Musings of a technophile

I’m not “industry insider” or anything, but if I have any qualities it’s that I can find problems in things very easy. On one hand that makes me a good problem solver, on the other hand it makes me seem like a very pessimistic person. In any case, Throughout the last weeks I’ve noticed some problems that have occurred regarding Apple’s iPhone 4. I’m sure there are thousands of posts… Continue reading

First, you need to install the nagios-nrpe-server. There is a nagios-nrpe-plugin but that’s not what you need because that is just the plugin and you need this daemon (Linux equivalent of a Windows Service for all you Windows guys).

sudo apt-get install nagios-nrpe-server

next, we should check and make sure that the service is actually running. We can do this two ways
sudo ps -Al | grep nrpe… Continue reading

I have an old PowerEdge 2650 that I needed to upgrade to some version of Windows Enterprise at my work as I needed to have more than 4GB of RAM available (in case for some reason you didn’t know Windows Server Standard only allows 4GB). Being that I’m currently upgrading various servers to Windows Server 2008, I decided to try and attempt upgrading this server to that. If you want… Continue reading

So I needed a new laptop for the boys as they were previously using my old Dell Inspiron 3800 (a.k.a. the 600 Mhz brick). The problem with the old laptop was that it can’t really play flash games, so sites like Starfall.com don’t work.

I spent a week looking on Ebay for a $100 laptop and finally came across a Dell XPS M170 laptop. It has a 2Ghz… Continue reading

First off I should say that setting up a anonymous connector kinda goes against best practices. You should always try to have some sort of authentication method for your SMTP connectors. That being said, it’s not always possible or it will take additional steps to set that up, and right now you just need to get this working right? :)

In order to create an anonymous connector, you need… Continue reading

If you ever have to deploy a SQL CLR Function that is not using Safe Permissions, then you may run into a roadblock where you get the error

CREATE ASSEMBLY for assembly ‘MyProject’ failed because assembly ‘MyProject’ is not authorized for PERMISSION_SET = EXTERNAL_ACCESS.
The assembly is authorized when either of the following is true:
the database owner (DBO) has EXTERNAL ACCESS ASSEMBLY permission and the database has… Continue reading

I have a table at my company that is replicated from a live database server to a server that is used for reporting. The live server is in one location while the reporting server is located in the building where I work, and they are connected via a point-to-point T1 line. The problem is that the table that is replicated is now over 60GB, so if replication breaks and I… Continue reading

For quite some time I have been wanting the ability to connect to my home computer through RDP from work as occasionally there is some information I can use from my home computer. The problem is that I use dd-wrt on my home router, which doesn’t allow for one-to-one (1:1) nat’s at this time. I basically wanted the following rules

1. Open only the RDP port open and

In a previous post, I talked about removing Symantec Endpoint Protection from your corporate network via a vbscript that ran through Group Policy. I had a problem though where I had uninstalled the program from all my computers, but I had it running on one server also.

As I went to uninstall it from the server, it asked me for the uninstall password. At this point, I had already… Continue reading

My company is getting rid of Symantec Anti-virus. The final kick in the shins was the new software they brought out called “Symantec Endpoint Protection”. I’m not exactly sure what Symantec was thinking when they brought out this product, but the old Symantec Corporate Server was much easier to administer. The new product just seems to go out of your way to make itself difficult – from installing to reviewing… Continue reading