Archive for March, 2009

Updating Acrobat using msiexec and psexec

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

Most of the software in our lab is managed via group policy through our active directory server, which means I can patch software by applying the .msp file (if it exists) to the network installation or by simplying adding a new network install point and having it upgrade the previous version of the software.

However, some software pacakges, for licensing or performance reasons, have to be installed on individual machines.  Our licenses for Adobe Acrobat mean that we have different versions installed on different machines throughout the lab.  Every computer has reader, but some also have Acrobat 7 or 8.  To patch these machines, I did the following:

Downloaded the updates from the adobe site:

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1&platform=Windows

Use the ADMIN$ share on machines with Acrobat installed to store the patches, and run psexec from a control machine to install them.

For Acrobat 7, I only to install 2 updates on a couple of machines and I used the command line options I found on AppDeploy to run them.

msiexec /p c:\windows\temp\AcPr710.msp;c:\windows\temp\ AcroUpd711_all_incr.msp REINSTALLMODE=OMUS RINSTALL=All REBOOT=ReallySuppress /qn

For 8, I wrote a batch file to apply several updates in order, with the following format:

msiexec /p c:\windows\temp\AcrobatUpd814_all_incr.msp /q

AppDeploy Acrobat Pages:

http://www.appdeploy.com/packages/detail.asp?id=545

http://www.appdeploy.com/packages/detail.asp?id=431

http://www.appdeploy.com/packages/detail.asp?id=937

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March 30th to April 3rd

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

There is an update to an acrobat pdf problem that has been out in the wild for some time, and so we’re patching the individual installations of Acrobat Pro this week.  Still haven’t had an opportunity to work on hydra’s new configuration, and still testing our new backup drive array.

  • Adobe  Acrobat Update
  • Hydra update and config changes
  • Researching laptop backup and synchronization system

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File locking and IMAP writes

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Occasionally in the lab, users have had problems accessing or copying email from their inbox.  The cause is often kernel file locking.  Here are the two situations I’ve seen the problem occur in:

  1. User has a problem with Pine, and it crashes or is killed in a way that doesn’t release the kernel lock on the file (kill -9).
  2. An offline operation to move a message (“UID COPY”) from one IMAP folder to another fails in some way, saying “Timeout while waiting for lock”.

For us, the first case is much more common.  Yesterday was the first time I’ve seen something like #2.  A user was unable to copy a message from his inbox to another imap folder in Apple Mail.  Our server is running dovecot, so I checked and saw that there was a .lock file being created and that the imap process moving the email was frozen.

I did the following:

  • stopped the imap process and closed the client mail app
  • ls -li imapfolder to get the inode number of the file (we use mbox format so all imap folders are files)
  • cat /proc/locks to check and see if there was a kernel lock on the file
  • mv imapfolder imapfolder_tmp; cp imapfolder_tmp imapfolder This creates a new file with a new inode number that can be written.

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March 23rd to March 27th

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

The RIA (research in action) fair is on Tuesday, and several lab members are demoing research for it.  The hard drive replacement was a success for zeus, and it appears my roll-out of flash, thunderbird and firefox updates has been successful as well.  Only  a few machines haven’t been restarted.  Here are some of the tasks for this week:

  • Testing Raid backup for u3
  • New Maya version
  • Hydra update and configuration changes

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March 17th to 20th

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

I was away at the beginning of the week, but I’m back now.  We’ve had some interesting issues come up with some of the Western Digital 250GB drives we use for linux home directory storage, so I’ll be concentrating on that along with some other technical admin tasks this week.

  • Hard drive testing on linux fileserver
  • Flash update for windows computers
  • Testing new raid bkp array for u3 partition on linux file server
  • New version of Maya software

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Using the ADMIN$ file share to review log files

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

I found a useful way to review the windows folder on clients via file sharing. Basically, an ADMIN$ folder is accessible for every client machine the active directory admin has access to. It will allow you to view and alter files in the c:\windows directory.

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March 9th to 14th

Monday, March 9th, 2009

After workng out some of the issues with the group policy updates for Firefox, I’m hoping to roll out the flash update along with the windows updates that are scheduled for this week.

  • Patch Tuesday – updates to windows machines during the week
  • New version of Maya software
  • Issue with Maya directx installer
  • Flash install on windows computers

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Active Directory Machine Account Problem

Monday, March 9th, 2009

Occasionally, I’ve noticed that some computers in the active directory domain we have will no longer update their group policy. When the computer is restarted, the error message given is :

Windows cannot find the machine account, No authority could be contacted for authentication. .

The solution to this issue, or at least a work-around, is to power off the affected computer and disconnect the power until the motherboard loses power. After it is powered up, it resumes normal function in the active directory domain and the group policy updates.

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March 2nd to 6th

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

It’s been a while since we’ve updated, so there is a recap for the task items that were previously in this list in the entry for March 2nd, 2009.

  • Replace washer station in z-corp printer
  • Update new black network scripts
  • Try to get new licenses for Maya
  • Update Firefox and Flash on windows computers

Next week: Patch Tuesday, so there will be some scheduled downtime for windows computers.

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Cluster Upgrade and Active Directory move

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so we’ve managed to clear a few of things on the task list. I’m going to talk a little bit about them here. The cluster update was a success, but I found a side effect of having the path include a reference to itself (to allow cluster specific binaries to be available). When building adding packages or changing the default partitioning scheme for the cluster nodes, the build process would fail if the root environment was accessed from a user who had this path setting and used su. It would build, but the install process would fail because key files aren’t copied in the hierarchy. Specifically, updates.img and stage2.img would be missing.

The active directory move was accomplished by using several vmware instances to test out the various stages. There is still some work to be done with the security certificates, and then the old domain structure can be removed. The cs disk space move was accomplished without incident.

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