Yearly Archives: 2010 - Page 2

Catholic whining

Posted by on August 20, 2010 No comments | 2,529 views

Some of you out there may have caught the YouTube video by some fundies that call themselves “RealCatholicTV” that was posted last week. I came across it via PZ Myers blog. The video was describing their vision of a catholic dictatorship (their words) which of course included a vision of enforcing all the kinds of oppression that we know from history follow from such dictatorships. They of course realised, by the massive response, that such ideas are not very welcome in a free world that so many people have fought for and died to achieve. As the cowards they are, these fundies, they took down the video. Possibly also due to people reporting it for being overly hateful to for instance gay people, which I myself reported them for. Or maybe also because, I hope, that a large number of Catholics and other Christians reacted to such an outrageous video.

Now they’ve posted a pure whining video as a follow-up to the one taken down. Of course, they are moderating the comment section on YouTube, so don’t even bother commenting there. They seem to only allow cheerleader-comments through the filter. They are after all not too into the whole freedom of speech thing. It’s a bit of a nuisance when you plan to replace the free world with a Catholic theocracy as they’ve toned it down to.

The laughable aspects of this whining video is of course the obvious childish “but so do you” approach. They accuse the free world of being a dictatorship of relativism. Funny that. A democracy tend to reflect the attitude and ideals of the majority of its people. The free world does not want somebody with a superiority-complex (a pope in this case) to decide on behalf of everyone what’s best for them. That was actually a key argument in their original video. The pope knows best, better do what the pope says. The pope speaks to God you see, and the voices tells him what to do. Well, the voices also spoke to Hitler. We do not want such lunatics running our lives.

The video culminates in a smug fire-and-brimstone lecture which is nothing but a pitiful attempt to scare people into submission, not that any sane person would buy into such crap. This sorry excuse for a human being, Michael Voris, is probably looking forward to see us all burn in hell. His divinely inspired love for us spawns of Satan isn’t quite the selling point he think it is, but it is what we’d expect from a faith with its long tradition of corruption, abuse and oppression of other people’s freedom. Not to mention a clergy of less integrity than a school-yard rapist.

Here’s the YouTube-posted drivel in question, enjoy!

Sun Java and Ubuntu 10.04

Posted by on August 5, 2010 No comments | 4,136 views

Sun JavaUbuntu decided to drop Sun Java from the latest release of Ubuntu, Lucid Lynx. However for me to get my internet bank to work, I need this package installed. A bit of googling turned up the solution, and here it is:

Add the Canonical Partner Repository:

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner"

Then all you need to do is run the commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin

And there it is :)

Ubuntu mdadm: “Device or resource busy” error

Posted by on August 4, 2010 2 comments | 7,915 views

I have been upgrading my old fileserver today with new hardware and 4 new 2 TB Hitachi disks. I thought I’d set them up in a Raid 5 array. This is a new installation of Ubuntu Server 10.04 running on an Asus Deluxe mainboard with a SIL SATA controller with 6 SATA ports.

Firstly: The array was created with the command:

mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sd[bcde]

This all went well enough, but after a reboot, I got this error when trying to assemble the array:

mdadm: Cannot open /dev/sdb: Device or resource busy

Looking about a bit on the net I find this blogpost which is quite helpful: Righteous Hack: Device or resource busy when using mdadm. However it doesn’t quite solve my problem as I already thought of these options and double-checked them. Some further searching revealed this helpful post on ubuntuforums: Raid stops after restart (SOLVED). That did the trick! Turns out that one of the raid-disks (was random on my server) is attempted assembled during startup when mdadm doesn’t know what raid to assemble from the conf file. The solution is running the command:

mdadm --examine --scan --config=mdadm.conf >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

which produce this line in the mdadm.conf file:

ARRAY /dev/md0 level=raid5 num-devices=4 UUID=eb001a5c:9a62bf3b:1b3376be:99c3df95
spares=1

Now the raid comes up as it should after reboot.

As for the RAID setup, I used this guide: https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID_setup

Firefox Page Setup and A4

Posted by on July 23, 2010 2 comments | 3,436 views

Firefox is a great web browser, but it is also insanely frustrating to work with sometimes. For instance will the Page Setup default to US Letter, possibly the two most annoying words you can come across in the world of printers and printing. How many times haven’t you seen some office printer stuck on “Please insert Letter” holding the entire print-queue back? Why the fuck the Americans can’t adapt to international standards however is another rant altogether.

Firefox Print DialogueAnyway, the issue in Firefox is that when you try to print a webpage to file, at least under Ubuntu (haven’t tested it elsewhere), the Page Setup tab is greyed out. You actually have to go to the Page Setup menu option to change this. The Page Setup menu option has no shortcut, so if you’re unlucky enough to have a window that is menu-less like in my internet bank when looking at a receipt after paying a bill, you’re basically screwed. There is no way you can change the paper format. Changing it in the main window doesn’t affect the other one, nor does it care about default settings when the print dialogue is called from JavaScript or Ctrl-P.

The solution to this is to change the default printing option in the config because you can’t change it under preferences either. Type about:config into the address bar, and change the setting named print.postscript.paper_size from “letter” to “a4″. That fixes this annoying issue once and for all. Of course this should be detected from the OS regional options, but as user friendly as Firefox is, it isn’t that user friendly.

System Center Essentials 2010

Posted by on July 22, 2010 No comments | 3,975 views

System Center Essentials 2010 LogoThis summer I have been working for my old employer for nearly 5 weeks. The local council offices at my hometown. In the server room 3 new HP ProLiant rack servers were in boxes. I have set up a new domain controller for a subdomain, a new Exchange 2010 and DC server to replace the old Exchange/DC, and last but not least, a System Center Essentials 2010 server to monitor license usage and to push updates (which WSUS does for free anyway).

First step in the process was installing Windows 2008R2 server on the box. Plain sailing with HP’s SmartStart CD which gives you the option to easily configure the disk arrays and then push the OS installation onto the disks with drivers and everything going along with it. I set up 2 disk arrays, 2 146 GB Raid 1 mirror sets. One for the OS and one for the System Center Essentials (SCE) installation.

System Center Essentials 2010 is a stripped down version of the large and more expensive System Center tool. SCE is for smaller organizations up to 500 clients and 50 servers. We have about 20 servers and 200 clients, not counting school student computers. SCE is quite affordable, especially on our Volume License. The SCE software package itself is about a 5 GB download which I grabbed at our MS Volume License account. There is a good set of guides at Microsofts Technet website here. There isn’t much to say about the installation process itself as it went rather smoothly. Except that it took quite a while to complete. SCE can run on Windows 2003 servers, but to get the virtualization bit to work properly, Windows 2008 is needed. SCE uses a MSSQL server as storage, but it is bundled with a MSSQl server that can be used instead if you don’t have a full MSSQL server in your organization. We have 3, but I decided to leave them alone and installed the bundled MSSQL locally.

When everything got up an running, I got to have a look through the management interface. I pushed out the client installation to the primary domain, which during the summer only has about 20-30 computers up and running. A nice test environment. I also set up the WSUS service to push updates via group Policy, and now after a few days, it seems to run smoothly. I have not yet enforced installation deadlines on the clients but that is an option as I seem to remember it is in the WSUS tool as well.

SCE ScreenshotWhat I liked the most about SCE is the ability to monitor resource status on computers. It checks hardware, manufacturer/model, disk usage and capacity, RAM, CPU and generally all you otherwise would manually punch into a asset database or those good old spreadsheets we used when I first started in IT in 1999. SCE also scans all installed software and versions thereof. Giving you a highly detailed and somewhat messy output. However the summary screen gives you a nice overview of operating systems in the organization. Today we run a tool I coded many years ago in VB6.0 which runs an inventory of resources (disk and RAM) and versions of a specified list of software. This is imported into a MySQL database and cross referenced with the computer inventory table. This works quite well actually, but is regularly in need of updates as things change in Windows and applications.

The virtualization part of SCE I have not tested yet, it is the main new feature of this release though. We do have a few VmWare servers running, so I might get around to it soon. SCE also has a nifty report generation tool that will generate reports from a long list of predefined reports. SCE also have a software  package deployment tool which is next on my list to test out. I hope I can set it up to push out software like Firefox and other non-MS tools we use, as well as Office 2007/2010.