There are times, where people ask you questions, which can directly be found on Google. This kind of questions are mostly boring. But hey, there is a nice solution for responding to those people:
On the website Let me google that for you you can enter any search query and send the generated link to the person, who asked you something. Perhaps, this person will learn something and will google the next question before he will ask you…
Methodology
Fun, Google
Sometimes bad things happen, sometimes ugly things happen. One of the very bad things that can happen is when an active domain controller crashes and there is no backup available. The case becomes really ugly if nobody cares about the crashed controller for about 60 days (forest that was created on a domain controller running Windows Server 2003 and earlier) or 180 days (forest that was created on a domain controller running Windows Server 2003 sp1 and later). On this depends the default tombstone lifetime of directory objects. Later we will investigate on the tombstone.
Administration
AD, Controller, Domain, FSMO
Ant offers some XML features like the xslt task, which transforms XML files into other files. But unfortunately, with Ant you can’t make simple XPath Queries on a specific XML file.
Luckily, there is a nice open source solution called XmlTask, which offers many possibilities to work with XML files.
- Download the latest version of XmlTask from http://xmltask.sf.net
Java
ant, Java, XML
Wrong use of the memory options can cause serious performance problems. To optimize the right memory size of the JVM or to find some critical memory issues, the GC log of the JVM can be very useful. Simply start the Java application with the option -Xloggc:<file>. Every GC action gets logged into this file.
To analyse this log file, there is a nice tool called GCViewer, which can be downloaded from http://www.tagtraum.com/gcviewer-download.html. GCViewer is able to display the memory usage of the application based on time and old/young generation heap space.
Java
GC, Java
There are some kind of tasks, which Ant won’t do. One of them is the loop. There is no simple way to implement a dynamic for or while loop in Ant. What do i mean with dynamic? Let me make an example. Ant reads out a number of iterations from a property file (we call it the number x) and should perform a loop x-times to call another Ant task. And this can only hardly be done with Ant.
But fortunately, there is Groovy. Groovy is a scripting language, which runs in a Java Virtual Machine. And because of that, it can be easily integrated with Ant.
Java
ant, Groovy, Java
The requests for comments (short RFC) stays for a series of technical and organizational documents of the RFC-Editors for the Internet (originally ARPANET) which was founded on the 7. April 1969. Most of you guys I’m sure know what RFCs are and might have already read of the famous RFCs on the editors page.
But did you know that there is also a set of humoristic RFCs available on the editors page?
Uncategorized
Requests for comments, RFC, RFC 1149, RFC 2324, RFC 2549
For a project I have to learn some of the specialty of an iScsi NAS. To be precise it was Net App FAS 2500 Filer. These things are very nice but a little too expensive for my personal use. But Net App offers a nice simulator of their product and the simulator is free. You just need to create an account on the Net App web site and search for the word ”simulator” or just follow this link. (http://now.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/simulator). Some bloody side note: the website doesn’t work fine with safari. Just use Firefox and all works well in this case.
Administration, Hardware, Software
.NET, app, filer, nas, NetApp, vmware
Peter Stevens from scrum-breakfast.com blogged today a really interesting article about an adapted scrum process for IT support. As Peter Stevens describes in his post on of his attendees in his workshop was the leader of IT Support for the EE Department of the ETH Zurich. They where facing the problem that their support group had to deal with daily business and they had to successfully compete medium term projects but their daily business was consuming all their time.
The answer to their problem was not strictly speaking Scrum… I suggest you read the interesting article from Peter!
http://www.scrum-breakfast.com/2009/05/towards-agile-support.html
Methodology
peter stevens, scrum, scrum-breakfast, Support
