http://www.kgotsi.com/index.php http://www.kgotsi.com/index.php?entry=entry100126-171242
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=entry090920-230101
This stuff is pretty sweet indeed.]]> http://www.kgotsi.com/index.php?entry=entry080717-152210
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=entry080702-160207
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=entry080612-114923
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=entry080501-125556
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=entry080322-201845
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=entry070913-155654
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=entry070425-211813
Again, it seems that it was clearly introduced at the time that we upgraded from 3.1 to 3.2.

We are VERY pleased with the XenExpress server overall, but this little issue would increase our productivity, and allow us to NOT move backward from the solutions and technology we've been using. XenSource is of course a big leap forward in other ways. Did I mention that we like it?? :-)]]> http://www.kgotsi.com/index.php?entry=entry070326-162814
1.) Xen Virtual Machine crash - We have 2 linux VMs running Debian Sarge, and 2 Windows VMs, one running Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium R2, and the other running Server 2003 R2. I use a Mac, and so I connect to the Server 2003 R2 VM via RDP to do a lot of Windows work. One of the things that I do there is administer the Xen server. We have the Xen Administration program loaded onto that VM. It generally works fine administering the VMs that way. However, about an hour ago I was logged onto our Server 2003 R2 machine and running the Xen Administration program, when suddenly my RDP session stopped working. I reconnected about a minute later, only to find that the VM had rebooted. Just a moment later, a colleauge mentioned that the other Windows VM had just restarted unexpectedly. Upon logging back into both, we were prompted with Microsoft's window which asks why the computer was unexpectedly shut down. I then logged into the linux VMs, and ran the uptime command to find that one reported being up for over 4 days, and the other over 5 days. So only the Windows servers were rebooted. I SSH'd into the Xen Server & checked out the /var/log/messages & /var/log/xen/xend.log log files, as well as others that I thought may give helpful information. Those two were the only ones that really seemed to tell much about the unexpected Xen problem. I have a pretty good hunch as to what caused the problem with the server I was using (Server 2003 Standard R2), but I have no idea why it took the 2nd Windows server down with it. (By the way, the VMs are running fine now).

Here's exactly what I was doing at the time of the VM crashes:
I was connected to the Windows Server 2003 Standard R2 via RDP on the console connection. And I think the console fact is the important one here. The reason being is because the last thing I did before the servers crashed was open the Xen Administration program, select the Server 2003 Std R2 VM from the list in the upper-pane, then click on the "Graphical Console" tab down below. I am thinking that because I was remotely connected to the server's graphical console via RDP, the Xen Administration program didn't like the idea of me viewing the graphical console from it, from within the graphical console. I've had similar issues w/ VNC connecting to the local host, only to get an endless loop of embedded screens. Hmmm. This is absolutely the only reason why I can imagine that this happened.

So, perhaps for now, a lesson learned is to be more careful with that. But perhaps in the meantime, XenSource can implement an if-then statement in their software to check before hand as to whether allowing their software to do something (try to do, anyway) is going to cause problems.

I think the big problem here however, is that my 2nd Windows VM was taken down with the other. I think this is totally unacceptable. Just a passing detail that may help in solving this problem is that one or two other times, I have had problems connecting to the Xen server from the Xen Administration program, so I SSH'd into the Xen server & restarted the XenAgentD process (service xenagentd restart), only to find that it also killed & restarted my Windows VMs unexpectedly, while leaving the linux VMs unscathed.

As previously stated, I am ready to pay the $700.00 for XenEnterprise, but not until I get a good answer to what caused this, and get a permanent fix.

As far as I am concerned, I am very excited about Xen. I love to see Open Source software actually make some money and develop into a strong competing business to proprietary software companies. That is why I chose Xen over VMWare for virualization.
I don't think that most people using Xen have problems like this. The very fact that Xen is marketed & often reviewed as a strong competitor to VMWare all the more confirms to me that this is probably not a common problem. Also, the founder of XenSource (Ian Pratt), stated in July 2006 that there were very few outstanding bugs in Xen at that time (this was in a PDF titled "The Xen Roadmap"). And I'm thinking that coming from this guy being a very experienced professional programmer, this probably refers to issues that are so small that I probably wouldn't even notice them (although I may be overzealous here).
Also, HP and I think IBM are strongly backing Xen, and sell servers preloaded with it. HP has published whitepapers in conjunction with XenSource stating how great Xen is and posting benchmarks running on their systems. I really don't think they would do this, if my problems were commonly experienced.

So what I'm trying to say is that I don't think that Xen is a buggy solution that shouldn't be used on production servers. We've actually been very, very impressed with it overall. But there is obviously something wrong here, and I need to be reassured that we're making the right decision by virtualizing with Xen, before I commit to invest in it. And once that we really are convinced that it is the right way to go, we will continue to invest in it, and work to steer our clients the same way. Once that we commit ourselves, then we want them to be successful, and so will gladly pay them in doing our part to help them have the financial resources needed to continue to improve & be successful.

As for now, I am posting this with a request for help. I have placed the relevant portions of the log files here: http://www.kgotsi.com/static.php?page=s ... s-20070326

Please provide assistance, and also contact someone in the Xen sales division and let them know that you are sending them another buyer, whose problems you just fixed.

Thanks a lot!

--
Doug Mortensen
Network Consultant
Impala Networks Inc.
doug----at----impalanetworks----dot----com

CCNA, MCP, A+, Linux+, MS Small Business Specialist
]]>