 by Tristan Self
Asterisk Grandstream BudgeTone 100 Attended and Unattended Transfers An attended transfer is one where a user A recieves an external call, he wishes to transfer to user B, user A calls user B and confirms they are willing ...
Posted 23 Jun 2011 11:22 by Tristan Self
Viewing CHM file from a UNC path I was viewing a CHM file from a UNC path, and was getting a "page cannot be displayed error", this appears to be down to the CHM file being read ...
Posted 15 Jun 2011 05:16 by Tristan Self
Visual Basic Tutorial Visual Basic is a more complex and updated version of an old programming language known as BASIC. BASIC stands for Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.BASIC became popular as ...
Posted 23 Jun 2011 11:39 by Tristan Self
Wargames At least once a year in the UK on a Bank Holiday the film WarGames is shown, possibly the best film about computer hackers ever made, as the inspiration for ...
Posted 13 Jun 2011 11:47 by Tristan Self

Showing posts 1 - 5 of 11. View more »

Microsoft SQL and Databases

Microsoft SQL 2000 SP4 In-Place Upgrade to SQL 2005 - Upgrade Advisor Error We had a very old server running SQL 2000 SP4 that we needed to upgrade to SQL 2005, as we didn't have the staff resource available for a complete ...
Posted 13 Jan 2012 00:39 by Tristan Self
Oracle TNS Listener Errors I recently had to resolve some TNS listener errors on a Oracle database server. It was Oracle 11g running on Microsoft Windows 2003 Server R2 SP2 32bit.Basically the problem ...
Posted 12 Jun 2011 05:18 by Tristan Self
Oracle, VMWare and Why You Should Add Indexes to Improve Performance I recently completed a migration of an 8 year old Oracle server to a nice new VM running on VMware Vpshere 4.1, this went without too many problems. However ...
Posted 12 Jun 2011 05:17 by Tristan Self

Showing posts 1 - 3 of 3. View more »