Author: Christian

Looking back (yet again)

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Well, it’s yet again New Year’s Eve. Yet again a whole year passed by blazing fast, I didn’t manage to get everything done like I wanted.

That includes the following things:

  • getting a better job (and probably better paid too!)
  • getting a better life (well, it’s as it sounds like – my current life is rather unhealthy, and thanks to a friend I got the grip onto myself and started changing a few things – like doing a small workout every day, a bit more movement all over the day and so forth)

Which also means I do have some resolutions for the next year …

  • Become more active (like do a longer workout each day)
  • Get a better paid job (even if that’s going to hurt some people)
  • Fix my remaining health problems (like my foot, the back, …)

Now that sounds like I didn’t get anything done in the last 365 days, but that I sure did.

  • I finally managed to make my way through the slackers list (Fabian accused me I’d be orphaning half the tree – if at all, it was 1/12),
  • I did some major changes at work (though I still need to do some things – like fixing the MySQL replication with TYPO3).

I do have the feeling that the next year is gonna get interesting real soon. I do have a project for the implementation of a VDI based class-room scheduled early next year (budget still pending – so it’s a maybe); we still do have to review the available possibilities (which includes Dell – who apparently implemented exactly this for some university/technical university in Brandenburg), as well as some other small purchases.

Gentoo wise I can’t tell yet whether or not I still want to be part of it. The last few months have been rather tough for me, I’ve been haunted by guilt for other things, so I couldn’t care much about Gentoo. I’ve put away some of the burdens I had, in order to focus on the fun aspects of our beloved distribution (there isn’t much left sadly).

I’d like to thank those who had extra patience with me, thank those who took the time to talk to me, those who cheered me up when I needed it. It’s been a tough time, but thanks to a lot of amazing people (Norman, Michel, Christina, Alex, Diego, Ned, Chris, Robin, …) I got through it and I’m still here – alive and kicking 😛 !

Oh, and a happy new year !!

Life as God it wrote

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Well, some of you know I’m a bit clumsy. Ok, I went buying some stuff for Saint Nicholas for the ones I love, which came to me about ten minutes before the shops are closing. Navigated my butt into the car, drove the ~6km to the nearest store (which still had open, that was around 20:00).

Got all I wanted, went back to my car (you know, this one) and put the stuff into the trunk. When closing the trunk, I felt some opposition, so I closed it a bit harder. “Closed” I thought and went back into my car. When turning on the ignition the bord computer suddenly complained “trunk open“, so I went back out, trying to open the trunk. *WTF* .. I couldn’t get it open. So I tried again, still nothing.

Okay I thought, since it was kinda closed and I couldn’t get it open with some brute force, I decided to go back home. On the way back home I remembered the parking lot of one of the DIY superstore’s had rather good lighting. So I went by.

On the parking lot, after parking my car, I went over the back seats below the trunk deck into the trunk, removed the trunk deck and saw that I somehow stuffed one of those plastic cooling bags into the lock of the trunk. I went *WTF* and tried brute force again opening the trunk. Still a no-no.

Ripped out the cooling bag (eventually everything of it), went back onto the back seats and tried to open the left rear door, but that didn’t work. Again *WTF*. Toggled the central locking system with the appropriate switch on the front panel. Still *WTF* it didn’t open. So I crawled onto the front seats, where I saw a tiny red light glowing, which is where I figured that the child safety lock for the rear doors was still on .. that at least explained why I couldn’t open the rear door from the inside.

Finally back outside, I went around the car to the trunk, tried to open it. Nothing, again with some force, *TADA* and I got it open. Removed the remaining parts (what was left of the cooling bag), and finally could close the trunk like it’s supposed to close. *pfew*

Device CAL’s ain’t no Device CAL’s ?

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I stumbled upon a *real* weird problem. Apparently the terminal server licenses called “per Device” ain’t a real per device. From reading on it Microsoft states it like this:

Device-based versus User-based Terminal Server CALs

Two types of Terminal Server Client Access Licenses are available: TS Device CAL or TS User CAL.

  1. A TS Device CAL permits one device (used by any user) to conduct Windows Sessions on any of your servers.
  2. A TS User CAL permits one user (using any device) to conduct Windows Sessions on any of your servers.

You may choose to use a combination of TS Device CALs and TS User CALs simultaneously with the server software.

If I take the above and take a closer look at my terminal server license server I’ll see something like this:

Terminal services license manager
Terminal services license manager

As you can see, I *do* have devices with more than a single license (in fact, several of them do have more then four), which from my understanding ain’t what Microsoft had in mind.

After noticing this, I initially thought my terminal servers had the wrong license mode, but as you can see below, they are using “per Device“.

Terminal service license settings
Terminal service license settings

Which means, I am completely clueless at this point, as they *really* should be using just a single license, and not multiple ones.

Update:

Ok, after experimenting a bit with it, it seems that a license seems to be tied to the SSID. Which would explain, why I see different CAL’s for a single device. We reflashed the thin clients in between (and within that process, the SSID is freshly generated), so that’d be the only explanation I’ve got for what I’m seeing.

Frantic work, private life, friends

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Well, it’s been a full month since I last wrote something. Back then I had some problems with 2X, Windows Terminal Server and printing (I still have problems, but not those anymore – I resolved them).

Work has been unusual frantic the last month, as well as I don’t pay much interest to all the things in Gentoo anymore (that was an advice from my shrink), as it just keeps putting on my anger/urge to do something nobody wants me to do even more. So I invested my time into doing other things (like baking or reading one of the many books that I buyed of Amazon and didn’t ever get a chance to read) I enjoy more.

I haven’t been completely dormant when it comes to Gentoo work, I finally went through the slacker list of last month (resulting in some retirement bugs, some already resolved – others not). Also I’ve been working hard with Robin on getting the auto-synced userinfo.xml working, in order to get away from two different sources of data. So be advised, you should rather edit LDAP (you can edit most of your own record by now – besides gentooAccess of course).

Now, my remaining task is, to get the missing data from people I mailed (most of them answered, others didn’t which is a real shame). Once that is done, we can simply lock the userinfo.xml in the gentoo/ repo, and then simply turn on a script to grab the userinfo.xml from LDAP and push it to the webnodes.

As for my personal life, it has improved at least a bit. I’ve been seeing a shrink to help me through some stuff (you know how life is – challenging), but also some of my friends helped me (heya there 😛 Diego, Alex, Christina, Norman, ……)

Windows terminal services & network printers

Christian 2 Comments

Yes, yes. I do list a lot of crappy products (go on, laugh; I don’t really care). Yesterday I had quite a struggle with Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Terminal services (or more precisely with their way on how to deal with network printers).

As most of you know, there a two (possibly three) different ways on how to do network printers.

  1. would be, to simply share a local connected printer by simply creating a share for the printer
  2. buy a smart printer with integrated print server
  3. a combination of 1. and 2.

We luckily enough do have printers with integrated print servers, so that wouldn’t be a problem. *But* you get a problem if you’re trying to monitor the printer queue if you simply create a new TCP/IP connection from another target. You simply can’t tell who’s printing what.

So we tried to find a way to reuse the already shared printers. And there actually is. Simply create a new local printer (as you would if you’d use the TCP/IP way), but don’t select TCP/IP, select Local Port instead. That’s the whole catch (I’ve been trying to figure that out half the day yesterday). Then simply supply the location (it’s URI formatted like this.is.my.printer.servarYour shady Printer) and click through the dialog.

The only catch with this is, that you have to install any non-standard printer drivers locally. That’s why I tried reusing the already present network drivers, but Windows treats Printers and Network printers differently. The former is treated as a global object (as in visible to all users on the current machine), the latter is only visible to the current user.

*Babing*

VBscript & Active Directory and printers ? (continued)

Christian 1 Comment

As I posted earlier, I tried working around some limitations in Microsoft’s Active Directory by teaching the script some intelligence.

But, since we recently started using Thin Clients, all the stuff I did with the fancy vbs was just a waste-of-time. Turns out, Windows XP Embedded doesn’t work quite the same as a “normal” Windows XP (that’s where I tested the script on), and it simply dies when running the WMI Query. Bollocks.

So I switched back, utilizing a shortcut in Startup, but pointing to the shortened vbs (see below) instead of the ugly batch file someone wrote.

But even that doesn’t work all the time, I still have to figure out why.

screen and UTF-8 (continued)

Christian 2 Comments

OK, since I last posted about my problems with screen and irssi being unable to handle unicode chars, I got a lot of feedback (here or on IRC), and actually it was Alexander who pointed me into the right direction. LANG=C doesn’t seem to support UTF-8 characters. So after adding

to my environment *everything* is just fine … 😯

screen and UTF-8

Christian 4 Comments

Since I got annoyed by umlauts being printed as ░, I figured I’d install a UTF-8 capable font on this box here and all my problems would be gone. But not so fast.

screen is a real fucked up thing. If you’re starting screen via screen -U everything is nice and cosy, and you get your UTF-8 goodness. But, don’t think you’ll get away with just enabling UTF-8 as default and enabling UTF-8 for each new window by doing this:

You won’t get any UTF-8 char (at least w/ irssi) out of that .. 😡

VBscript & Active Directory and printers ?

Christian 1 Comment

Well, since our current solution for mapping printers is an ugly batch file, which needs to be put into Startup, I today poked at doing it in VBscript (I know, but it’s less ugly than the batch script, trust me).

As some of you know, printers are only applicable to users (as in you can’t put a startup script onto an OU, which is going to map the printers). So as we store users and the computes in different OU’s in our Active Directory (we do have about 15.000 students), I can’t apply the printer.vbs to the users OU directly either, unless I implement some intelligence into the script itself.

And that’s basically what I did. Since different pools at the university have different DNS suffixes (like pools.rz.barfoo.org, that our or pools.fmz.barfoo.org) and we only want them students to have our printers when they logon at our pool, I just made the script to get the DNS DomainName of the current active interface and compare it against a given pattern.