Up to Something

Editors Note

This is unfinished, but I am leaving it as "Published", because it's being used for reference. Sorry for omissions and misspellings.

Patching Ahsay 5.5.5.x

This is a short blurb about patching Ahsay backup, for Windows users of the 5.5.5.x product release.

Plug

Ahsay online backup is my favorite backup for a variety of reasons. I use it and I encourage my business customers to use it. It is priced affordably and it's fairly agnostic about what get's backed up.

High Points

• NAS-device support. e.g. Thecus 4100, 5200, etc. These can run Ahsay OBS natively, thereby making a 4+TB backup server w/ replication a cost-effective possibility. Businesses who deal in large documents and pictures need massive amounts of disk space. Servers with adequate storage are already costly, but backup capacity can drive costs outside budget requirements. NAS-device support makes a significant cut to the overall backup-budget.
• Mac / Windows / Linux and even Netware are supported as client operating systems.
• The OBSR, or backup-server process, may be hosted on Windows or Linux.
• Every OBSR comes with Replication - for FREE.

What Sucks

Ahsay, as of this writing, does two things very poorly.

• Windows 2008 System State backup doesn't work w/o Third-Party software.
• Patching the server and the clients is tedious and the documentation is a little unclear.

Other Area's for Improvement:

• MS-SQL Backups are mediocre. Ahsay is functional but incomplete in the nature of support, particularly when restoring. For a simple daily backup with hands-on restore, it's adequate.
• The Unix/Linux/Mac job scheduler is useless.
• Mac Desktop backups are not easy to work with if you have traveling laptops.
• Entourage is the devil.

Download

Acquire the latest Stable or Hotfix release from Ahsay-Pedia. Click the gigantic orange "Enter" button. Find the Hot Topics, and click FAQ: How to install the latest patch set or hotfixes to AhsayOBM or AhsayACB?.

Find How to install the latest patch set / hotfixes to AhsayOBM in the Table of Contents.

Download the release you want. Unzip it. Today, January 26th, 2010, you have these files:

• bin/obc.jar
• bin/obcc.jar
• bin/obcs.jar

This is the unclear part: You must unzip the obm-fix.zip, then you must unzip the JARs as well!.

Prep Steps
• 1. Uncompress the hotfix zip file you downloaded.
  
• 2. Rename the files, add a ".zip" extension. i.e. obc.jar -> obc.jar.zip
  
• 3. Uncompress into folders.
  
• 4. Next we stop services and copy files.
  

Services

Stop these services
• AutoUpdateAgent (Ahsay Online Backup Manager)
• Continuous Data Protection (Ahsay Online Backup Manager)
• Online Backup Scheduler (Ahsay Online Backup Manager)
• Exit Ahsay, if you have the OBC client or System-Try application running.

Find your AhsayOBM 'bin' folder. Rename the 'jar' files which you are replacing. .

Now copy the new FOLDERS in, which should end up looking like this:

I thought that the first season of "Legend of the Seeker" was bad. But, the second season is worse. The writers don't know anything about the characters, and they haven't really read the books. Terry Goodkind put some effort and thought into constructing a realistic world. The show is nothing at all. Who are the writers? Did they eat paint chips?

I feel bad for the actors, in this case. Dollhouse gets canceled, but LoTS gets a second season. I hate the show, and I am reporting via second-hand knowledge. I have tried on a few occasions to watch it, yet the resoundingly bad writing is unbearable. Time travel, ridiculous character gaps, and senseless changes to everything. I see this as confirmation of a simple truth: They are writing as they go. There is not a plan, no clever architecture, no vision for a story. Absolute lack of any coherent ideas or reasoned thought. The bad guys are weaksauce, the good guys laughable and the plot was scraped together from shake-n-bake style bad sci-fi orgies.

So, in short, do the world a favor. Ignore Legend of the Seeker. Just... turn away and find something pretty.

I use Typo, and I have since the early 4.0 days. Each upgrade brings a slew of new messes to the table. I recently discovered that apparently there are only two people behind Typo development, and with it being a Ruby/Rail project that does offer some explanation as to the sucky edges. With newfound compassion, I will explain my work to the other peoples around.

I use PostgreSQL because it's awesome, MySQL sucks, and SQLite is dippy. In retrospect, I wish that my blog had used SQLite, but I didn't, and I have no idea how hard it would be to migrate to SQLite. So, I use PgSQL because it's rad. SQLite fits the bill, but didn't make the final cut.

When upgrading to from 5.0.x to 5.2, here's the rub:

• Backup your database first: pg_dump -U myuser -f pre-migration.db.sql mydb
• Save a copy of your typo directory
• Get the typo tarball, and untar it.
• Install RAILS locally (untar rails, copy all the stuff from vender/rails to your typo directory's vender.)
• Setup your database.yml
• Migrate your database by hand: "rake db:migrate"

Watch your postgresql output:

Missing Index

the db:migrate couldn't remove an index, because it didn't exist. So I killed it.

create index "index_contents_on_blog_id" on contents (id, blog_id);

Kill Sidebars

I grabbed my static content from my old blog, prior to upgrade, so when I had sidebar-related crashes, I just murdered them.

delete from sidebars;

_{note: people complained that 'misspelled Sidebards'. It was a failed joke.}

The Aristocrats

It may seem like a lot for dirty talk, but after that things are mostly complete. Next Week: Index Optimization for Typo.

It's Daylight Savings Time - Again. Time for a new round of FAIL from Microsoft.

Windows Mobile

A clients' Verizon Windows Mobile phone has changed all the appointments for the foreseeable future to an hour later than originally scheduled.

Entourage

Microsoft Entourage 2004, on my older PowerBook G4 is rendering dates, and /hour/ in the future. I caught it when an email I sent was CC'd to my Gmail account, and the account said, "11:16 AM (-57 minutes ago)". Special.

Windows Mobile

Another clients' BRAND NEW Windows Mobile Phone, running Palm, on DST-Day, experienced EPIC FAILURE and had to have the firmware reloaded. (???) If it wasn't THE day when they turned it on, I would not blame DST.... but.... Also, after speaking with them, I am really unclear on whom to blame. I haven't followed the latest Palm stuff, but is this actually Windows problem?

Windows Mobile: ceTwit

vkoser writes about a problem with date math in ceTwit - and, I am just going to blame Microsoft because of their consistent steaming piles on this one.

Zune

So far, I have heard of no new Zune problems, but the leap-second bug deserves a second mention. Well played Redmond. Nice quality control.

Wrap up

Well, that's about it for todays "Microsoft Sucks" rant. It's been a decade already, and they still have bi-annual issues with dates. Remember DST 2007? That was a FUBAR mess. Turned out that Exchange with OWA didn't put proper TZ info on some calendar entires, and and Mac/Entourage users were totally boned. You had to have an Outlook client, on Windows, to properly affect the fix. I know some admins who had to restore after the run. The tests went well, but the production run screwed everyone.

Last DST change I had three clients with messed up appointments. Not all appointments, about 5% of them. A secretary had to audit all of them. We finally back dated a PC, and it did work. We printed out and compared in order to locate the problems. EXCHANGE AND OUTLOOK SUCK!

MacOSX Strives to be more rigthteous than the next bloke:

Dec  1 20:38:22 xXxMac SyncServer[2205]: SyncServer: Truth vacuumed. 
Next vacuum date 2008-12-15 20:38:21 -0800

Wah-Hoo

• Flickr Example
• Apple regular discussion
• Yet Another Apple Discussion
• Apple Development Explains the Truth Database. (WTF is the truth?)

Oh. Wow. Michael Widenius said some trite things about the new 5.1 release. How can they be trite? Because the version numer changes, but the problems with MySQL Remain.

Holy crap. Look at the list of problems with MySQL. I have two customers left who use it. Sometimes I have ended up using it for small projects, even in the fairly recent past. No more.

• Lite-weight DB: SQL Lite
• Real DB: PostgreSQL

Should is use MySQL: No.

Should I use it for internal company projects: No.

Should I use it for my blog: No.

What should I use instead? - See above.

---

But the king of all reasons to skip this so-called product:

The MySQL server team have a bug fixing policy 
where a bug that has existed a long time has a 
lower priority 'because people know about them'. 
This is supposedly one of the reasons why the 
Bug#989 mentioned above has not been fixed.

published on Michael Widenius' blog

I hate Microsoft. I truly do. These assholes are simply unbelievable. I cannot articulate the fury and frustration which I feel at this moment. Seriously. The insanity of whatever policy drives them is beyond the measure of intelligent people.

I cannot write a scathingly witty post about overcoming them. I have redacted this blog once, but this is beyond endurance.

A client has a Windows 2003 SBS network. They started out on "Volume Licensing", and the previous admin upgraded to a "2003 SBS R2 Retail" license. Let me tell you - THAT was a joke. You pay Microsoft to run an install off of a CD labeled "R2 Technologies". This ~$400 investment runs in about 10 minutes or less. The largest change is the "2003 SBS R2" BRANDING. The fckng BRANDING. That's right - half a dozen pictures which appear in places.

Whatever, we commenced the upgrade and transition to the Transition Pack. This leveraged our current investment, and actually allows us to virtualize. The problem is that the Transition Pack doesn't ship with an Exchange 2003 cd.

I do not have enough swear words to make this pain go away. Anyone who knows ANYTHING knows you cannot remove DS from an Exchange Server. You must first uninstall Exchange. Then you may remove/demote/whatever. Then you simply reinstall Exchange.

In our case, we want to move Exchange to server Two, DS to server Three and deprecate server One. We cannot. We don't have the media. The Exchange media which came with the SBS install requires installation on Windows 2003 SBS. Anyone who tells me I didn't plan ahead and "see what I got" deserves to be anally raped by rabid coyotes.

This is so stupid and frustrating. I paid $1400.00 to get a two CD pack which migrates SBS 2003 to 2003 Standard. It also came with paper that allows me to migrate Exchange 2003. Oh, and the "rights" to "buy" media from a "fulfillment" center.

Ripping off a product managers head and shttng down his throat is more like fulfillment here.

Why is it that normal people don't run more successful projects? See this ticket regarding Paludis. Paludis is a C++ replacement for Portage. Portage is a squirrels nest and even though the ebuild system is pretty nice, portage itself is pretty lame.

Disclosure

In the interest of fairness, I would point out: The Paludis site flatly refuses to say anything about the project. Therefore being run by a complete asshole isn't contradictory to any previous statements.

Summary

The gist of the ticket is that Paludis doesn't support certain types of parallelism and the developer(s) refuse to do anything sane in order to prevent, notify or clearly document the danger of it. This danger is apparently readily realized by users.

Examples of sanity might be:

• Warn people it's not supported.
• Make some sort of method for restricting parallel execution.
• ADD A NOTE TO A FAQ

Evidence

What does the Paludis think of a notice about the dangers of parallel runs of the software they publish:

chaoflow: "What about preventing parallel paludis runs or at least a FAQ or some other way of explicitly telling people, that parallel paludis operations are not supported?"
ciaranm: "Preventing parallel runs is a security hole. And an FAQ entry is pointless -- parallel executions are fine so long as they stick to certain operations."
chaoflow: "Wouldn't it be nice to have documented, which operations are fine for parallel execution?"
ciaranm: "Not really. If you don't already know, you shouldn't be doing it at all."

Very Dense

This is clearly beyond the scope of Paludis. See this conversation:

chaoflow: "What about preventing parallel paludis runs?"
ciaranm: "Preventing parallel runs is a security hole."
chaoflow: "Could you elaborate on that?"
ciaranm: "It's an inversion. A non-root user can obtain the locks and prevent root from being able to do anything for an arbitrarily long time."

This stunning display of logic and intellect is what passes for success over at Paludis. Even I can think of a few methods to help prevent this:

• Make an override mechanism. Easy enough, right?
• Enable super-users to kill the offending process.
• Put the lockfile in a secured-location.
• Use shared memory, and make use of ipcrm to kill rogue locks.
• Observe that a security /hole/ involves some sort of exploitation of a system. A DoS involves prevention of normal operation. This doesn't even make a legitimate DoS.

Blackhole

The stupidity doesn't end there:

chaoflow: "And way way better would be some simple locking inside of paludis preventing bad things from happening."
ciaranm: Paludis is not there to protect you from yourself.

ciaranm must see this as an incredibly clever way of saying "go f*** yourself.". ciaranm seems to be an incredibly dense idiot. Why is an f'd up system preferable to some logic which may lead to the inconvenience of cleaning up a rogue lock?

Paludis IS a security hole - It just might fuck up your system, if you run it in parallel with itself, but it certainly won't try to tell you that. I am guilty too.

We win again. I wanted to run Scalix for a client, inside of a VE/CT/whatever, and I tried using Fedora Core 7 to do so. I was unable to make the installer work and didn't see much in the way of help from Scalix. Here is a link to the Bugzilla page. (Login Required) Here are the important bits. Aside from discouragement I didn't get anything from Florian... Nothing except responses that was. No one else seems to give a damn if I even exist.

Whatever. The point is that with some minor extra-effort, Scalix does indeed work inside of an OpenVZ container on Linux. My host OS is gentoo, running 2.6.18-028stab053.

The Scalix package is pretty great, just up the Java memory once you have it running. The instances (two) on a system shared by two different companies work great. We migrated to Scalix from Kolab. Outlook users (all two) are happy. Thunderbird users didn't see too much of a change.

Yay for us.

Typo is a Rails app. Rails is a Ghetto. While I'm not sure what it has to do with torturing the Jewish people, I think that Zed might be a Jew. I digress.

Rails is clearly caught in a ghetto. It's strange and suffers from strange documentation. One example of something well-known only to Rails people are the DB Migration steps:

• 1. backup your db
• 2. Install your update / new instance / whatever
• 3. issue "rake db:migrate"

It wasn't known to me. Apparently it wasn't known to most of the Internet. How did I find the magical command "db:migrate"? I found it with the same steps I used to find almost all things about Typo: I crawled through blogs and groups and everything else. I have never found a single site that had concise documentation. Everything is simply people blogging about how a particular problem was solved. I have never found any upgrade guides. This search also found me another goodie: purge your sessions table before the 5.0.3 startup.

I think that the entire Rails documentation process is based on hype. Either you pay attention to the hype, or you're doomed. The way to understand it is to use it. The way to use it is either bloody or all-consuming. The hype is how the word is spread. Once I knew how to use the secret db:migrate, I found TONS about it.

Typo is the child of Rails. I couldn't find an upgrade guide, but I did find an upgrade guy. David, the Nihilist, Gibbons. He is my Typo/Rails upgrade guy. He has worked with Rails and for a while was the best sysadmin that PlanetArgon ever had. David has helped me with more simple problems than I can count.

The last problem which I had was errant notifiers in Typo. I tried (and failed) to post comments. I tried to see what was failing. I turned on debug mode. Nothing. Not a damn thing. I went into settings attempted to disable notification. It didn't work, but I didn't notice. Still no debug messages.

Well, at length David did a little SQL magic.

update users set notify_via_jabber='f';
update users set notify_via_email='f';

Wow. Well, his history with Typo gave him something that I didn't have: a mistrust for the admin interface. I don't blame the Typo people for this crap, but I do blame the lack of docs for everything else. I guess it's time to get out of the ghetto.