The dreaded SMART failed email

My NAS emailed me about a 3 weeks ago telling me that a drive had failed.

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

host name: shank-nas   
DNS domain: dhcp.theshanks.net   
NIS domain: (none) 

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon: 
Device: /dev/sdc [SAT], Self-Test Log error count increased 
from 0 to 1 For details see host's SYSLOG. You can also use 
the smartctl utility for further investigation. Another 
email message will be sent in 24 hours if the problem 
persists.

I ignored these messages for a while, after all, this drive had just been replaced. It was part of a 2-drive enclosure that I purchased from woot a few years ago. The enclosure starting stalling on data reads in November of 2012 and I sent it in for RMA repair. They send me a new unit with supposedly new drives. Less than 1 month later, this one starts failing. Go Hitachi.

iStolen? iGotItBack: Tales of recovering a stolen iPhone

It was winding up to be a normal Friday evening when I received a call from my wife, someone at the school where she teaches had gotten into her purse, taken all of her cash and her iPhone 4. "What do I do?", she asked.

It's a really dangerous game, stealing an iPhone, it's even more dangerous when the owners husband is a geek and fancies himself a bit of a detective.

Working for a start-up finally pays off

After years of dedicated hard work for Rhythms Netconnections and the more than $10,000 of hard-earned money invested in the company, it finally paid off. I got my check today in the mail!

The IPv4 shortage isn't a hoax!

Imagine that you are starting your new business, you call up the phone company to get a new phone number and they tell you, "Sorry, there are no more phone numbers left in the whole world, we're out."

What would you do?

What would businesses do?

What would the world do?

SharePoint Services Upgrade from 2.0 to 3.0 Goes Horribly Wrong...again!

Those who do not learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them. Yep.

About a year ago I did an upgrade for a company from SharePoint Services 2.0 to 3.0 and basically fought it for 3-weeks on and off. I just did an upgrade for the company I worked for again and sure enough the exact same things happened. I assume you are here because the SharePoint upgrade didn't go quite right for you either. Maybe you didn't have all the permissions needed, you had administrative rights to the server but not the database, oops. I am blown away that the installer will let you corrupt the database to an unusable state, no fear, you can recover and here is how.

What you see: Unable to get global configuration data

This is the first indicator of trouble, for me it meant that I had partially updated my database schema but rolled back my WSS to 2.0.

Do This: Rerun the upgrade to WSS 3.0 and follow through the upgrade handling any errors below.

What you see: An Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServer named "sql" is using the same id as the new object named "sql" of type Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPServer. Every object must contain a unique id. Either update the new object's id or delete the existing object and try again.

Do this: Clear out the Dependencies and Objects tables. To do this, go to Query Analyzer or Microsoft SQL Management Studio (Express) and enter "delete from objects; delete from dependencies;", select the SP database and click on EXECUTE. If you try to do these individually, you will get dependency errors that are pretty miserable to resolve. I know, I did first.

What you see: The pre-upgrade scan tool has not yet been run on this database SPContentDatabase

Do this: From a command line run: C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions12BINprescan /all then try the upgrade again

CAT5e vs CAT5E vs CAT6 vs CAT6a

After much research, it appears that CAT 5E (big E) is a marketing ploy and doesn’t comply to any standards. It’s rumored to support 350MHz of bandwidth but I couldn’t find any real facts. Here are the actual standards:

• Cat 5: Currently unrecognized by TIA/EIA. Provided performance of up to 100 MHz, and was frequently used on 100 Mbit/s ethernet networks. May be unsuitable for 1000BASE-T gigabit ethernet.


• Cat 5e: Currently defined in a
  TIA/EIA-568-B. Provides performance of up to 100 MHz, and is frequently used for both 100 Mbit/s and gigabit ethernet networks.


• Cat 6: Currently defined in TIA/EIA-568-B. It provides performance of up to 250 MHz, more than double category 5 and 5e.


• Cat 6a: Future specification for 10 Gbit/s applications.


• Cat 7: An informal name applied to ISO/IEC 11801 Class F cabling. This standard specifies four individually-shielded pairs (STP) inside an overall shield. Designed for transmission at frequencies up to 600 MHz.

This leads us to a question of price.

	Cat6	Cat5e
1000’ Cable (Plenum rated)	$326.00	$183.00
RJ-45 (Stranded)	$0.73	$0.25
Wall jack	$6.39	$3.20

Generally you can expect about 2x the price but will support 10x the speed (10GB). These prices are from a few sites on the internet and aren't by any means representative of all pricing. The general feeling from newsgroups and forums was that the expensive part was the labor so installing Cat6 was still the better choice if you have a new installation.

Beware Laplink PCMover

One of my clients received a copy of Laplink PCMover with her new laptop. Not only did it not successully transfer Quickbooks as it claims to, it transferred Microsoft ActiveSync (not Vista compatible), Windows Installer, Windows System Restore and more that corrupted the Vista install beyond repair. To Laplinks shame credit, they did put a warning window in the wizard suggesting that you need to know what you are moving before the process begins. The average users just clicks the checkbox and moves on in anticipation of all of their applications being transferred to their shiney new PC. Laplink support suggested I could undo the errant program migration but it was an all or nothing deal, I couldn't select just the programs that were migrated that caused problems. Laplink PCMover ended up costing 4-days of problems when we could have moved data and reinstalled programs in about 6-hours.

MSMQ Async Solution

See end of post for update

I touched on this a little bit befoe but finally figured out a solution. Here is the basic code for a Windows Service that sets up a listener thread and executes it, the listener thread is responsible for adding a handler for the queue ReceiveCompleted event. Here is said code:

The Vonage Saga is Ending

The last straw today. I came back from my birthday lunch and went into my office to find my message light not blinking for the first time in several weeks. I thought this was odd as my Nortel Vista 350 (Qwest Home Receptionist) showed 4 new callers. I dialed into my voicemail and was informed that there were no new messages. I then checked my email and strangely, it said I had 2 new messages. I then logged into the web site and sure enough, I did. Dialed back in, nothing. Hmmm. So I called Vonage and after 35 minutes was told that the issue was known and had been reported but not updated on the web site yet. This is it folks, I can't take it anymore. I have officially decided that after 6 months of my voice mail indicator not turning off, choppy quality, long hold times, phone echo and every service outage imaginable as well as terrible customer service that I am done with Vonage.

I set Melissa's line back up with Qwest for $25/mo with a waived activation fee for returning from a competitor and decided I would give AT&T Callvantage a try for my business line. I do a lot of long distance so this would be a good cost savings. However, this time, at the first sign of crappy quality, I am leaving this VoIP ship and going back to a good ol' "TiVo-can-dial-up-I-can-send-faxes-works-when-internet-is-down" hardwired phone line. Also luckily for me, Vonage was so incompetent that they never transferred my service fully away from Qwest so porting was easy this time with my line. I look forward to receiving my MTA and calling Vonage and telling them to get lost in the next week. Stay tuned and I will let you know how it goes.