Archive for April, 2010

MBR FA: It pays to read the manual

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

While I was building an installer for debian on a usb stick, I ran the following:

install-mbr /dev/sdb

To fix a problem I was having at boot.  It worked, but I then presented me with the following after booting the usb key:

MBR FA:

Some googling told me that I need to press “a” and then “1” at the next prompt to get this to boot, but reading the man page for install-mbr told me why I needed to do it in the first place (or at least a reasonable explanation for what happened).

It turns out the install-mbr command sets up a boot loader that will give you a menu if a key is pressed during startup.  My best guess is that it reads the boot menu selection as a keypress and stops the boot at the mbr prompt.  There are ways to disable this in the man page, but it isn’t worth the effort for me since I can just type a and 1 to proceed with the boot.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

April 26th to 30th

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

I’m mostly concentrating on software updates this week, but if anything interesting happens I’ll add a post about it.

  • Windows server update
  • file server testing
  • web server updates

Posted in Task list | Comments Closed

Using WMIC to review installed software

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

I found another way to see installed software from the command line (provided it’s been installed using a .msi installer).

From:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1482739/batch-script-to-get-specific-installed-software-along-with-version

List all installed Microsoft products:

  wmic product where "Vendor like '%Microsoft%'" get Name, Version

*

  List installed products that have Office in their names:

  wmic product where "Name like '%Office%'" get Name, Version

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Thunderbird 3 and Message Synchronization

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

I’ve been working with Thunderbird 3 in preparation for a deployment at DGP and found an interesting quirk – the message synchronization feature basically turns imap into a cached set of files on the local drive.  Since we have quotas on the network space where is data is kept, the file sizes are a big problem (it filled my quota before syncing all the messages).  It can be configured through the gui, but I want to change the installer to change this by default.

The best option I’ve seen so far is to change the default preferences file, but I’ll need to get it into the executable installer or change it after the installation.  To that end, I created a .cmd file which does a silent install:

ECHO.
ECHO installing thunderbird
ECHO PLEASE WAIT
start /wait \\Wood\SW\Thunderbird\”Thunderbird Setup 3.0.4.exe” -ms
\\Wood\SW\DGPSWscripts\sleep.exe 5

set option=pref(“mail.server.default.autosync_offline_stores”, false);

ECHO.
ECHO installing thunderbird
ECHO PLEASE WAIT
start /wait \\Wood\SW\Thunderbird\”Thunderbird Setup 3.0.4.exe” -ms
\\Wood\SW\DGPSWscripts\sleep.exe 5

set option=pref^(“mail.server.default.autosync_offline_stores”, false)^;

IF %PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE%==AMD64 echo %option% >> “%PROGRAMFILES(x86)%\Mozilla Thunderbird\defaults\pref\all-l10n.js”

IF %PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE%==x86 echo %option% >> “%PROGRAMFILES%\Mozilla Thunderbird\defaults\pref\all-l10n.js

  • The SLEEP program is from the Windows server 2003 toolkit.  The start /wait means that the command window will pause on the installation and then edit the pref file to disable mail sync.
  • The file is in two different location depending on whether it is a 64 bit or 32 bit version of windows (the brackets cause an IF ELSE statement to fail

Tags:, ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

April 12th to 16th

Monday, April 12th, 2010
  • Follow up with Autodesk re: Maya and 3D Studio
  • Update firefox and thunderbird
  • Windows software updates
  • Continued research in new file servers

Posted in Task list | Comments Closed

April 5th to 9th

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

This week I’m working on:

  • kernel update to fax server (and ironing out issues with new fax system)
  • Updating Pixar and Autodesk (Maya, Sketchbook) licenses
  • removing locate package from rock’s cluster rolls.

Posted in Task list | Comments Closed

Fax server quirks

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

While updating the fax server I found that running wvdialconf caused the system to stop working, probably due to the changes it made to the permissions on /dev/ttyS1, which is the port for the modem we’re using.  I was able to change the permission back to

crw——- 1 uucp dialout 4, 65 Apr  6 10:21 /dev/ttyS1

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed