Blackberry Outage
Blackberry (RIM) data and email service confirmed down since 2:00AM Eastern 01/29/2011, with no ETA in sight. Looks like all carriers are affected, with AT&T and Verizon confirmed.
Categories Archives Technical
Clean upgrade from SAM3 to SAM4 with playlist in-tact
SAM4 has a slightly different database format and filesystem layout than SAM3. You should not try an in-place upgrade, or bad things can happen. The best way to upgrade if you have a large or refined playlist, is to install SAM4 along side SAM3 and copy the playlist tables over. This way you can leave […]
Write speed on Linux
A quick non-destructive test of disk write performance on Linux. Useful for testing cheap HDD’s (write will almost always be worse than read): dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
Vanilla Kernel on CentOS
If compiling a Vanilla kernel for CentOS, you may encounter the following after rebooting: Setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory Setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory Setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory […] Kernel panic – not syncing: Attempted to kill init! To resolve the booting […]
Validating and Repairing a FireBird Database
To validate the database: gfix -v -f database_file To (attempt to) repair the database: gfix -mend database_file
Cpanel: Error invalid maildir size file
Sometimes an email account goes over quota and the quota can’t be adjusted due to the following error: Error invalid maildir size file The following commands ran as root will resolve most email quota issues for a Cpanel account, including incorrect quota calculations. Substitute <cpaneluser> with the Cpanel user which owns the email account having […]
Windows: Location of DNS zone files
If the file is not in the %systemroot%\system32\dns directory, the full path to the zone file will be shown on the General tab. Since most zone data is held in the registry, restoring the %systemroot%\system32\dns from backup isn’t enough – you’ll need to manually populate the DNS zones in the DNS console, and choose the […]
Windows 2008: Disable password complexity requirement
Method 1 In Windows Server 2008, there is an option in Local Security Policy. Click on Start and then Administrative Tools and then click on Local Security Policy. In Local Security Policy, click on Account Policies and then click on Password Policy. Under Password Policy, double click on “Password must meet complexity requirements” and then […]
Copy one disk to another using Linux and DD
The following will copy two disks, partition table and all, with forensic quality, and pad the destination disk with zeroes if any data is unreadable on the source disk. Be sure you’ve identified which disk is which using combinations of dmesg and ‘fdisk -l’. The destination disk must also be equal or greater in size. […]
Windows: Ignore errors with Xcopy and RoboCopy
To copy entire directory structures as quickly as possible and ignore all disk errors (useful in data recovery) either of the following commands should work with robocopy being the quickest (if you’ve got Vista/7 or XP with the XP Resource Kit installed). Both commands use source -> destination path order. xcopy /C/H/R/S/Y c:\ d:\ /C […]