The next few weeks I will be in study mode.
Next week a 5 day classroom course for VMware vSphere 4.1: Install, Configure & Manage
The week after that its 3 days VMware vSphere 4: Manage for Performance
Then some exam training and on the 25th the VCP4 exam. I am exited and nervous, as I have not studies for an exam or cert for a long time. But I am also confident as I understand a lot of the material already.

In preparation for this I have been gathering some white papers, been reading up on some things and have also been looking for a good book also. I was in the tram today paging through the Kindle app for the Android, and it struck me that the Amazon sphere would be the right place to consume this kind of stuff.  I have the Kindle app on my Ipad, my Phone and on 2 PC’s (I don’t yet own an actual Kindle) and the fact that I can pick up wherever I left off, wherever I am and when I have some time spare, appealed to me.

It’s a relief that I can actually find a good use for all these kindle outputs because I was stuck in the dilemma between the physical and the virtual. I will soon be receiving my first leather bound book from Easton Press, but for a while I felt torn between the superior convenience of ebooks, and the wish to have a proper physical book collection. But I realize now I can split the difference; educational books work a lot better as ebooks. So I can find good an honest use for both the old and new at the same time.  This is greatly fulfilling to me somehow.  I now even have a reason to get a Kindle.. perhaps.

Still in the tram I bought Scott Lowe’s Mastering VSphere 4, Kindle edition, and directed Amazon to send it to all my devices. By the time I got home, it was already downloaded onto my Ipad.

I used to collect a large amount of the MSPress books, but was saddened when I realized that most of them would become obsolete. Getting the ebook versions of these kinds of books might not necessarily be that much cheaper (mastering VSphere 4 set me back $41), but at least its not a waste of paper!
For a long time I justified buying these books by saying that I would rather read from my hand that from the screen, and this is actually true. But The Ipad and Kindle are convenient enough (and even my Android phone is, to be honest), that I cant justify wasting the trees on this kind of book anymore.

I was also thrilled to discover that some of the old Battletech novels are being re-released as Kindle versions. It was impossible to get your hands on, for example, the Blood of Kerensky trilogy in paperback form, it has been out of print for so long. I read most of the novels until Darkage started, but I never got my hands on some of the oldest titles. I hope they bring them all back! What a rich universe to re-discover!

Putting together new blade servers, 2 x BL460C G6 and 2 x G7
They will server as our 7th and 8th Citrix Servers and our 7th and 8th ESX servers.

Working on updating the laptop roleout script for these new T510 Thinkpad’s. We use RES Wisdom to do our automated installs.

One of our batch of Lenovo T500 laptops refuses to boot from our Windows Deployment PXE server.
So not easy to get our default company image into it. Hard to explain to Lenovo support what is wrong cause its so very specific. All other network functions are just fine. My colleague ran a trace on the server side, and the Laptop doesn’t even seem to contact it.

If I had to guess I would say its network driver issue and this laptop has a very specific revision of network board .. or something. 

It seems I am not the only one running into PXE boot issues with a Lenovo.

Don’t really have that much time to dig deeply into it. I would like to see what the conversation is between our WDS server, the DHCP server and the laptop. Something wierd going on there.

So here is mine to all the users, to get them to log out on time:

Sint en Piet zaten te bedenken

Dat pakjesavond er is voor geschenken

Weet je wat het NOB in het schoentje vindt?

Een NECTS Release 1.2.1 met de groeten van Sint

 

Zo’n update door te voeren kost heel veel duiten

Daarom vraagt Piet aan iedereen om zo dadelijk af te sluiten

Zo hoeven de IT-ers niet lang te wachten

Om jullie Livelink pijn te helpen verzachten

 

Dus gaarne zo spoedig mogelijk af te loggen

Zodat het systeem dadelijk niet zal ontploffen!

Een voorspoedige reis naar huis, en wat betreft pakjesavond: geniet!

Heel veel groeten van de Sint en van Piet.

 

 

 

Sent over Citrix to all logged-in users:

As many before us, we ran into the following error in Virtual Center, when we tried to P-to-V a server:

“multiple connections to a server or shared resource by the same user”

This is not an uncommon error, and you might recognise it from other scenarios that involve remotely connecting to a Windows host. 
I found quite a few posts that mentioned this problem, even a mention in the release notes of VMWare Converter itself, and an VMware knowledge base article,  and they go something like this:

An Inter-Process Communication (IPC) named-pipe network connection is already open from the local Windows Redirector to the remote host with different credentials than you are specifying in Converter. The Windows Redirector does not allow IPC connections with multiple different credentials from the same user session. This restriction also applies to mapped network drives as they are also a type of named-pipe connection.

To ensure the Converter agent connection succeeds, perform the following actions on the computer running Converter:

1. Close any application views or Windows Explorer windows showing files, ActiveX components, or Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-ins from the server you are trying to convert.
2. Open a command prompt. For more information, see Opening a command or shell prompt (1003892).
3. Type net use \\<remote_hostname>\ * /delete and press Enter.
   
   Note: This disconnects any mapped drives to the remote host.

4. Check My Computer for any mapped network drives to the remote host and disconnect them.
5. Log off the server running Converter and log on again.  This disconnects an open IPC named-pipe connections established by any remaining applications.
6. If the problem persists, restart the server running Converter.
7. If the problem still persists, and you are using the VirtualCenter Converter plug-in, restart the VirtualCenter server.

So we tried all the above, but to no avail. Try as we may, from both our admin workstations, aswell as on the Virtual Center server itself, we could not get it to run.

In the end, my collegue tried to run the task using the IP adress of the server, itstead of its hostname!

That did the trick! But don’t ask me why! I suspect it has something to with the named-pipe actually being named differently when you do this.

:p

Sometimes,  a rogue printer driver entry gets left behind in your printer list. Sometimes, you cant delete it.  Somtimes its even a duplicate of a printer that already exists, perhaps with a slightly different queue name.

Various message sources, like here suggest breaking network connection with the printer in question may be needed before windows “releases” the print queue so it can be deleted.

But what if the printer in question no longer exists at all? 

This seems to occur under different circumstances, but one that is often suggestion is it can happen when printer mappings are added to a user profile using scripting.

The suggested solution in this case seems to be to run the following command:

rundll32 printui.dll, PrintUIEntry /gd \\server\printername

I ran into this problem on our Citrix farm.

Here we had 2 print queues for the same printer, the top one being incorrect, but impossible to delete:

\\srv-prt-01\prt052.nob.local
\\srv-prt-01\prt052

I isolated one of the servers so I could play with it without any users on it.

I made sure all scripted mappings to both the old and new queue where disabled.
I even deleted the queue on the server

 I tried first disconnecting the printer physically, then trying to delete the errant queue. This did not work.

I tried the rundll32 command, no dice either.

The next step was the more drastic one. I logged onto the desktop of the Citrix server with ILO, disabled the network card, rebooted, and low and behold, I was able to remove the queue.

But when I logged into the server again as a test user, the driver had returned. Even with our scripting turned off, the queues actually deleted  on the print server, the queue still appeared for my test user on the Citrix server.

This could only mean the entry was stuck in the user profile.

(zoom)

And indeed, there it was, under HKLU\<user-sid>\Printers\Connections

I deleted the errant entry, and I never saw the queue again, at least not for that particular user!

I wonder how often this happens. I was suprised to not have come across something about the user registry hive when googling this problem.

Now I have to see what I am going to do about all the other users that have this entry. Perhaps it would be better practice to actually delete this entire set of keys when they log out, every time.

The printers get mapped by our logon system anyway when they log in again. It might help keep their printer list a little cleaner in future.

All queries directed at Steve Gilmore about this, have resulted in him simply pointing us to the live stream of the Gang, as its recorded on Leo Laporte’s site on Friday or Saterday. He gives very little advance warning of when they are going to do a show. And its just down to luck, and your own personal schedule wether you are in the position to listen to this at the time.

After about a month of this, several people, like myself and Dave Winer, have become fed up, and this Friendfeed discussion has resulted in various alternative resources being made available, including a certain “Jack” very helpfully providing us with an alternative RSS feed, coming out of Yahoo pipes.

Here is my own little rant, followed by the complete conversation:

“I cannot understand why they would stop the podcast. I dont care what else they do, as long as I can recieve it as a podcast. The ENTIRE point of podcasting was its time-shifted nature, the fact that we can unshackle ourselves from the -obsolete- broadcasting model. Realtime has its place, but one does not preclude the other. Going live-only is a step back in my opinion. They cut -so- many people out of their listenership, I cant wrap my head around it!”

http://friendfeed.com/davew/4f42347b/torrent-of-this-week-gillmor-gang-just

To summorise, here are the various resources currently available:

Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/details/GillmorGang/

Yahoo Pipes conversion from the Internet Archive, into an RSS feed:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=uFOYFoZN3hGItIPx0j6skA

Feedburner version of above RSS feed:
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheGillmorGangShow

ISOHunt Search (rss) for any Torrent with the words “Gillmor Gang” in it:
http://isohunt.com/js/rss/%22Gillmor+Gang%22?iht=

Update 20 July 2009:
After the little Spat with Leo Laporte, Steve has not done another Gillmor Gang.
It looks like we shall have to go without for the forseeable future