Home of DJ and technophile Jonathan Puddle (aka J Puddy)
Work
Great Plains – invalid pathnames file
Feb 25th
In years gone by we’ve used Great Plains Dynamics as our financial software at work. We transitioned off it in 2006, but still have to keep it around for auditing purposes. We had a power failure a little while back, and the machine that GP is running on died, and on reboot Great Plains didn’t work. In my busyness I didn’t really bother with it, until I got a call that we had an audit coming up on some ancient history.
When opening GP, we received the error: “Your path to the data is incorrect. Please enter the location of you Pathnames More >
How to identify vmware-vmx.exe process to a VM
Dec 10th
I’ve often had the need to figure out which vmware-vmx.exe process (on a Windows VMware Server host) matched which virtual machine. Maybe a development machine has locked up, or otherwise won’t respond to VMware server shutdown requests… it happens to me semi-regularly.
I found the answer here. You can use the SysInternal tool “Process Explorer” to see what command line argument has been executed for each process. In the case of vmware-vmx.exe, the virtual machine client name is in the command line executable, so you can figure out which VM matches the process.
Genius. Thanks a lot rsa911!
Setting up a road warrior style VPN connection with pfsense and OpenVPN
Nov 25th
VPN is a wonderful thing. I’m particularly fond of IPSEC and OpenVPN, as they allow some great tunneling and remote connection possibilities. Following is a basic tutorial to get your pfsense firewall to handle OpenVPN road warriors, and how to configure the clients. This is based on the tutorial by Frewald on the pfsense forums, but simplified for my personal benefit. OpenVPN on pfSense – Installation guide for Windows Dummies :- road-warrior.
The first thing you need to be aware of, is that you’re likely going to authenticate to pfsense’s OpenVPN implementation with certificates. The OpenVPN client includes everything you need More >
Amazon’s new packaging initiative: Oh please oh please!
Nov 4th
I came across Jeff Bezos’ announcement on Amazon yesterday, regarding their new packaging plan. Slashdot reported it as well. Basically, they’ve convinced a number of manufacturers to simplify and green-ify their product packaging, and are hoping this will catch on over the next few years.
All I can say is good freaking job Amazon. Here is a company using it’s clout to effect some positive change. I am sick of the massive amount of plastic and crap I get sent when I order just about anything, from just about anywhere. Simplicity of opening is one thing, as I have certainly sliced my More >
All systems are go
Aug 19th
Work has been pretty wild lately. I was talking to my boss today and I said that IT at TACF is probably about as full-on as it has been in about 5 years.
- I’m managing the relaunches of 5+ websites, which as anyone familiar with that process knows, can be a crapload of work. We’re going to rebuild our DotNetNuke infrastructure from a clean slate, as we’ve been upgrading this thing since version 2, and have fundamentally different requirements since the customizations made at that time. - We’re ramping up our CRM/ERP application, Everest, customizing it more than we’ve More >
iPhone working with Microsoft Exchange
Jul 16th
I’m happy to say that we at TACF have our one iPhone updated with version 2.0, and have got it syncing with Exchange 2003.
Apple provide a document that offers a trivial level of assistance in setting things up. If you’re already using ActiveSync for other devices, then you’ll be working already. If you’re not using ActiveSync (or aren’t sure if you are), but you are using Outlook Web Access already, then you’re just a couple of steps away. There are a few guides out there for enabling ActiveSync, which is really a simple matter of enabling in Exchange System Manager, and More >
SQL Query contraints of a database
Jul 5th
Another useful query I was in need of, and found, yesterday. This one is care of Pinal Dave (who writes a very useful blog, which has helped me before), though I added the “Order By” line. This query lists all the constraints of a database. Replace AdventureWorks with your DB name.
USE AdventureWorks; GO SELECT OBJECT_NAME(OBJECT_ID) AS NameofConstraint, SCHEMA_NAME(schema_id) AS SchemaName, OBJECT_NAME(parent_object_id) AS TableName, type_desc AS ConstraintType FROM sys.objects WHERE type_desc LIKE ‘%CONSTRAINT’ ORDER BY NameofConstraint GO
Query a MSSQL database for table sizes
Jul 3rd
We use Microsoft SQL 2005 for our mission critical and web databases. In one instance, we’re able to use SQL Express just fine, but lately I had been keeping an eye on a DB that was approaching the 4GB limit imposed on SQL Express. I had a Google for queries to list the table sizes (it’s simple enough to find out the size of a single table in Management Studio, but querying is clearly simpler/faster). I found exactly what I was looking for, thanks to Scott Moss. Paste this below, replacing OnePoint with your DB name. Everything else is fine More >
More reasons to stay away from GoDaddy
Jun 30th
The first few domains I set up I had hosted with GoDaddy, as they seemed like a decent company. I moved my domains away from GoDaddy a couple of years ago, as I started to feel uneasy about them, but couldn’t put my finger on anything in particular (other than fishy pricing). Over the last couple of years a lot has been surfacing about their business practices, and other things I didn’t agree with. I moved TACF’s domains away from GoDaddy, largely due to their Superbowl adverts (which I find amusing, but tasteless).
A little while ago ICANN slapped GoDaddy down More >
How to email FROM specific IPs, using Linux and Postfix
May 19th
I was asked recently to find an email solution for a new marketing firm. The solution specifically, was for the problem of outbound IP binding. That is what IP address email is sent from. If you’re providing email outsourcing for multiple clients, it’s important to keep each client on it’s own IP(s) so one being blacklisted won’t affect another. It’s a simple matter to add IP addresses to a server for the purposes of listening, but to tell a mail server to send from a particular IP(s) (and not just the default IP) can be a pit tricker. Depending on More >
Non admin users running scheduled batch tasks
May 5th
I ran into a problem a few months back where I found non-admin users on Windows Server 2003 couldn’t run batch files in scheduled tasks. I just gave up then as it wasn’t important, but I had to find a solution for the same issue today. Didn’t have to look far, it turned out:
SYMPTOMS When you run a batch job that runs under the context of a regular user account on a Microsoft Windows Server 2003-based computer, the script may not run. If you run the batch job by using the Scheduled Tasks feature, the following error message may be More >
Exchange server down all weekend… fixed
Mar 18th
I did some maintenance on our email server on Saturday (backup, chkdsk, defrag) just simple stuff, but somewhere inside the chkdsk things got mangled. I knew there were some file level problems on the machine, and there’d been a general stability problem for a while, so all of this was about due to happen. But what an annoyance, really. We had no inbound email for the entire weekend and Monday.
In the end, the problem was limited to our Xwall spam filter. It’s an incredible filter and I highly, highly recommend it. In this case a couple of it’s key files More >