Summer and such.

It’s been a busy summer for me, with certainly lots happening. Thought I’d take some time and out and talk a little about what I’ve been doing with myself.

Unfortunately, my summer camp was cancelled in which I was hoping to complete the expedition side of my queen’s scout award. Unfortunate, but I’m not going to cry about it.

Instead of going away and I went to Matt’s for the week and helped out (with camera in tow!). During the week, we got his 1494 out the garage after refurbishment and did some light hay work on a New Holland 945 Bailer.

There’s a full feature story in December 2012 of Classic Tractor – including the use of this picture, look out for it!

While I was out working with him, we started the harvest, combining – New Holland TX34.

After my little week out of work, I headed back to normality battling with Windows! (I kid, NOT!) Working with Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8 – I must say are incredibly different to what everyone is used to I’m afraid but that’s life. I’ll be posting my annoyance no doubted on those!

Ystradfellte Waterfall Walk

Ystradfellte – a rather unusual place name in which I cannot pronounce for the life on me. As Network members, we decided to practice for our Summer Exploration hike here.

Some of the scenery is simply amazing. Especially, going into area’s where you can walk behind the waterfalls.

Then on the Sunday, I headed to Borth for a bit of beachiness.

Where do I start?

It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything like this, it’s all very exciting. I doubt anyone will actually read this, but you never know. But anyway, enough of that.

Well, Hi. My names James, and this isn’t a alcohol anonymous meeting. I bet for many of you, your wondering what the fuck is he actually doing? And who the fuck am I? Well, there’s no point me explaining, you don’t care. (email me if you do). All you need to know is that I’m 20, I’m from the west midlands, I fiddle with computers, I like to walk up big mountains and that’s enough to get you into my friends list.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote something like and published it online. After all, I’m using a self hosted site and not some fad tumblr blog where I repost pictures of half naked humans in a distressed pose (although, I do like that now and again).

Life’s very different for me as it was a few years ago when I used to do this. I was a young, stupid and inconsiderate young man back then, and I’d like to think that I have become more mature like cheese or pathetic cider.

I’ve finished college and have a piece of paper to say I can fiddle with computers. I’m on my second job within the IT ‘marketplace’. I’m pretty good with boxes that say ‘Microsoft exhange’ on them, I understand what they need to get them smiling.

2012 should be a good year if everything goes to plan. I’ll make it a good year. I’ll always have a smile on my face. That’s the way life should always be.

If you read this. Leave a comment. Im genuinely interested to see or how many do see this. Don’t leave your name or anything. Unless you want to. Don’t feel obliged too.

Catch you around soon,

James x

SBS Migration 2008 – Unable to access the source server.

Sometimes, the server cannot reach the source server due to DNS issue’s. I have worked out that you can get into the host file and add the server IP address and name.

To add it, simply control alt delete in the task manager, new task run – then head to the hosts file c:windowssystem32driversetc and then hosts file. Add your entry, then try and ping it using the command prompt. You can get to this the way from run.

If you’ve done this, tried and get an authentication error, then you have a problem with connecting the source servers DNS server.

SBS Migration – Active Directory replication is taking longer than expected

I came across this error the other week while I was running a small business server 2003 to 2008. I thought I would share with you what I did to resolve it.

While running through ‘expanding and installing files’ – the migration wizard gets stuck with the following error message.

“Active Directory replication is taking longer than expected. You can choose whether to continue waiting’

Of course, this obviously means you have AD problem from your source server. Digging a little deeper into this, I looked into the SBS install log. This is located in the programs files folder, inside of the small business server folder. – (if you want to access this, cntrl + alt + delete, task manager and then run – head to the land of explorer).

I found out the culprit.

Setup: DsGetDcName returned: 0
Setup: DsGetDcName returned name: sbs03.domain.local
Setup: Expected name: sbs08.domain.local
Task: There are 0 pending replication operations.
Setup: Attempting LDAP bind.
Setup: Bind successful
Task: Waiting for replication to finish

—

I checked to make sure the services needed are running. I found this bit from M$. (this is on the source server)

Computer Browser
Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
Workstation
File Replication Service

after checking this, still no go. I decided to have a look further and discovered that the BurFlags registry key for FPS needed to be changed – and they’re operating incorrectly. This should normally be done by the migration wizard apparently!

—

Have a look at the following reg key on your source server and make sure it is decimal 4.

HK_LMSystemCurrentControlSetServicesNTFrsParametersBackupRestoreProcess at Startup - Change the BurFlags key to decimal 4

Now on the destination server, head into reg edit. (if you want to access this, cntrl + alt + delete, task manager and then run )

HK_LMSystemCurrentControlSetServicesNTFrsParametersBackupRestoreProcess at Startup – Change the BurFlags key to decimal 2
HK_LMSystemCurrentControlSetServicesNetlogonParameters – change the SysVolReady - Change the key to decimal 1.

Now restart FPS on both source and destination servers. – (services.msc on the destination server from run).

Your migration should then run as normal.

Symantec Backup Exec 2010 – Notifcations with exchange 2007 & 2010

I know quite a few of you have had this problem, so I thought I’d show you how to fix this. This applies for both exchange 2007 and 2010.

You need to allow exchange to accept incoming SMTP from non-authenticated applications – in our case BackupExec

Head over to your Exchange Console, into your sever configuration > hub transport > you should see receive connectors. Go and ahead and create a new connector. You want a custom connector. Call it something sensible (BackupExec and the name of the server).

I don’t like to keep stuff on standard ports, it’s just me – so I always change this to port 26 – after this click next.

Now delete this crappy default and click the add arrow drop down to add a single IP (this the IP address of the BackupExec server – this can be the server you working on if it’s SBS)

Go ahead and finish creating this. Once done, right and click and head into the properties of the connector.

Click the permission tab and allow exchange servers.

Apply and head into the Authentication tab and click the box ‘Externally Secured’ – nothing else in here should be ticked!!

Now ahead back over to BackupExec. Tools > Email and Pager notifications. This should all make sense now. SMTP mail server is your exchange / sbs server name. And the account your using to send the mail.

Any questions, feel free to comment.

Why use a Server OS as a workstation OS?

For the last couple of months, I’ve been using Windows Server 2008 R2 as my main desktop operating system. One or two have questioned me to why I’ve done this and to why I’m not running Windows 7.

First of all, I’d like to point out that I have used Windows 7, and it’s my primary OS on my Laptop. I do still find serveral issue’s with the OS, including slow downs and memory management issue’s. But overall – still, better than Vista.

So why use Server 2k8?

The bare basics of an operating system – no junk and bloated and useless software pre-installed.
Better memory management and organisation of background services.

If you don’t believe me – have a look at some of the articles below showing the performance of Server 2008 to other Microsoft operating systems.

Windows “Workstation” 2008 – Vista Done Right?

Massive benchmark comparison between Windows XP, Vista and 2008 Server, 32- and 64-bit

From those to articles, you can see there is a performance increase if your using vista, for certain – even an upgrade to 7 is worthwhile if your still running Vista.

I find personally that 2K8 is much more responsive and quicker than Windows 7 and seems in general a lighter operating system. It works well for me, so give it a shot.

You can download it free and try it for 180 days from Microsoft – http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/try-it.aspx

I’m just your average 18 year old, right?

Apparently not. According to a recent test I did – I have the maturity levels of a 22 year old. Great.

Running with a netbook

A couple of weeks back, I got a EEE-PC701SD, It’s one of the original netbooks, with a 1Ghz Celeron, 512mb Ram, 8GB SSD, Aethoroes based wifi and that’s about it.

How has it been?

Running with a NetBook makes your life allot easier. I chuck mine into my normal college bag, and I normally forget that it’s there, it’s so light! Just to pop it out and start taking notes is the best bit. This model that I have comes with XP home, nothing special – it comes with Microsoft Works but I’ve personally installed OpenOffice which works great on it.

The only thing that I have a issue about is that they don’t have a british keyboard for it. It’s a american standard one which has a slightly different key layout comparing it to the british keyboard. I wouldn’t recommend it for typing for long periods of times.

Overall, my little netbook is awesome – I seriously recommend getting one.

If you have any questions, don’t be afraid to comment

Woocha, WGET!

Occasionally, my ISP (BT) does lack in connection speed. It’s not necessarily their fault, but one of the links or bridges connecting is slow. I was downloading some large mixes that a friend had done on his server, but I was only getting 40KB/s on a 200mb file, slow. I thought about it, and was wondering how I can use my dreamhost server to my advantage. I asked a couple of friends, and a mate, William told me about the SSH function, wget.

WGET tells the server to download a file of another server. As my dreamhost server sits in a huge data center with huge pipes hooked up to it I can hit speeds that I can only dream of. I know that I can hit high speeds when downloading files from my server, roughly 700KB/s – which is nearly topping out my home internet connection. Once I told the server what to download, i was hitting file transfer rates on 10MB/s on some (server to server).

So how do we go about downloading files then?

First we need to SSH into our server;

user@example.com - then we enter our password once prompted.

once we are logged in – simply type

“wget [insertthefilelocation]”

Older Entries