Current Inbox status jeremy has 19 items in his inbox

Posted by jeremy, at 2011-10-06 16:31:12

yes, it can be done
BigFix (now Tivoli Endpoint Manager) does not officially support any way of completely removing settings from the configuration file.

So I set about making my own way. Using sed and shell, this script will eliminate settings from your besclient.config file. It needs files in /tmp to be executable, it needs sed to exist, and your configuration file should be in /var/opt/BESClient/besclient.config.

While this is not hyper-tested, I have been using it for a while in my own lab. Enjoy, and give credit where due.

Posted by jeremy, at 2011-05-19 00:06:31

I need a category for "creepy"
I hate phones. I do not like talking on them. My feelings of warmth toward them are not enhanced by some complete nutjob calling the house and alarming my wife. I wrote all about the latest incident right here.

Posted by jeremy, at 2011-05-05 12:34:19

Marvin Windows customer service rocks.
Three years ago, we had a bay added into our kitchen. Valet Building Services out of Rogers/Hamel did the work. When they finished it, they were demonstrating how to remove one of the sashes from a window, and damaged the track. They replaced a part then, but the sash would always sag when lifted to the top. I called repeatedly, but the owner had closed down the company, and fixing it was apparently above and beyond.
Hamel Lumberyard, however, was happy to send a guy out to look at the windows. They filed a repair request with Marvin, who sent a guy out today.

The Marvin guy showed me how the carpenter from Valet had used brads which were too long, and damaged the track. He'd also driven brads through some of the plastic weather-resistant covering on the sill.
Marvin would've been totally within rights to refuse the repair, but they STILL covered it under warranty -- even though it was carpenter error. I'm glad I went with Marvin windows for the whole house! I'm also glad I had Aspen Building Contractors do all the other windows for me. The carpenters at Aspen know how to do things correctly.

Posted by jeremy, at 2011-02-18 08:25:36

Diabetes related things added
I just realized that two rather important documents were not included on this site. The first was my essay on how my diabetes was not caused by bad lifestyle choices, and secondly, the 2011 Thor Corps JDRF walk for the cure fundraising letter
I hope you find them educational.

Posted by jeremy, at 2011-02-17 09:56:49

Daily life, by Dirk


Thor gets a new infusion set like this every 2-3 days. This is what living with diabetes is like -- for those rich enough to afford insulin pumps.
Help us find a cure for diabetes -- donate at the JDRF donation page for Thorwald:
JDRF donation page for Thorwald Anderson

Picture copyright 2011, Dirk Koenig.

Posted by jeremy, at 2010-11-24 10:17:41

another manual I might need to find
The cd player in Thorwald & Gunnar's room is an Insignia A-1112. Long ago, I lost or recycled the manual. Today, I had to join some hokey site to get one, so I figured I'd put it up right here: Insignia A-1112 Executive CD Player PDF Manual, so I wouldn't have to go looking for it again.

Posted by jeremy, at 2010-09-16 10:27:35

bluetooth on win7_64
I've had a bluetooth dongle in my PC for years, but when I upgraded to win7 (directx 10, you know), I didn't bother getting everything configured. After looking at the bluetooth headset on my desk for the umpteenth time, I decided it was time to either configure the SBH500 with my PC or sell it. So I configured it -- took me a while, but the trick was to update the bluetooth software on win7, using new broadcom drivers: http://www.broadcom.com/support/bluetooth/update.php -- make sure you actually HAVE a broadcom chipset bluetooth dongle. After that, the headset magically started work. Oh, and to put the SBH500 in discovery mode, turn it off, hold down the button with the image of the headset, and turn it back on. Hold the button down until you get a steady blue light.

Posted by jeremy, at 2010-06-21 20:50:46

silly digital character watches
Years ago, Thorwald got an Armitron Scooby-Do watch. The instructions, however, have been lost in the sands of time. Googling for said instructions is futile. A little common sense, however, and you'll find this link: http://www.armitron.com/docs/ArmitronLadiesDigital.pdf -- the instructions for the Ladies Digital watch -- which is what the Scooby-Do watch uses as guts. Hopefully, this link will save you the googling I have to do twice a year, when the clock changes. Silly daylight savings time. I have also cached the manual right here, incase Armitron pulls their manual. Please use their site first, though.

Posted by jeremy, at 2010-04-15 21:07:13

HP SIM, PSP v8.25 and my memory
I spent a few weeks testing and trying to implement full integration with HP SIM (Systems Insight Manager) and a fleet of about 650 RHEL4 and RHEL5 boxes (we didn't even try with the RHEL3 machines) at a major retailer.
Through this time, HP support first said that PSP v8.15 would work. Then, when that didn't work, we upgraded first to v8.20, then v8.25. Again, unsuccessful. We DID manage to get full SIM integration by installing the v8.30 hpsmh and smh-templates RPMs on v8.25 machines, but that's a bit of a hack.
v8.30 was the first PSP that we installed that got us proper SIM integration -- full reporting back to the SIM server and automatic dial-home capability, and integrated access to the iLO console.
(while I did this work nearly five months ago, I had to remind myself of it today, so it goes here, so I don't forget. I've yet to lose my blog, after all)

Posted by jeremy, at 2010-04-15 21:02:01

aix thinks you entered your password wrong, really.
Had a situation where a user was correctly entering their password to login to an AIX 5.3 (oslevel 5300-09 is no longer affected by this bug) box over openssh, yet was getting tagged with an unsuccessful login. The user would enter their password once, but an unsuccessful login was being declared, followed 3-4 seconds later by a successful login -- even though they didn't get reprompted.
After _much_ analysis of machines, I found the issue: On those servers that would double-attempt the login (once unsuccessfully, once successfully), someone had added the line:

UsePrivilegeSeparation no

Once I disabled that line, by prepending a # character, and reloaded the config:

kill -HUP `ps waux | grep sshd$ | grep -v grep | awk '{print $4}'`

(that command is done from memory, by the way, and is special to AIX), everything worked just fine. This goes here because I didn't find a single tip on this solution ANYWHERE that google could find.

Posted by jeremy, at 2010-01-18 11:19:25

New stereo in the car
I finally got around to putting the new stereo in my 2002 Mazda Protege5. I also took pictures and explained what I did. Hopefully, this page can benefit anyone else who is looking to do the same thing.

Posted by jeremy, at 2009-12-04 07:59:57

vmware and read only filesystems
File this under "weird":
Years ago, due to some timing issues in various SCSI drivers, Linux guests running under VMware would decide that they were having hardware issues, and force their drives (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb) into read-only mode. This sort of thing makes grand sense when you're dealing with real hardware. On vmware, though, we might as well trust that the device is good. This also happened on Xen and VirtualBox, too. Basically, if the Host OS didn't respond fast enough, the guest decided that there had been a hardware failure.
RedHat fixed the issue, SuSE fixed the issue, all was well. This was back in the RHEL 4.6/5.1 era.
Except...the bug is back. I'm running into it on fully patched RHEL 4.8 and RHEL 5.4 machines. Careful digging through mailing lists suggested that adding "barrier=0" into the options for each filesystem, in /etc/fstab would fix things. Sure enough, it did. I'm happy to report that HP tech support has informed me that they're now using my solution at OTHER customers, with good success. Just goes to show -- just because a bug is fixed, doesn't mean it STAYS fixed.

Posted by jeremy, at 2009-11-16 18:21:37

joy
One of the things I'm tasked with lately is setting up netdump on RHEL4. To do this requires more than a little wizardry, particularly since docs are lacking. To netdump to a netdump server outside the local network segment, you need to put the MAC address of the client's default gateway into NETDUMPMACADDR=
You can find the MAC address of your default gateway by running the command:
arping -c1 -I "devicename" "ip of gateway".
Or:

arping -c1 $(route -n | awk '/UG/{print $2}') | awk '/reply from/{print $5}' | sed -e 's/\[//g' -e 's/\]//g'

Feel free to use that where you may. If you'd rather, you can use this two command sequence, too:
ping -c1 x.y.w.z; arp | awk '/x.y.w.z/{print $3}'

Posted by jeremy, at 2009-06-23 20:33:39

Joys of vista wireless
I recently set up WLAN for one of my clients, and everything worked great using WPA2 and my EEE904 running XP. Signal was good throughout the location, DHCP was being passed through the 802.11g access point just fine, so I pronounced it good and left.

No sooner had I gotten on a plane to head to another customer, than I got the call: "Wireless isn't working." It was the damnedest thing. I had configured the Vista64 laptop in question personally, and verified that all the WPA2 settings were correct. Once I got back on the ground and got Internet access, I punched into the Ubuntu server that handles DHCP, and could see that the server was offering leases to the proper MAC. Everything looked right.

To make a long story short, check out this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233 -- basically, Vista does DHCP just a bit differently, and unless you add the registry entries contained in the "more info" section of that document, you aren't going to get Vista working with your commodity router. Just in case that article goes away, here's the nuts-n-bolts of it:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\{GUID} 

Value name: DhcpConnForceBroadcastFlag
Value type: REG_DWORD
Value data: 0

Doing that will square things right away.

Posted by jeremy, at 2008-10-27 23:19:39

AoE on Winders? Free?
I am VERY happy that someone has finally implemented an AoE driver for Windows over at http://winaoe.org/. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, and with disk at a bit of a premium on the server, it'll be a few weeks.
AoE is _not_ Age of Empires -- it's ATA over Ethernet. Poor man's iSCSI, if you will. I messed around with it some in the Linux3 class, back when I was teaching, and was impressed with how simple it was to set up. I'm looking forward to spinning up some AoE in the house here -- why have big drives in the windows machines when I can have hardware-like speeds out of network shares?
One thing you will want for this, however, is good ethernet hardware (like a REAL gigE card -- Intel, not that Marvell Yukon junk), and fast disk in your server.