I wanted to post a quick blurb here about making registry edits on nodes of a Microsoft cluster. This is especially handy when attempting to change paths that are tied to a cluster resource or service.
You must make sure that the cluster resource is online (or that the service is running) when you make the registry edits. You must make the edits on the active node of the cluster as well. After you have made the registry edits you may take the resource offline or stop the service. Now you restart the service or bring the cluster resource online and the most recent registry settings are passed back to the registry (the changes you recently made.) The changes will also be propagated to the passive node at the next fail over.
This is a key issue that even Microsoft tech support seems to ignore at times. If you make changes to a registry key when the service is stopped or cluster resource is offline, when you restart the service or bring the cluster resource online, it will overwrite your changes with the last known registry settings for that service or resource before it stopped or went offline. This can often put system administrators in a loop of changing registry keys and then having them revert. The reason for this behavior is that in a cluster, the cluster's Registry Checkpoint is in a special area of the quorum. Every time a service is restarted or a cluster resource is brought online, the Registry Checkpoint information is written back to the active node. Every time a service is stopped or a cluster resource is taken offline, the current registry information residing in the active node is written back to the cluster's Registry Checkpoint.
With that said, it makes perfect sense that services must be running in order for your registry change to be written into the cluster's Registry Checkpoint in the quorum and thus propagated from that same Registry Checkpoint.
I hope this saves someone out there a lot of hair pulling some day.
Editing Registry Settings in a Microsoft Cluster
Choosing a good business documentation wiki - Docuwiki Mediawiki Tikiwiki
Although I have been very diligent in the past with regard to creating documentation for various projects that I have undertaken, there still remains the problem of organizing and managing that documentation. A slew of text files, even with descriptive names, doesn't help someone looking for a specific instance of information. This becomes more frustrating when that information is needed promptly to address a pressing issue. With the advent of more powerful search capabilities and indexing of every single file sitting on a computer, these stresses can be greatly reduced, but that introduces a new limit to that information - it is locally held on a single PC. It doesn't take long to realize that if there was a way to present this information via a web based interface, so that a group of people can view the information and edit it if necessary, it would be a great thing. Although there are several ways to approach this situation, one of the best and easiest ways to do so is via a wiki.
A wiki is software that allows people to easily create, edit and link web pages. It is mostly used to create collaborative web sites such as Wikipedia. A wiki lend itself perfectly to the creation and maintenance of collaborative documentation products. Moreover, with a database back end or easily portable text files, the wiki can be backed up, moved to a new location and searched with ease and convenience.
There are a myriad of wikis available for various stated uses, but I have narrowed down the field to the three wikis that I feel are the best out there. One condition that I established early on (and is entirely arbitrary to my situation) is that the wiki be free to use and distribute. This means that most likely, the wiki would have to be open source. With that said, the top three condenters are DocuWiki, TikiWiki and MediaWiki. All three wikis are free and licensed under some form of the GPL. This means that they are able to be freely distributed and modified in any way, and that you are obliged to submit any modifications you make to the open source community for the improvement of the project.
MediaWiki is the same wiki used by Wikipedia, and I would ventire to say that if it can handle the heavy use of Wikipedia, it would be more than able to handle a collaborative documentation project. MediaWiki is easy to use, supports multiple languages, indexes content on the fly and supports discussions.
TikiWiki is more along the lines of groupware or content management systems, but functions as a wiki as well. It has many additional options not found in other wikis such as forums, image and file gallery and calendaring. This is a great wiki for an online collaboration site of just about any topic.
Lastly, DokuWiki is a standards-compliant wiki that was designed for documentation. DokuWiki has a powerful syntax and is based on text files that can be easily read outside the wiki. It is a great wiki for documentation purposes because of the way it supports structured format.
Of the three top contenders, it is hard to choose one as the true best. I would say that if your primary purpose is documentation only, I would go with DokuWiki. If you want something that is slightly more diverse than documentation, but not 'all over the place' then MediaWiki is your wiki. If you want something that functions more like a CMS in which users can not only collaborate on content, but also have discussions in forums and share files and images, then TikiWiki is it. For the project I am currently working on (which needs a wkiki type information bse), I decided to go with MediaWiki to give me a little more than just a documentation based wiki, but I am considering changing some of my blogs over to TikiWiki to enable readers to discuss things in forums and share files and images.
IBM Releases Statistics about Lotus Symphony users
As it turns out, IBM has gathered a few statistics about users of the new Lotus Symphony suite that IBM is offering for free at http://symphony.lotus.com IBM states that 88% of Lotus Symphony are Microsoft Office users, and that although Lotus Symphony is only available in English, more than 50% of users are outside of the United States. The user base has surpassed 250,000 and that many Microsoft Office users are trying out Lotus Symphony to assess if it is a suitable replacement for Microsoft Office. As it stands, the common sentiment is that most users of Microsoft Office do not use advanced features that are not available in other free office application suites. With this in mind, many small business, students, non-profit organizations and anyone who lacks the financial means to afford Micrsoft Office can definitely benefit from suites such as Lotus Symphony. I can tell you from personal experience that Lotus Symphony is a more than adequate replacement for most Microsoft Office users with one enormous benefit - it's FREE.
Read the full article at: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/139618/microsoft_uses_pick_symphony_ibm_says.html
Seagate Maxtor Hard Drives Tainted with Virus that reports to Chinese websites
The Taipei Times reports that a batch of Maxtor branded Seagate hard drives have been tainted with a virus that uploads data stored on the devices to Chinese websites. It is not yet known how this has happened, but the Chinese government has been known to run aggressive spying programs involving information technology and the internet. Several users of the devices reported finding the trojan on brand new hard drives and alerted the investigation bureau. So far, the only devices confirmed as tainted with this virus are the Maxtor Basics 500 GB drives. Everyone should check to make sure that they do not have these disks. If so, they should be returned to the location where they were purchased. Initial reports state that 1800 units were shipped to stores. Of those 1500 have been pulled off shelves, with the remaining 300 having been sold to consumers already.
Read the full article at: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2007/11/11/2003387202
IBM Lotus Symphony Beta 2 - My Hands On Opinion
There are definitely some of us out there that remember the name 'Lotus Symphony.' For some it is a nostalgic memory of Big Blue's (IBM) time in the sun. For others, it's not as nice of a memory. There was a day when the name IBM evoked feelings of pride and excitement. I still spell out the acronym mentally every time I see the name IBM - International Business Machines. Wow! To this day, I look up to IBM and hope for the day when they once again compete head to head (market share wise) with the Redmond Giant. Enough about history - time to move on to the good stuff.
IBM has resurrected the Lotus Symphony name with their new 'office suite.' It should be well noted that although they are offering Lotus Symphony, their Lotus Notes and Smart Suite products. While Lotus Symphony includes a word processor application, spreadsheet application and presentation application, their paid-for product includes all three of these plus an email application. That being said, this is an excellent product for those who want office applications without paying licensing fees. The underlying code for Lotus Symphony is a fork of the Open Office source built to run on IBM's Eclipse platform.
All in all, the suite is a fine application suite for business users. All three applications are able to read, edit and save in most common formats, with the additional capability to save a document in PDF format built in. The applications function similarly to any other office suite applications like Open Office, Star Office, Word Perfect and MS Office. The single greatest 'innovation' that I love about Lotus Symphony is the placing of the Properties Editor to the left of the document editing window. Most office applications place the properties editor tool bars or buttons above the document editing window - compressing an already small vertical real-estate editing space. With most new PCs migrating to the use of wide screen monitors, it makes sense to put any kinds of tool bars off to the side of the editing space. This leaves more room for the editing space and also maximizes use of the entire screen. This may not seem like a big deal to a lot of people at first, but I urge everyone to try it out. Use the Lotus Symphony Suite for a month or so and you'll see what I mean. It just 'makes sense.' Hopefully more software companies and providers will follow IBM's lead and move the properties editing tool bars off to the side of the application space, but until then, give Lotus Symphony a spin and see what I mean.
You can download your copy of IBM Lotus Symphony Suite here: http://symphony.lotus.com/
Content Management Systems - Windows IIS and Linux Apache
So the other day, I decided to investigate what Content Management Systems are available to the Microsoft and Linux crowds. As you can imagine, there are a multitude of open-source Content Management Systems out there such as Drupal, Joomla, PHP-Nuke, Postnuke and XOOPS. On the Microsoft side, you have Drupal, Plone and MOSS 2007 among others. I wanted to get some feedback from the web masters and administrators out there with respect to the benefits and drawbacks to each. Which do you run in your production environments? Which do you run at home or for personal sites? Which is your favorite?
I also stumbled across a great site that lets you 'try out' many of the open-source Content Management Systems out there. A handful of these are also multi-platform, so the site can be of interest to the windows web server administrators out there as well. The site is http://www.opensourcecms.com/
What are your opinions on these Content Management Systems?
-Ernest
Sprint Sierra 580 EVDO Card & Linux / Ubuntu
Below is a post that I had up on an old blog...I am bringing it back for the sake of people trying to configure their EVDO cards under Linux. It works in Debian and Ubuntu...should be similar for any other distribution.
Follow the steps as shown, and you should be able to connect just fine...
There is an initial assumption that the wireless card has already been activated by sprint (and probably used in windows at some point to verify that it works.)
1. Insert your wireless card and be sure that your computer recognizes it as a USB device. Look in dmesg for it. Once you have verified that it is recognized by your system, proceed to step 2.
2. Issue the following commands (you will need to sudo or su to do this)
# modprobe usbserial vendor=0x1199 product=0x0112
# mknod /dev/ttyUSB0 c 188 0
Next is the configuration of PPPD and the scripts needed.
3. Create a file named '1xevdo' with the following text, and place it in the '/etc/ppp/peers/' directory
lcp-echo-interval 0
-detach
ttyUSB0
115200
debug
noauth
defaultroute
usepeerdns
user 210xxxxxxx@sprintpcs.com
show-password
crtscts
lock
connect '/usr/sbin/chat -v -t3 -f /etc/ppp/peers/1xevdo_chat'
Be sure to replace '210xxxxxxx' with your wireless card's area code and 7 digit phone number.
4. Create another file, named '1xevdo_chat' with the text below and place in the ' /etc/ppp/peers/' directory.
'' 'AT'
'OK' 'ATE0V1&F&D2&C1&C2S0=0'
'OK' 'ATE0V1'
'OK' 'ATS7=60'
'OK' 'ATDT#777'
5. Use your text editor of choice (we all know it's vi) to add the following line to '/etc/ppp/pap-secrets'
210xxxxxxx@sprintpcs.com * zzzz
where '210xxxxxxx' is the phone number assigned to your card, and 'zzzz' is the password for your wireless card account (typically the last 4 digits of the phone number).
6. as root, issue the following command to connect to the internet
# pppd call 1xevdo
--------
That's all the instructions for the process, and hopefully it will work for you. here are some observations I have:
If you get a 'connect script failed' type of error, and you are sure that you followed the instructions, remove the wireless card and reinsert it. This is what I had to do to get my card to work properly.
The modprobe and mknod commands will need to be re issued every time you reboot. You will not need to recreate the files and scripts. You can automate the scripts for modprobe and mknod if you wish. I will post more on the automation later.
You will get two types of output when your attempt to run the script. Either you will get an error (failed connection script), or you will get a long output similar to the following:
serial connection established.
using channel 2
Using interface ppp1
Connect: ppp1 <--> /dev/ttyUSB0
sent [LCP ConfReq id=0x1
rcvd [LCP ConfReq id=0x0
sent [LCP ConfAck id=0x0
rcvd [LCP ConfReq id=0x1
sent [LCP ConfAck id=0x1
sent [LCP ConfReq id=0x1
rcvd [LCP ConfAck id=0x1
sent [LCP EchoReq id=0x0 magic=0xeda0c264]
sent [CCP ConfReq id=0x1
sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x1
rcvd [LCP DiscReq id=0x2 magic=0xee74136c]
rcvd [LCP EchoRep id=0x0 magic=0xee74136c ed a0 c2 64]
rcvd [IPCP ConfReq id=0x3
sent [IPCP ConfAck id=0x3
rcvd [LCP ProtRej id=0x4 80 fd 01 01 00 0f 1a 04 78 00 18 04 78 00 15 03 2f]
Protocol-Reject for 'Compression Control Protocol' (0x80fd) received
rcvd [IPCP ConfRej id=0x1
sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x2
rcvd [IPCP ConfNak id=0x2
sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x3
rcvd [IPCP ConfAck id=0x3
not replacing default route to ppp0 [10.5.250.5]
Cannot determine ethernet address for proxy ARP
local IP address xx.x.xx.xx
remote IP address xx.xx.xxx.xx
primary DNS address xx.xx.xxx.xx
secondary DNS address xx.xx.xxx.xx
Script /etc/ppp/ip-up started (pid 4273)
Script /etc/ppp/ip-up finished (pid 4273), status = 0x0
Once you are connected, by seeing the above information in your terminal window, open a web browser and try to view some pages. If your browser cannot serve pages, you may need to edit your resolve.conf file manually and add the DNS servers that you see in the above output. This should get you on the road to full connectivity in linux!
