Platform: All Windows
As a system administrator (or frankly, power home user with big drives), one of the more tedious tasks is managing drive space. Now that we are in an era of half-terabyte drives, giant databases, media files, etc, it's often very difficult to figure out where all that space went. A very powerful visualization tool is the use of treemaps. A typical treemap application takes a data set and represents it graphically, with the size (or date) of data scaled relative to the other datasets. With a tool that does this based on drive space usage, you can quickly locate that 1GB memory.dmp file you forgot about after the last BSOD, or find that .iso image of Windows 2000 you no longer need, etc. A fantastic implementation of this is SequoiaView from the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven in the Netherlands. This free application is fabulous for graphically representing drive space usage on Windows.
Monday, March 07, 2005
Platform: All Hardware
Here's a trick I came up with a week ago. If you work in any sort of data center or high server density server room, it's always very difficult to identify a noise from a particular fan or hard drive. Last week our phone system had developed a drive with a head or bearing problem, but there were no log entries on the machine to identify the drive. Since the drives are hot swappable, it was no big deal to pull the drive out while the system is running. This system has high-availability requirements, too. The problem here was that the drives are closely packed together, and the high pitched sound coming from the bad drive was such that it made it very difficult to identify which drive was the problem one. One potential solution is a stethescope. I did not have one immediately available to me. Another solutions which I did have available was to use an inexpensive sound level meter. I have an older version of the Radio Shack model 33-4050 that I keep in my toolkit (I used to install car stereos and consider myself a home theater enthusiast as well). Using the sound meter on the A weighting, I could move the meter up and down across the array of drives and find the one making the loudest noise. That one was the bad one, and I was able to easily identify it where my ears failed me.
Here's a trick I came up with a week ago. If you work in any sort of data center or high server density server room, it's always very difficult to identify a noise from a particular fan or hard drive. Last week our phone system had developed a drive with a head or bearing problem, but there were no log entries on the machine to identify the drive. Since the drives are hot swappable, it was no big deal to pull the drive out while the system is running. This system has high-availability requirements, too. The problem here was that the drives are closely packed together, and the high pitched sound coming from the bad drive was such that it made it very difficult to identify which drive was the problem one. One potential solution is a stethescope. I did not have one immediately available to me. Another solutions which I did have available was to use an inexpensive sound level meter. I have an older version of the Radio Shack model 33-4050 that I keep in my toolkit (I used to install car stereos and consider myself a home theater enthusiast as well). Using the sound meter on the A weighting, I could move the meter up and down across the array of drives and find the one making the loudest noise. That one was the bad one, and I was able to easily identify it where my ears failed me.
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
Platform: All Windows
Here's the most awesome link site I've found it a while. This is A comprehensive list of startup apps that you might find running on your or another person's PC. I see all sorts of crap sneak into our network by people who cannot resist downloading junk. Using this and rkill (from the 2K resource kit) is a useful way to figure out what those exe's do.
Here's the most awesome link site I've found it a while. This is A comprehensive list of startup apps that you might find running on your or another person's PC. I see all sorts of crap sneak into our network by people who cannot resist downloading junk. Using this and rkill (from the 2K resource kit) is a useful way to figure out what those exe's do.
Wednesday, July 23, 2003
Platform: Windows 2003
The return of the B: drive! Today I was fumbling around with a new 2K3 Server (Standard Edition) and discovered I could reassign my CDROM drive to letter B: This is not possible under 2K and XP, as I checked them. This is great, since the concept of two floppy drives has died so long ago I feel quite aged when thinking about it. What to make B: ? CDROM of course!
The return of the B: drive! Today I was fumbling around with a new 2K3 Server (Standard Edition) and discovered I could reassign my CDROM drive to letter B: This is not possible under 2K and XP, as I checked them. This is great, since the concept of two floppy drives has died so long ago I feel quite aged when thinking about it. What to make B: ? CDROM of course!
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
Platform: Windows 2000, 2003, XP
If you are having a problem seeing your machine dynamically register itself in DNS, make sure you are running the DHCP client services. Logic would dictate that you don't need to run this if using a statically assigned address (which is what I do on all of our servers), but the DHCP client service is what takes your IP and registers it in DNS. Re-enable the DHCP Client service to automatic and reboot (just starting it didn't seem to do it for me), and you'll see it in your DDNS server again.
If you are having a problem seeing your machine dynamically register itself in DNS, make sure you are running the DHCP client services. Logic would dictate that you don't need to run this if using a statically assigned address (which is what I do on all of our servers), but the DHCP client service is what takes your IP and registers it in DNS. Re-enable the DHCP Client service to automatic and reboot (just starting it didn't seem to do it for me), and you'll see it in your DDNS server again.
Wednesday, April 02, 2003
Platform: Windows XP
The native Windows XP support for CDRW's is very limiting, but in a small department where you want to support a single external USB CDRW drive, for example, it eliminates the software licensing complexities and troubleshooting problems of installing Nero or Roxio EZ CD Creator on multiple machines. Most users can deal with it nicely, but it doesn't support .iso files natively.
Thanks to Alex Feinman, though, there's a great freebie Power Toy called ISO Recorder Power Toy. If you have a need to burn .iso files (or copy CDs), this is just the ticked for doing it in the shell. Download this little gem from the ISO Recorder web site. I give it three thumbs up, and I've only got two!
The native Windows XP support for CDRW's is very limiting, but in a small department where you want to support a single external USB CDRW drive, for example, it eliminates the software licensing complexities and troubleshooting problems of installing Nero or Roxio EZ CD Creator on multiple machines. Most users can deal with it nicely, but it doesn't support .iso files natively.
Thanks to Alex Feinman, though, there's a great freebie Power Toy called ISO Recorder Power Toy. If you have a need to burn .iso files (or copy CDs), this is just the ticked for doing it in the shell. Download this little gem from the ISO Recorder web site. I give it three thumbs up, and I've only got two!
Friday, March 14, 2003
Platform: Redhat Linux 8.0
Installing Dante--the build doesn't work. I was trying to install dante-1.1.13 (a free implementation of a SOCKS server that installs on Linux). During the build process I got the following errors:
sockd_request.c: Undefined
reference to `__bwap_32’ (I got 6 of these errors)
sockd_request.0:~/dante-1.1.13/sockd/sockd_request.c:352:
more undefined references to `__bswap_32’ follow
collect2: ld
returned 1 exit status
I dug all over looking for this one, and eventually discovered it’s due to a broken entry in the gcc compiler under Redhat 8.0. The fix is to make some changes to /usr/include/bits/byteswap.h. Full details are in the gcc-prs mail archive. This is broken on my gcc RPM version gcc-3.2-7.
Change line 84 from
# define __bswap_16(x) \
to
# define __bswap_32(x) \
and now your build should work!
Dante
Dante Installation Instructions
Installing Dante--the build doesn't work. I was trying to install dante-1.1.13 (a free implementation of a SOCKS server that installs on Linux). During the build process I got the following errors:
sockd_request.c: Undefined
reference to `__bwap_32’ (I got 6 of these errors)
sockd_request.0:~/dante-1.1.13/sockd/sockd_request.c:352:
more undefined references to `__bswap_32’ follow
collect2: ld
returned 1 exit status
I dug all over looking for this one, and eventually discovered it’s due to a broken entry in the gcc compiler under Redhat 8.0. The fix is to make some changes to /usr/include/bits/byteswap.h. Full details are in the gcc-prs mail archive. This is broken on my gcc RPM version gcc-3.2-7.
Change line 84 from
# define __bswap_16(x) \
to
# define __bswap_32(x) \
and now your build should work!
Dante
Dante Installation Instructions
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