Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

If you've been getting a lot of "Unable to read local eventlog (reason: 87)" entries in your event log with SQL 2005 RTM from the Alert Engine of SQL, you'll be happy to know this has been fixed in the new build.

Some installs never have it show up, others have it fill up the event logs. Strange little bug but I'm glad it is gone.

You can download it from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=39ebef74-1c29-49fe-8221-c94f2b52f6c6&DisplayLang=en

Looks like it will be mainly covering wireless security and Windows Defender aka what used to be Microsoft Anti-Spyware, which used to be Giant AntiSpyware. It has come a long way since then though, especially for Terminal Servers. Giant used to launch 3 processes per user session, ouch.

Register for it here:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032291929

aka

http://tinyurl.com/n6ydd

Think about that one a second and see why I find it funny.

I bumped into this today on accident but I'm certainly going to use it like I use Exchange Best Practices Analyzer at customer sites. Pretty much any Exchange box that I have to maintain or help maintain, gets scanned with ExBPA from time to time. ISA can be a quirky beast from time to time so I'm happy to see this utility released.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=D22EC2B9-4CD3-4BB6-91EC-0829E5F84063&displaylang=en


aka

http://tinyurl.com/fljbmhttp://tinyurl.com/fljbm

I have a feeling these statistics on the side of the blog won't be accurate until this new version of the blogging software has ran for a while. I'm on the bleeding edge release (snapshot from today) so I'm hoping most of my plugins work as expected.

Thanks to a friend of the server, the RAM on the donated server will go from 256MB to around 1.25GB soon. That will allow me to un-tweak the web server a bit. It is amazing this site, plus about 11 others, used to run on a dual PPro. I had it super-tweaked for pumping packets out, so most people didn't have a clue. Only time you would really notice is when you uploaded megs upon megs of pictures to the galleries.

"Dinosaurs are extinct. Do you know what that means? THEY'RE FIRED!"

Sabrina has been watching way too much of The Apprentice.

Bumped into this problem last night when I was doing a test setup of a little Squid backend on my desktop machine at home. It would typically segfault complaining of too many file handles open. I found a great way of patching the binary in the newsgroups to avoid recompiling it manually with a hardcoded file handle limit. I'm hoping the configure scripts get fixed eventually.

Basically, search for 00 20 00 00 from the bottom of the .EXE, upward, with a hex-editor. You will want to change the 2nd instance of 00 20 00 00 to 00 0C 00 00. Basically, reducing the number from 8192 to 3072.

Originally spotted:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.cygwin/40135

Tried to make things a little less cluttered around here - also discovered that Google Local doesn't seem to like taking 'comments' anymore so I stripped them from the GeoURL code. I might have broken other things in the process, but it's 3am and I need to sleep. I hate falling asleep on the couch prematurely, only to wake up in the middle of the night.

If you own a Sony DRM'd CD, you'll be interested in this.




Crazy weekend. Both kids are sick with the stomach flu and we are showing signs of it too. Juliana ended up at the hospital tonite and has an appointment tomorrow morning. Not fun.

I'm running on fumes at the moment. I think the Sony gods are angry because the first time I attempted to post this, the power went out right after a lightning strike. I'm going to submit this before I lose power again.

The original spec was to have 256 character available for passwords, so 256-bytes were reserved. Why is the password length limited to 127 characters? Far-east/Unicode uses 2 bytes per character. Oops.

Found that 'dirty secret' here:
http://blogs.technet.com/robert_hensing/archive/2004/07/28/199610.aspx

My biggest complaint about SMB as a network protocol was how often it would need to do many (relatively) redundant transfers across the wire. You have to remember this protocol dates back to Windows for Workgroups and DOS, where latency and high overhead did not matter much because 99% of the operations were done on a local network.

People back then weren't trying to stuff files back and forth through a VPN over a DSL line. End result, nowadays, is a lot of blocking operations when "stuck" on a low bandwidth link and typically results with a non-responsive Explorer process for network operations. Another limitation, without resorting to using a WINS server or some type of Layer 2 bridge, was/is browsing for "nearby" computers. Again, this shows the age of the protocol. A lot of "Workgroups" or "Domains" now exist in diverse geographical locations, and not in the next cube over.

I'm looking forward to the redesign. Only bummer is that it looks like it will be Vista/Longhorn only, for the advanced features.

One thing in particular that caught my eye from the new blog entry from the SMB team is this:

SMB 2.0 supports an arbitrary, extensible way of compounding operations to reduce round trips. This makes the protocol less chatty as compared to SMB 1.0. Chattiness of SMB 1.0 has often been a major pain point.

Bingo. Pretty much what I described up above.

Read more about it here:
http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/archive/2006/03/10/421752.aspx

They are being strongarmed by Clear Channel it looks like. I don't subscribe to them or Sirius but stuff like this will just slow the adoption, I think.

http://www.orbitcast.com/archives/xm-100-commercialfree-music-no-more.html

I haven't had to do this yet, but I am sure I will have to at some point. We're working on a test deployment of CRM right now, and from what I can see, it is going to be pretty nice.

http://blogs.msdn.com/midatlanticcrm/archive/2006/03/08/Changing_Port_Numbers_in_Microsoft_CRM.aspx

I'm sure my crusty license from many versions ago won't work on this version but it was nice revisiting an old friend when I needed a good serial terminal emu in a pinch. I always want to avoid Hyperterminal when I can.

Despite having a bad rep due to what it does, this program actually had some good uses.

http://www.securitydump.com/content160.html