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Posts uit oktober, 2005 tonen

Printing to LPD Printer Is Slow or Fails with Windows

Experienced a nasty printing problem, which was caused by a number of ingredients that together will make it very odd that someone else will ever experience this problem, but anyway: here's the story... At a customer's site, we implemented new industrial labelprinters (Zebra's, very fine machines). Per label printing went fine to these printers, but printing a higher number of labels (> 10) showed a strange phenomenon: a number of labels printed fine, the system waited for a couple of minutes, then some labels again, then some minutes waiting again and so on... Very strange, but more important: very irritating! Other relevant infrastructure components: SAP R3 on Windows 2000 Server, printing to LPR-printers on the 2000-box, which in turn delivers the label on a print server (running Teklynx Sentinel S4 Print Pack for adding barcode functionality etc.). On this print server, the label processing is carried out and at last the label is delivered to the labelprinter. Quite

Shutdown.exe

For scheduled reboots of Windows 2000/2003 systems, I was always using a version of SHUTDOWN.EXE (by Stephen L. Bryant from Microsoft) that did this job very well. However, I also tried using this one to do a scheduled shutdown, and that did not work well: Windows did shut down but the machine did not. A colleague of mine found this one , which does this job quite well. For those of you curious why anyone in his right mind would want to do a scheduled shutdown, here's the reason why: we are running VMware Workstation and one of the VMs is a Windows 2000 Server. We need to backup both the host server and the Windows 2000 Server VM, but we do not have enough licenses for the Windows Remote Agent of VERITAS BackupExec. So, the nicest option of course would have been to purchase another license of the Remote Agent, but instead we shutdown this machine just before the backup runs so that we can backup the VM as a regular file.

Tweakers.net - Nieuws [ 'VPN-wachtwoorden van Cisco makkelijk te decoderen' ]

http://www.tweakers.net/nieuws/39432/?highlight=cisco+vpn (Dutch only) Reden te meer om bij VPN-verbindingen twee-laags authenticatie te gebruiken. In de woorden van RSA: something you have and something you know. Toegepast op dit Cisco VPN-concept: something you have = je connectieprofiel, something you know = extra authenticatie op bijvoorbeeld RADIUS-server.

How Do You Restart Notes/Domino 6.x After It Hangs?

This night, I had been waiting 45 minutes for a Domino server to shutdown, but it just wouldn't... I was wondering if there might be a utility KillDomino (just as we have KillNotes ), and although I found out that KillDomino indeed exists, I couldn't find it (tip: search for KillDomino and follow the links to what you find... ;-)) However, there is something way easier than KillDomino: nsd -kill . Check it out!

Activated the Word Verification Option

Just a few minutes ago, I found out that both this blog and my other personal blog have been hijacked by the "spam commenters". Therefore, the Word Verification Option has been activated, to keep the bad guys out...

Running VMWare workstation VM's as a service

http://www.freelists.org/archives/thin/06-2004/msg01039.html Quote: "If you're a VMware enthusiast, you've probably on more than one occasion wanted to log off from your computer while leaving your virtual machines (VMs) running." I know that GSX Server can do this by default, but it is very handy to add thit functionality to Workstation as well. In our case, Workstation is running on our Management Server. Many times a day we log on to the Management Server using a console session over RDP, and always we have to remember to not log off from this session but to disconnect it instead. When running Workstation VMs as a service, this is no longer needed. Handy...

VMware job finished...

Although the physical-to-virtual conversion has been finished for a weeks and the server that I was converted is already running as a virtual server for the same amount of time, I recently saw that I had finished my report here (the log that I started somewhere in august...). Time to do that now! Basically, it all went very quick starting from where we left off in the log from August 24. I stopped that report telling that we were restoring the image from the second drive in the VM to the first one. We had to use Ghost 8 for that, however, because the previous version just quit restoring the image somewhere along the way. After restoring the image, we were ready to start the server. And it worked very well from the very first time! Although I do suspect that the Dutch saying "more luck than wisdom" goes here, I am extremely content with how easy this conversion went. It really is a matter of creating the image, creating the new VM and restoring the image to the VM. We were hav