A few days before leaving overseas I was invited to talk about Private Cloud concepts with Tudy Damian (MVP, Virtualization) and Adrian Stoian (MVP, System Center).
The recording is in Romanian and can be found here.
Last week I got the chance to brush my Mac skills and encountered the following problem.
When using Mac OS X 10.6.* and PGP versions prior to 10.1.2 after upgrading the OS to the latest version (10.6.8) it would not boot anymore.
This is a known bug in PGP which is fixed in PGP 10.1.2 or later. But, if you’ve already done the upgrade you can fix the problem pretty easily without the need to reinstall OSX. Here’s how:
The other day Adobe just released an update to their flagship product Adobe Reader. While I quickly updated my installation, I decided to try the new Software Installation introduced in Windows Intune 2.0 last year and deploy the update to a couple of computers I manage.
The first problem I encountered was that I couldn’t use my favorite browser and I had to use IE. When I would go to the Software tab and select the task Upload Software, my browser would download an executable and when I would try to run it I would get
An error occurred attempting to install SoftwarePublishingApp
Switching to IE solved the problem, but in the final dialog screen where I should select the software I wanted to deploy I would only have the options of deploying msi or exe files. The problem was that this particular Adobe patch was in the msp file format.
After taking a break from the problem I went over to the Update tab and saw a new task that was available: Upload. Much to my surprise the process was basically the same as with Upload software but this time I was presented with the option of selecting msp files as well.
The rest of the steps were basically giving Intune more info on what Operating systems to deploy the software update to.
The next step was to approve this update to deploy it to computers. You can find imported 3rd party updates in the Non-Microsoft updates section in the All updates drop-down menu.
So, for the record 3rd party updates in msp format can be deployed from the Update tab not the Software one.
The other day I combined 2 of my Google Apps domains by adding the second as a domain alias. The problem was that the alias appeared to be stuck and the only option would be “Activate domain alias”. I had already activated the alias by 2 methods so I had no idea what was wrong.
I then read on the forums that being signed in to multiple accounts could prevent a successful activation. I immediately signed off all my accounts and retried. This time, I got an error, saying that Google Webmaster Tools is not enabled for my domain. After activating that service I managed to finally activate the alias.
The root cause of the fail would be something in the lines of: Google detects that you don’t have access to the Google Webmaster Tools and switches to one of the other accounts you may be signed in. That account’s GWT service might be activate, but it doesn’t have permission to deal with your initial domain hence the errorless loop of trying to activate the alias.
Activating a domain alias is a pretty simple process but if you never get an error it is hard to figure out what could be the problem.
I’ve promised myself that any blog post that I write would be a technical/career one, but I feel the need to remember what 9/11 meant for me.
I was a small boy, only 13 years old, and my memories about 9/11 are starting to fade. What I remember that day is that I was playing outside with my brother and kids from the neighborhood and my mother said we should come home.
I remember entering the house all sweaty from playing and that the TV was on in the kitchen. I remember my mother saying something serious had happened and then we started watching the TV together. I don’t recall what channel we were watching perhaps CNN, but I believe I was watching TV when the 2nd impact occurred. I was a boy and had no idea what that meant at the time, but I distinctly remembered my mother crying and saying that “World War 3” is going to start because of this attack.
I read today this great article on how 9/11 shaped the leaders of that time. Although it was over 10 years ago, I do remember that I liked Rudy Giuliani’s leadership at that time, and how calm he was when his city was attacked. Not so much about the president at that time.
I am now considerably older and wiser and feel that 9/11 profoundly changed the world we live in. I’m glad that World War 3 hasn’t happened but the 2 wars the US was/is involved in are not that far away.
I think that 9/11 might have even provoked the current economical crisis we are in now, as the US has spent billions of dollars on the wars and for securing the US from any other terrorist attacks.
This week was an exceptional good week, but the the most important accomplishment is that I managed to pass my Google Apps certification exam and I’m now a Google Apps Certified Deployment Specialist.
It was now a matter of pride passing this exam, having been sponsored by a 3rd party who I hope will use my skills in the future.
Last week I attended ITCamp 2011 a premium conference held in Cluj-Napoca and organized by 2 communities: ITSpark and CodeCamp. Now that I have a bit more time off, I decided to write about my experience.
The first thing that comes to mind is finally! While I like small community events with 20-30 participants, a big event like ITCamp was long overdue. I remember the last TechNet session I attended in Cluj was quite a while ago, in 2007.
The conference had 2 tracks, one for ITPro and one for Developers, while the event had over 200 attendees. I managed to attend most of day 1 and only the final 2 sessions on the second day.
The first day started with the keynote opening from Mihai Tătăran and Tudor ‘Tudy’ Damian and I take this opportunity to thank them again for their hard work on making this event happen.
Next Petru Jucovschi and Sebi Vijeu talked about automated testing in a virtual environment. I admit that even the developer side of the presentation was interesting because it would have helped me in my Computer Science courses over the years.
Stephen Forte then talked about Kanban, a Japanese philosophy that says work in progress should be kept at a minimum. Stephen is a great speaker and in the 60 minutes he spent describing Kanban and how to use it, the audience had some really good laughs.
After the lunch-break, Adrian Stoian talked about System Center Configuration Manager 2012. I was really looking forward to this presentation as I like the System Center family of products and Configuration Manager in special. I was really glad Adi had some demos to show us because I have been busy and can’t find any time to install SCCM 2012 and play with it. I am really excited about what SCCM 2012 will bring and plan to make some time in July to test it hands-on.
Tudor Damian’s Private Cloud – the good, the bad and the ugly presentation was a really nice recap on the whole cloud computing idea. Sometimes we let ourselves get caught up on new ideas and Tudy was excellent in pointing both advantages and the disadvantages of the cloud.
My next stop was at the Dev track. I already knew what Windows Intune was about and a colleague from school mentioned Ciprian Jichici was an excellent speaker so I decided to attend his Year 2 – Life after Cloud presentation. Right from the start I was blown away by his expertise. The guy talked for an hour with just 6-8 slides, impressive! As I had recently worked with Windows Azure I had some clues on how to use it, but Ciprian’s presentation managed to answer all outstanding questions I may have had. Excellent speaker, no wonder he is a Microsoft Regional Director!
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the Open Panel Discussion on Cloud & Windows Azure because I would have liked to hear what the rest of my peers think about the whole concept.
I was able to make up for that loss at the VIP dinner later that day, where I was invited because I helped organized the event. The table I sat had some great people. Besides fellow itsparker Chris and Cristian Lefter which I had already meet, I had the opportunity to talk with Paul Roman from PRAS Consulting and Drago? Mănac from Appnor. I had some really hard questions for each of them as I really wanted to know what “good” decisions they made to get to this point. I consider both of them a very good example of an ITPro turned self entrepreneur.
On the second day of the event I only managed to catch 2 presentations. Mihai Tătăran talked about the migration of an existing application in Windows Azure and the problems his company faced.
Paula Januszkiewicz’s presentation called 10 Deadly Sins of Administrators in regards to Windows Security was a real delight. The presentation was really hands on and Paula showed us how easy it is to hack a network. Ranging from stuff like the ability to write in a folder we don’t have permission, snooping SMB traffic and even replacing explorer.exe. At the end of the presentation I had this strange feeling I need to get home, secure my network, and start using encryption on my laptop 
.
All in all the conference was a great event both from a technical perspective and because I had the opportunity to network with really smart people from the IT industry.
Congratulations to all of the organizers who made this possible. Looking forward to next year!
Tomorrow I will be hosting a presentation and a workshop with fellow ITSpark members Chris, Cosmin and Tudy.
As Tudy has already blogged, the event is part of a 3 cities road-trip (Cluj-Napoca, Bucharest and Timisoara), a series of events held under the auspices of Microsoft with the goal of bringing NGO and IT closer, so they can work and solve problems easier.
Am publicat joi un articol despre interoperabilitatea produselor Microsoft. Articolul se refera la interoperabilitatea servicului Azure cu alte medii de dezvoltare decat cele specifice Microsoft: Java, PHP, Python si Ruby. Articolul face parte dintr-o serie de articole cu tema interoperabilitate care vor aparea pe parcursul lunilor martie-aprilie-mai.
Urmatorul articol va avea ca tema dezvoltarea de aplicatii PHP in Windows Azure.
Link: Dezvoltarea de aplicații Java pe Windows Azure folosind Eclipse
Every since I installed SCCM 2007 in the network I manage, I wanted to test the Operating System Deployment (OSD) because it’s much more flexible than what Windows Deployment Services provides.
After looking at numerous guides on how to setup OSD in SCCM 2007 (here and here) I would always end up having this error when trying to PXE boot clients
Downloaded WDSNBP
Architecture: x64
The details below show the information relating to the PXE boot request for this computer. Please provide these details to your Windows Deployment Services Administrator so that this request can be approved.
Pending Request ID: 45
Contacting Server: 192.168.3.1.
TFTP Download: smsboot\x64\abortpxe.com
PXE Boot aborted. Booting to next device...
Of course I tried what every other sysadmin does, find cases when people had the same problem and try the fixed that worked for them. Well, in this case that didn’t work, and that’s because my situation was a bit special. What should have caught my attention a lot earlier was the following lines in the smspxe.log file:
Executing LookupDevice(03000200-0400-0500-0006-000700080009, 00:13:8F:D7:BD:97) smspxe 26.01.2011 12:19:54 3240 (0x0CA8)
CDatabaseProxy :: LookupDevice succeeded: 162 30 5 1 smspxe 26.01.2011 12:19:54 3240 (0x0CA8)
MAC=00:13:8F:D7:BD:97 SMBIOS GUID=03000200-0400-0500-0006-000700080009 > Device found in the database. MacCount=1 GuidCount=30 smspxe 26.01.2011 12:19:54 3240 (0x0CA8)
Executing LookupDevice(03000200-0400-0500-0006-000700080009, 00:13:8F:D7:BD:97) smspxe 26.01.2011 12:19:54 3416 (0x0D58)
The problem here is obvious, although I can’t say it was to me (GuidCount greater than 1). There were computers with duplicate GUIDs (actually UUIDs) and this prevented a proper PXE boot for all devices. I managed to get a confirmation that the duplicate GUID was indeed preventing the PXE boot after reading this blog post on the ConfigMgr blog. The only problem is they suggested something I knew I couldn’t do: talk to the vendors and ask them to fix the problem. The salvation finally came after reading post on the Microsoft forums here.
I proceed to test this out by running SQL Management Studio, going to my ConfigMgr database (SMS_Sitecode) then to Stored procedures and finally edited the NBS_Lookupdevice procedure to replace my duplicate UUID with all 0 which SCCM will ignore by default. Another method described here involves changing 2 procedures so that SCCM basically ignores UUIDs when dealing with PXE boot.