www.jayntguru.com » annoyances

Microsoft, you HAVE to do a better job than this

jayntguru — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 21:54:44 +0000

Here’s an error from SCOM.

Performance data collection process was unable load SQL Server Authentication configuration information. Account for RunAs profile in workflow "Microsoft.SystemCenter.DataWarehouse.CollectPerformanceData", running for instance "INFMGT02.accessgeneral.com" with id:"{81890C12-35B3-7AEA-C0FF-3EFCA7486E97}" is not defined. Workflow will not be loaded. Please associate an account with the profile. Management group "Access"

OK guys WHICH profile? Come on.. how hard is this? I mean I can guess, and I have, and guess what? It has one associated.

SCOM 2007 R2 – workgroup/DMZ server notes

jayntguru — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:55:03 +0000

This is harder than it should be. Here are my notes on doing this.

1. On cert server go here: http://blah/certsrv/

2. request cert. choose type other and paste in the below OID

3. OID = 1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.1,1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.2

4. Make sure to check key exportable. Make sure to use FQDN of server for name and common name.

5. Open up server mgt for certificate manager and approve.

6. Go back to website, install the cert.

7. Mmc, certificates for personal. Export the cert. make private key exportable.

8. Copy cert to client server.

9. On server do mmc for client, import cert, mark as exportable.

10. Run momcertimport on client, choose cert.

11. Restart system center manager service on client.

12. Wait a min and go to mom console, administration, pending management. Approve it.

13. Done!

Dear SCOM. You blew it

jayntguru — Sun, 30 May 2010 15:46:10 +0000

In case you weren’t aware, for SCOM to work against a non domain machine, all manner of certificates is required between the RMS and the agents in order for this to work. Not only is it required, but you have to use the fairly archaic tools provided with certificates, oh, and you will need your own certificate authority too. This is such a complete and utter #FAIL that I don’t really know where to start. Mainly my issue is that it doesn’t need to be this hard.. if someone wants to see the CPU time on my webserver, then by all means, hack in, but damn if I care enough to go through this level of work for it. And that brings me to my second issue, the shit just doesn’t work. Sure you could say this is a “rush it out the door” kinda thing, but this happened back in 2007 and there have been plenty of releases including an R2 version, yet still this useless and archaic process is still in place.

So in short, the SCOM guys failed by over-complicating something that isn’t needed, and then making it 10 times more difficult than necessary. FAIL.

Obama and health care – worst president ever and one of the worse ideas ever

jayntguru — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:59:17 +0000

In case you didn’t know, I think Obama has taken the torch from Jimmy Carter as the worst president we have ever had, for many reasons. Especially, I believe that this health care thing is a piss poor idea for many reasons, it’s too expensive (we don’t have the money – we cannot afford it), it increases the entitlement state, diminishes the concept of personal responsibility and is unconstitutional. I have posted about it many times on twitter and on facebook. I don’t want to get into a long discussion here as to why, mainly because I don’t have the time, and I feel like a lot of it has been said before, but what I did want to do was register my complaints in an open forum (the internets) so that google could pick up on them and to be sure that my feelings are.. what are those words? Oh yeah open and transparent.

I will probably come back later and update this post with some more info, but for now I wanted to put in some quotes I have run across in the past couple of days that I think are applicable.

If you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative at 40, you have no head! – Winston Churchill

Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one. – Thomas Paine

Amendment 10 – Powers of the States and People. Ratified 12/15/1791. Note The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Everyone should read this.

hiding users from the welcome screen in windows

jayntguru — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:57:08 +0000

This is a bit of an annoyance for me, but when vista or w7 boots and shows you the list of users, I personally find that annoying. Here’s a link to a fix.

keeping flash full screen when you use the mouse

jayntguru — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:58:19 +0000

Since I’m a bit of a mediacenter advocate, I use the internets on the tv a lot. One of my issues with flash is that it never stays full screen if you click the mouse on another monitor. Today I ran across a how-to at lifehacker on how to fix this. It’s temporary (it will break when they upgrade versions) but it’s better than nothing.

the vista snipping tool (where is it?)

jayntguru — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:43:14 +0000

I went to use the vista screenshot tool just now and couldn’t find it. After some investigation I realized that the snipping tool is included with the “tablet pc components” in vista and w7. So if you uninstall things that aren’t needed (like the tablet pc components), then you won’t have this.

Why this is included with the “tablet pc components”? I have no idea. This doesn’t make any sense to me.

deleting a partition during the w7 install

jayntguru — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:22:48 +0000

I had an issue tonight when reinstalling w7 where the install would not let me delete the partitions on one of the disks… they could be formatted, etc, but the delete button was grayed out for some reason. Why it did this, I can’t tell you. What I finally found to fix it was this:

on the first welcome screen of the w7 install, hit shift-f10, this gives you a command prompt
run diskpart
list disks
select disk 0 (if this is the disk you want)
clean
exit

Then you can continue with the install on a new fresh and clean drive.

jusched.exe #fail

jayntguru — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:03:21 +0000

I really dislike this stupid java update scheduler already for a whole lot of reasons, but with windows 7 it’s an extra hassle, at least for me. This is because that new systray icons are hidden by default, so you can not notice the (stupid) thing running. Just now I started to use my laptop and realized it was very slow. Here’s why:

Total and complete #fail.

run a chkdsk under 2008r2 (or regular 2008, or w7), use all your memory

jayntguru — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:33:36 +0000

I run chkdsk.exe pretty often on my machines, mainly because I’m paranoid about data integrity since I have a lot of data spread across many hard drives. On my server I was trying to run chkdsk.exe on a couple of drives at once, thinking I could save myself some time.

When the machine slowed down to a crawl, I started by looking at the disk utilization to see what was going on. It was expected that this would slow down the machine, but these are non system disks, physically separate from anything that should directly impact system performance. After killing two of the three chkdsk’s, I was left with the one on the “J” drive, so I decided to check disk performance with the performance monitor.

Here you can see that aside from the chkdsk itself, there is some pretty significant writing taking place to the pagefile located on my “G” drive… Which shouldn’t take place since this machine has 8gb of ram and with no virtual machines running, never uses more than 1 gig. (No vm’s are running during all of this.) Of course, hitting the pagefile so much implies that the server is running out of memory, so let’s go see what the memory tab looks like.

Here you can see that there is 0 free memory (as in zero)! Then you can look at the processes and see that chkdsk.exe is using 7.0 gigs of memory! What? This must be a bug.. a leak.. right? Something must be wrong. Well, guess what? Apparently this is by design… from what I have been able to gather after reading various forums and blogs, the w7/2008 server version of chkdsk will use all the available ram in an attempt to speed up the chkdsk.

Here’s a Microsoft article that mentions it.

Now there has been a lot of sky is falling type talk over this subject, and there are many people who have stated that their machines crashed as a result of this. To be clear in my case the machine does continue to function, although it does it very slowly. In my opinion, this behavior, even if by design, is very bug-like and mimics a memory leak in every way, just without the crash at the end. (And the memory clears up when chkdsk is done.) This seems like an odd way for Microsoft to design this, and I would prefer some other way to limit the ram used by this process.