Monday 30 August 2004

Online Crash Analysis

Ever been gifted with a stop error on Windows 2003? This is not a rant, as I am 99% sure the error was due to crappy hardware. When I logged in one of our W2K3 Servers the system presented the usual screen that demands explanations of why it was so unpolitely shut down.

It pleased me to see that itself knew about the stop error and already provided the explanation. Even better, it asked me to send Microsoft a complete memory dump, so they can try and find out what the problem was. Here is a snip of what the upload interface looks like (it's web based):



It's gonna be sweet make MS waste their time to find out I have a bad memory card :-).

Local users and groups


Free translation: "Local users and groups. It is not possible to access the computer CARECA. Error: the wrong disk is in the drive. Insert disk %2 (Volume serial number: %3) in drive %1.

Saturday 28 August 2004

Friday 27 August 2004

Services For Unix - NFS Client: First Blood, Part II

I dare you to change the default file creation permissions from 755 to something which doesn't have the execute bit set.

Alright, I don't know much about NFS, but isn't there a way to find out if the file you are acessing is a regular file or a directory? Because once you remove that execute bit from the permissions you can no longer search in directories, resulting in a nice "Access denied" for the folder you've just created.

Maybe there should be different options for files and folders. But that's my humble opinion. Anyway, I'm stuck with regular files looking like -rwx-r-x-r-x on my directory listings. I've always wanted to execute a windows backup file on Linux!

Services For Unix - NFS Client

Hooray, a NFS client! just try and use it with robocopy:

2004/08/27 09:56:49 ERROR 5 (0x00000005) Time-Stamping Destination File c:\backup\BlackFishWapBKP.BAK
Access is denied.

SQL Server 2000 - Operator alerts

So here I am, trying to get MSSQL 2000 to send a simple email alert whenever it finishes a backup job. The interface looks very intuitive, but how the hell do I set up a MAPI profile for the user running SQL Server?

Wading through the documentation I quickly find out that I need to have either Outlook (not express - I tried that one, no good) or Exchange Client installed. Now why is that? Do I really have to cripple my already loaded server with Office so I can receive a simple email?