Very very bad support from Meinberg getting better?

November 23rd, 2012 No comments

Last two weeks I had to update some NTP servers from one German company. When I requested new firmware I received following e-mail:

Dear Sir,
 unfortunately, I cannot provide a new firmware since your compact flash card is too small and the action might end up in a system’s inconsistency.
Thus, you are also not the only customer who is affected by this, we offer bigger compact flash cards for 65€ each. Please let me know whether this is of interest for you and if you need an official offer.
Mit freundlichem Gruß / With kind regards
 

So this made my very upset. To be able to upgrade to the newest version of firmware I had to pay 65EUR for new flashcard. So I wrote couple e-mail to this company. I wanted to know the reason why I need to invest more to NTP server. I found out that firmware got big and it cannot be uploaded into flash which came with NTP server. This looked weird to me. Why would I have to invest into device if manufacter’s engineers made a mistake. I already decided not to sell manufacter’s devices. And I though that was end of the story.

Today I received following e-mail:

Dear Ondrej,
 
I just wanted to let you know that we dramatically improved our update procedure and, after an intensive clean-up, released
the new firmware version 5.34h which can be installed on 64MB compact flash cards without any problems. The new release is 4 MB (~25%) smaller (!) than the previous version without removing any features.
 
Although you already expressed your extreme dissatisfaction with our products and decided for yourself to not recommend or
buy Meinberg products in the future, your feedback helped us to improve our software and I sincerely thank you for that.
 
Best Regards,
 Heiko
 

So it’s funny how some angry and mad e-mails can change such a things. Now we can upgrade our devices. But I don’t think we will offer them anymore to customers 🙂

Quickie: How to find out some info about user in AD for free

November 14th, 2012 3 comments

Sometimes you need to find out some basic informations about user in domain when you are regular user. You can use command:

net user USER_name /domain

and you get some informations:

net user /domain

net user /domain

Thanks to my coleague Peter Ivanco 🙂

Categories: Quickie, Windows Tags: ,

Quickie: vShere PowerCLI to change NTP settings

November 8th, 2012 No comments

I had to change NTP servers on 40 ESX servers today. When I started to click this settings via vShere Client I was bored after two pieces 🙂 Then I have decided to use vShere PowerCLI.

Run vShere PowerCLI. Then I had to connect to Virtual Infrastructure server:

Connect-VIServer vCenterSERVER_Name.domain

List all ESX servers and put this list into variable:

$hosts=Get-Cluster Cluster | Get-VMHost

And the last, run couple commands to proceed:

ForEach ($ESX in $hosts)

{

     Remove-VMHostNtpServer -NtpServer “NTP_SERVER_OLD1” -VMHost $ESX | Out-Null;

     Remove-VMHostNtpServer -NtpServer “NTP_SERVER_OLD2” -VMHost $ESX | Out-Null;

     Add-VmHostNtpServer -NtpServer “NTP_SERVER_NEW_01” -VMHost $ESX | Out-Null;

     Add-VmHostNtpServer -NtpServer “NTP_SERVER_NEW_02” -VMHost $ESX | Out-Null;

     Get-VMHostService -VMHost $ESX | Where-Object {$_.key -eq “ntpd” } | Restart-VMHostService -Confirm:$false | Out-Null

}

And everything was set in couple of seconds 🙂

Remove-VMHostNtpServer – removes NTP settings for ESX

Add-VMHostNtpServer – adds NTP settings for ESX

Last command restarted ntpd service.

Have a nice day,

 

Quickie: Add your photo into AD

November 7th, 2012 No comments

More and more are people working with Outlook 2007+, using Lync clients, … all of these applications have ability to show pictures of users in their interface. Let’s look how to implement picture into AD for some users.

Picture in AD is stored in one AD attribute called thumbnailPhoto. We need to put picture into this attribute. Exchange servers and other services use Global Catalog Domain Controllers to resolve attributes for objects in domains. So first of all we need to make sure attribute thumbnailPhoto is propagated into Global Catalog database. We need to modify properties of attribute thumbnailPhoto:

  • Register MMC snap-in for Active Directory Schema running command:

Regsvr32 schmmgmt.dll

  • Open up Active Directory Schema MMC snap-in
  • Under Attributes look for thumbnailPhoto and open its properties
  • Check option “Replicate this attribute to the Global Catalog”

Edit thumbnailPhoto properties

Edit thumbnailPhoto properties

Read more…

Open File – Security Warning

November 7th, 2012 3 comments

Couple days ago something started to bother me. I use Microsoft Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 9.0 to browse on Internet. When you download some application from web, for example my favorite SSH/Telnet/Console client Putty, and you run this application, you get following warning:

Open File - Security Warninig

Open File – Security Warninig

Read more…

Quieckie: Windows 7 SP1 problem with ACT 5.6

October 29th, 2012 No comments

Today we were implementing ACT 5.6 due to migration from Windows XP to Windows 7. My colleague reinstalled SQL Express and ACT twice because it didn’t work as expected. We were examining Windows 7 SP 1 and they were failing everytime he ran report.

Then we have looked into event logs and found out following errors:

ACT problem

and

Read more…

Quickie: Local admin has to have password to create domain

October 24th, 2012 1 comment

Today I was preparing new AD test environment for myself. I’ve created new W2008R2 VMs and when I ran dcpromo.exe I’ve got following error:

Local admin password empty

This was just a funny thing I never saw 🙂

Quickie: Ceskoslovensko hlada AD superstar

October 23rd, 2012 No comments

Pred casom som nasiel super prednasku o AD, ktoru prezentoval sam Ondrej Sevecek.

Odporucam si ju pozriet, je to velmi zaujimave a velmi dobre prednesene. Bodaj by sme mali takych ludi viacej.

Internet Explorer Proxy Settings via GPO not working

October 22nd, 2012 2 comments

One of our customer just released the beauty and power of GPO. They started to use it more and more. Couple days ago they set brand new GPO with following settings:

  • Proxy IP was set with port 3128 for all protocols
  • Exceptions for couple websites and local addresses

 

IE Proxy GPO

Read more…

Quickie: Batch file didn’t wait for ping command

October 11th, 2012 No comments

Today I was needed to make batch script to ping some IP addresses for problem described in this article. My first script was as following:

@Echo Off

:Loop1

ping 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 30000 >NUL

ping 8.8.8.8 -n 1 | find /i “bytes=” || goto FailedPing

goto Loop1

:FailedPing

echo FAILED PRIMARY NET TO VIA 10.0.0.1 %time% >>ping_test.log

route delete 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 10.0.0.1

route add 0.0.0.0 mask 0.0.0.0 10.0.0.2

goto Loop1

When I ran this script in cmd.exe or I scheduled it, it ate one CPU core. I didn’t know why it’s happening, because when I ran this commands in cmd.exe separatelly it workied fine. After couple minutes of debugging I found out that script is not waiting for “ping” commands to finish. It was weird. My colleague told me to use “sleep.exe” to make it wait for a little bit. But that was not a solution. I wanted to force it to wait for ping commands. I tried weird thing. Instead of “ping” I used whole path for ping.exe “%SystemRoot%\\System32\\ping.exe” and for command “route” I used “%SystemRoot%\\System32\\route.exe”. Now everything looks and works perfect.

I have no idea why this is happening, but it works and I need to remember it 🙂