Category Archives: Technology

Technology

Log files fillup!

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We have a variety of servers that run many different applications which log to a file.  This includes IIS, SMTP, FTP, etc.  The list goes on and on.  It is easy to lose track of them all, and even easier to let the log files fill up your drive while your not watching!

We have had to go through and zip up or delete logs to clear up disk space many times.  The full drives have on occasion caused service outages due to not being able to write to the log files.  We have struggled to find an easy/inexpensive way to do this.  It would be easy to write a batch script to delete all the files, but we are under PCI requirements to keep a certain amount of log files on disk for compliance reasons.  Thus the need to zip up the files and delete the originals.

One of our excellent coders at my office came up with this great VB script that will do just this for us.  It will curse through a directory *and all its sub directories* looking for files with the extension ‘.log’ (or whatever extension you want) and mash them all into a single date-stamped zip file.

One thing I need to mention is that this script is looking specifically for log files that have a date stamped file name (this is how it created a date stamped zip), so it will only really work on IIS logs and the like.

Take it for a spin and let me know what you think!

 

[UPDATE: 8/19/2011] I have a new version of this file described in the following post.

Backup Exec, Technology, VMWare

Backup Exec 2010 AVVI – Part 2

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So it has been several weeks since my Part 1 post on this topic. We are still struggling with all of our servers getting backed up using AVVI.

I enlisted the help of a co-worker and he wrote an excellent vb script that queries the domain for all the servers, and then goes and restarts the VMTools service on every box.  We run this script from our backup server, and it works great.  This centralizes the management of that task, and keeps us from having to mess with batch files on every server, and potentially forgetting to add the task, etc. on a new server. You can download the script if you like. Change the .txt extension to .vbs, and edit the service name at the top.  Edit the mail server settings at the bottom if you wish to get an emailed report of the results.

I believe that this new process has helped, but we are still having issues getting backups from all the machines.  We have found that occasionally the mgmt-vmware service needs to be restarted on the ESX hosts as vCenter has trouble getting the snapshot.  I have not yet taken the time to figure out how to automate this, so it is a manual process at the moment.

Blogging, Technology

WordPress 3 Upgrade

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I’ve been struggling with getting the new version of WordPress to auto-install.  I have been getting a stalled upgrade with no error or feedback.  The process would just fail at ‘Unpacking Files’ and nothing else would happen.

After a bit of searching I found a tip that finally worked.  It seems to be due to php4 and php5 being enabled at the same time like my hosting company 1and1.com has.  After updating the .htaccess file at the root of my WordPress installation with the following code the upgrade worked seamlessly!

Add

# Ensure PHP5 being used
# For WordPress auto upgrade
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

To your .htaccess file and you’ll be in business!

UPDATE: 8-3-2010 1:40pm

Either the upgrade to v3, or my hosting company (I suspect the hosting company)_ wiped out my .htaccess file.  This prevented me from upgrading to v3.0.1.  Once the settings were *back* in place I was able to upgrade as expected.

Backup Exec, Technology, VMWare

BackupExec 2010 AVVI

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I’ve been working with Symantec’s new VMWare agent for Backup Exec 2010 for the past couple of months.  We were excited to have differential backup of VMDK files through vSphere when they announced the new version of the software.  In practice however this is a bit more involved than we bargained for.

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Technology

Downgrade iPhone 3G(S) from iOS 4.0, back to iPhone OS 3.1.x

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I recently upgraded my iPhone 3g to the new iOS version 4.  I wasn’t terribly impressed with the limited features that are available on the 3g handset, and found the new OS to be slow enough to drive me nuts.

I resolved to go back to the old OS and get my speed back.  (There wasn’t anything I would miss anyway on my old phone)  It turns out it was harder to downgrade that I had thought.  I spun my wheels for a while and ended up asking my buddy Ian for ideas about it.  He pointed me to this blog entry which ended up being exactly the trick I needed.  Now I’m back on the prior OS and working as expected again.   Thanks for the tip Ian!

Downgrade from iPhone OS 4.0 Beta, Back to iPhone OS 3.1.3 | Mac|Life.