2010-09-10T20:34:26Z Doug Mortensen Copyright 2010, Doug Mortensen SPHPBLOG
The reasons:

1. Network Maintenance time/work is still required anyway.
   • Deep Freeze is not a replacement for antivirus or patching systems. In fact,
     1. Faronics (who makes Deep Freeze) sells their own antivirus product to integrate with Deep Freeze.
     2. And Deep Freeze provides a means to have a scheduled maintenance window to "thaw" (unfreeze) computers, so that network administrators can install patches and apply updated antivirus signatures.

I have been aware of Deep Freeze for at least 4 years. It is an interesting concept, but something that I have not ever decided to look into using.... until now. My company recently started doing work for a new client whose network is setup to use Deep Freeze. As we essentially were given the opportunity to become their primary I.T. provider, we decided that we really needed to take a thorough look at Deep Freeze so that we could appropriately advise them on the long-term route to take in managing their network. I may add that this is a small medical office with 1 server + 10 PCs.

It is also important to mention that this particular client also had Deep Freeze installed on their server, and have operated for 3+ years with the server generally in a "Frozen" state. This is significant, as the server is a domain controller which implies also a DNS server. It is a Microsoft SQL 2005 server, and serves various data files which the client PCs access via UNC paths.

I was familiar with the concept of Deep Freeze, but was left with a lot of questions regarding its actual implementation and the effects/implications it may have on data/databases & overall functionality on specific systems/components such as:

Active Directory
DHCP
DNS
Windows Event Logs
IIS Logs
Other Logs
SQL Databases
Other Application Databases/Data
Software & Operating System Patches
Antivirus

I first spoke with the I.T. person who previously managed their network. He did not have enough good things to say about Deep Freeze, and strongly recommended that I use it with all of my customers. The specific answers he gave to my questions were:

• Deep Freeze is not a replacement for antivirus software, and that you should still have antivirus.
• Deep Freeze has the ability to schedule maintenance windows for patch installation on clients (schedule clients to reboot thawed out at 10pm, have patches & A/V updates applied, then reboot frozen again at 4am)
• He thinks that Deep Freeze makes some kind of exception for Active Directory, so that a domain controller can be "frozen" without the Active Directory database being affected

Next I spoke with my cousin Todd, who used to work in a school district I.T. department that discontinued using Deep Freeze while he was working there.

Next we checked with the Faronics website

Next we spoke with Faronics Tech Support

Lastly I did more research online.]]> http://www.kgotsi.com/index.php?entry=entry100828-083203 2010-08-28T00:00:00Z 2010-08-28T00:00:00Z
I think since we ever deployed this box, we have been having issues with calls that somehow get stuck in a state that they are never hung up. The result is that one of my channels gets tied up forever until I manually go in and kill the call.

See image:


The above hung call shows a duration of 1340:40:52 (which is 1,340 hours, 40 minutes and 52 seconds, A.K.A. 55 days, 20 hours, 40 minutes and 52 seconds), and is still counting up. Could that be right?

I'm not sure how to find more info about the currently hung call, but I need to figure out what is causing this and how to prevent this. As my customer only have a few channels, giving one up for a few days until someone notices that it is not available to the system doesn't work for these guys.

In this example the hung call is on a SIP station that is not currently registered. Don't ask me how a call can be active with an extension that is not even online. I'm pretty sure that other times that this happens, it has been with extensions that are online/registered. So I think that the fact that this extension (703) is not currently registered is irrelevant to the problem.

Also, just a rundown of our channels. Zap channels 1-4 are a PRI, and 25-26 are standard POTS lines. Outbound calls first use the POTS lines, then switch over to the PRI when the POTS are already in use.

One thing I haven't paid attention to is whether this only happens with the POTS lines (channels 25-26), or the PRI channels too.

I appreciate any input.]]> http://www.kgotsi.com/index.php?entry=entry100331-093255 2010-03-31T00:00:00Z 2010-03-31T00:00:00Z
Other phones that do this well are:

Windows Mobile phones
- iPhone
- Palm Palm OS
- Palm WebOS
- Android
- Any phone compatible with RoadSync (made by DataViz)
and the list goes on...

Except for RIM's BlackBerry phones.

RIM drives me crazy that they are unwilling to let their phones talk directly to the Exchange server. They just don't want to give up the revenue they get out of the BIS service and BES and BPS licenses....

Aargh!! :-)]]> http://www.kgotsi.com/index.php?entry=entry100126-171242 2010-01-27T00:00:00Z 2010-01-27T00:00:00Z
This stuff is pretty sweet indeed.]]> http://www.kgotsi.com/index.php?entry=entry090920-230101 2009-09-21T00:00:00Z 2009-09-21T00:00:00Z
In any case, the file /etc/issue needs to contain the IP address that the XenServer will be managed from using XenCenter. If not, the console functions in XenCenter don't work.

At the same time that I modified the above file to reverse my original changes, I also removed the subinterface. So I'm not positive which change fixed it. But the IP address listed in /etc/issue was the one that I had used temporarily on the subinterface, and I'm pretty sure that I had modified that file, as it turned up in my list as one of the files that had been modified on the system since 1/1/08.

So for any other XenServer sysadmins who may have fouled up access to the console function in XenCenter, I hope this helps you!

Oh yeah. One more thing. After changing those settings, things didn't start working again until I restarted /etc/init.d/xenapi and /etc/init.d/xenapissl]]> http://www.kgotsi.com/index.php?entry=entry080717-152210 2008-07-17T00:00:00Z 2008-07-17T00:00:00Z
The current Zimbabwe situation is something that I am very concerned about and have been following very closely. Their article seemed very inaccurate and I felt that it was unfair and wrong to the situation of Zimbabweans, so I took the opportunity to write the following letter to their editor. I feel that the information is good enough and important enough that it can be shared with all who are interested and should enlighten some, and confirm to others the things that we've been hearing in the media.

The Letter:

I just wanted to take an opportunity to let you know that I feel that the article on Zimbabwe posted today is largely misleading. I do not know whether this is due to intentional divisiveness of the writer, or his/her own ignorance. From November 2002-October 2004 I lived in South Africa and Botswana. I worked there as a voluntary missionary, paying my own way. I spent 99% of my time among the native indigenous Africans. I rarely even interacted with white people, so much so that when I returned home to America, it was quite a culture-shock for me to need to adjust to living among white people again.

The people I associated with were generally the common middle to lower-class people of South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe. I also became very good friends with indigenous Africans from Kenya, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Namibia and other parts of Africa. Some of these people had university degrees, others from technical colleges, and many were largely formally uneducated beyond Primary & Secondary school (high school). I only mention this background to establish the fact that my experience & knowledge came from Africans, and that it is about as authentic as it can get.

Before going to South Africa, I’d known since I was a teenager that Zimbabwe was a country, although it would have taken me time to find it on the map. Now I know exactly where it is and much information about it. Again, this is all from my experiences in South Africa & Botswana.

It was first in South Africa that I heard about Robert Mugabe. By the time that I had arrived, he had already taken the farms from the white farmers and given them to people who didn’t know how to run the farms. At that time I had never heard whether he gave them to the original families owning the lands, or to his loyalists. The media I have seen since returning home has repeatedly stated that he gave them to his loyalists instead of the original owners whom he was supposed to give them to. I tend to believe this. In either case, at the time I arrived in South Africa the inflation of the Zim-Dollar was already such that it exchange rate to the South African Rand was 100 to 1 and to the US Dollar 1000 to 1. If nothing else, this should give some kind of indication that the current Zimbabwean government has done a very poor job to manage and help their economy. Throughout my stay in Southern Africa I continuously heard reports of things getting worse and worse there. This was often from Zimbabweans who were either my peer missionaries, or others who had migrated to South Africa and Botswana for work, since there wasn’t any in Zimbabwe.

In South Africa, I heard reports that Mugabe was allowing the majority of the people of his country suffer in unemployment, hunger, & poverty, while sharing his wealth with his select group of loyalists. In the recent media this has also been reported, including him printing excessive currency to distribute to them while there was no real monetary backing to it, thus fueling the inflation and causing his loyalists to prosper while the general Zimbabwean public was suffering. I tend to believe this media report as well.

I knew a Botswana man who had recently returned from his own 2-year missionary service in Zimbabwe. He told us that there was regularly no bread on the shelves of the grocery stores in Zimbabwe.

I can’t and won’t judge and say who is at fault with the whole Zimbabwe situation. But everyone I talked with who had first-hand experience with it, pointed to Mugabe and his regime. And perhaps we can give Mugabe the benefit of the doubt and say that he really is not behind it all, but is the “front” representative and is basically trapped in his political position as others in his party pressure him to stay in power to prevent their trial for crimes against humanity. I really can’t say.

But what I do know is that your article seems quite inaccurate. I’d appreciate it if you removed it, modified it, or added my comments afterward in order to give a more balanced viewpoint.

Particularly:
• Zimbabwe’s sanctions from Western countries started coming after he kicked out the white farmers around early 2002, and started to let his people suffer.
• Morgan Tsvangirai is criticized in your article as a Western stooge. The truth is that you and I have probably NEVER gone through and hopefully never will go through the brutal beatings, unjust jailing and terrible persecution that he has. It is a shame to slam the reputation of someone who only tries to be a leader of people who want change in his country. He has shunned violence and even rejected the proposal for African nations to bring in military force to balance Zimbabwe’s current militia, army and others who are currently a bit out of control. He does not want violence or his people to suffer. I honestly feel that it is quite pathetic to criticize someone like him.
• Blaming the West is something that I NEVER heard from anyone who suffered from Zimbabwe’s problems. I heard them blame the West for other things. I had some Africans telling me that Americans were terrorists, especially in regards to the Iraq invasion. But never did the West come up in relation to Zimbabwe’s problems. Again, to my knowledge, the sanctions didn’t start coming until the Mugabe regime stopped taking care of the general public of Zimbabwe.

So to answer the author’s question of Why Zimbabwe, I have to say that I certainly feel that their situation is deserving of our attention. I pray every morning and night that peace may come to the people of Zimbabwe in such a way that is for the good of all of the people. There are many problems in this world. And I think that there are many of them in which the U.S. and other Western countries are involved. I don’t mind at all that the problems of Zimbabwe are being considered by Western powers. They certainly need whatever help they can get at this point. They have the worst inflation rate in the world. Additionally, Western powers are not the only ones condemning the currently situation in Zimbabwe (including Mugabe’s regime and how the recent run-off election was carried out unfairly [not to mention the 1 month delay with producing the results from the initial election]). Botswana, Zimbabwe and Ghana are just a few African nations openly condemning all of this. And two of them are Zim’s neighbors. Many South Africans have recently condemned it. A clear indication of this was the refusal of South African port workers to allow Chinese arms to be undocked and shipped by truck through S.A. to Zimbabwe. They refused to allow such things, given the Mugabe’s violent election campaign. Also the G-8 recently publicly condemned the same Zimbabwe situation that you are defending. The G-8 includes USA, Japan, Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Italy and France.

You’re going to have to do a lot more to convince me that things are anywhere close to “right” in Zimbabwe at this time. In the mean time, I hope and pray that things will get better there soon for the good of all of their people.

Yours respectfully,
-
Doug Mortensen

]]> http://www.kgotsi.com/index.php?entry=entry080702-160207 2008-07-02T00:00:00Z 2008-07-02T00:00:00Z
Then the virtualization people got creative and decided to let you virtualize your Boot Camp installation. This way if you dual boot and use virtualization, you only have to have 1 Windows installation.

Simply put. This has botched my Windows Vista SP1 installation. It had been running beautifully using Boot Camp, and then I decided to try Parallels to access the Vista installation from Mac OS X without having to restart. Bad idea. about 4 working hours later, I still use my Windows programs under Boot Camp. Instead Microsoft sends me to an Internet Explorer only shell and tells me how to get a genuine copy of Windows.

My business is a Microsoft partner. My copy of windows is genuine.

Now I've reactivated Windows Vista SP1 twice, rebooted between Mac OS X, Boot Camp and Vista in Parallels about 12 times. Updated Parallels to the newest version & reinstalled their tools in Vista. And on and on.

As convenient as a feature this virtualizing BootCamp may be, it is not worth the frustration & lost productivity that occurs every time that Microsoft releases a major update.

As soon as I get Vista happy again in Boot Camp, I'm not using Parallels anymore to run the Boot Camp OS. Bad idea. Waste of 1/2 of a business day where I'm supposed to be generating revenue helping clients with their networks and systems. Not nursing my own crippled Vista installation back to the land of trusted functionality....]]> http://www.kgotsi.com/index.php?entry=entry080612-114923 2008-06-12T00:00:00Z 2008-06-12T00:00:00Z
There I found the following two lines:

Error 0x80070422 returned from call to WMIGetIPAddress().
Error 0x80070422 returned from call to CRFireCommit::Commit().

And obviously the first one points to a problem obtaining the local IP address via WMI. So I looked at the services and sure enough WMI Service was stopped & disabled. I think this was done either by myself or an employee in the past when troubleshooting some lock-ups. In any case, WMI Service is usually a good thing to have running (and by default it is always running). So I set the startup type back to automatic, started it up, reran the SBS CEACIC wizard, and ta-da!

Problem fixed.]]> http://www.kgotsi.com/index.php?entry=entry080501-125556 2008-05-01T00:00:00Z 2008-05-01T00:00:00Z
I don't know why I didn't try this earlier. I thought I did, but it didn't work. Maybe so, but I am not positive. In any case, it has been working well running WSUS 3.0 now for months.

No thanks to Microsoft for making one of my original posts in their WSUS discussion group disappear. I honestly think that they removed it because they couldn't figure out an answer to it, and I was the only one person out of thousands of users who was having the problem. I've seen this once before too. What gives? I was able to pull my original post up in the Google Groups cache of that Microsoft newsgroup. But in searching the actual microsoft group, it was nowhere to be found. This is the second time that I have seen such behavior. And the other time it was not with one of my own posts, but instead with a MS Office problem that several other people were reporting, in which they were kind of criticizing Microsoft, and for which Microsoft hadn't been able to provide a solution.

I really hope that the disappearance of these threads was just a coincidence, but so far, it doesn't seem that way. In any case, it's pretty sad...]]> http://www.kgotsi.com/index.php?entry=entry080322-201845 2008-03-23T00:00:00Z 2008-03-23T00:00:00Z
First Error:
============
There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personell or package vendor.

Second Error:
=============
Fatal error during installation


*Then the installer quits

In the application log we find the following errors, which all occur within a few seconds of eachother:

First Error: Event ID 1004 Source MsiInstaller
============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU', component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}' failed. The resource 'D:\SUS\wusync\WUSyncSvc.exe' does not exist.

Second Error: Event ID 1001 Source MsiInstaller
=============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU' failed during request for component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}'

Third Error: Event ID 1004 Source MsiInstaller
============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU', component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}' failed. The resource 'D:\SUS\wusync\WUSyncSvc.exe' does not exist.

Fourth Error: Event ID 1001 Source MsiInstaller
=============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU' failed during request for component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}'

Fifth Error: Event ID 1004 Source MsiInstaller
============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU', component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}' failed. The resource 'D:\SUS\wusync\WUSyncSvc.exe' does not exist.

Sixth Error: Event ID 1001 Source MsiInstaller
============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU' failed during request for component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}'

Seventh Error: Event ID 1004 Source MsiInstaller
==============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU', component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}' failed. The resource 'D:\SUS\wusync\WUSyncSvc.exe' does not exist.

Eighth Error: Event ID 1001 Source MsiInstaller
=============
Detection of product '{AFF0D9D3-6F0D-437E-9327-98108B4A8644}', feature 'WU' failed during request for component '{D31B2119-C240-4F8B-B13C-20EF38B2E070}'

Nineth Error: Event ID 11721 Source MsiInstaller
=============
Product: Microsoft Software Update Services -- Error 1721. There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personnel or package vendor. Action: WUSyncRemove, location: D:\SUS\wusync\WUSyncSvc.exe, command: /unregserver

Tenth Error: Event ID 11725 Source MsiInstaller
=============
Product: Microsoft Software Update Services -- Removal failed.

]]> http://www.kgotsi.com/index.php?entry=entry070913-155654 2007-09-13T00:00:00Z 2007-09-13T00:00:00Z