Search Results

Search found 205 results on 9 pages for 'outage'.

Page 4/9 | < Previous Page | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9  | Next Page >

• Moving dozens of existing standalone retail sites to one central inventory database: what should I know going in?

  - by palintropos

  This will be the first project of this scale that I have attempted, and the first time I have run a website at all (much less dozens) using an off-site database. In particular, I'd like to know: what sort of optimizations I should read up on to make this run as smoothly as possible? any pitfalls/gotchas wiser, more experienced folk are aware of I should be on the lookout for, and what damage-control and preventative measures I should take against the nightmare scenario of the main server (hosting the database) having an outage, grinding over 100 websites to a halt (because they have no access to the product data).

  Read the article

• "An upgrade from 'precise' to 'oneiric' is not unsupported with this tool" error while upgrading

  - by tas

  A brief electrical outage interrupted my 12.04 upgrade. After many tries, which included trying to upgrade from a command line, I was able to access Ubuntu screens again. I find that the 12.04 upgrade was indeed not completed; I am still running 11.10. However, Update Manager does not give me the option of installing 12.o4 now. And, when I run Update Manager, I am asked if I want to execute a "partial install." When I answer "yes," I receive the message above. Besides a clean install, any ideas about what can I do to upgrade to 12.4?

  Read the article

• Week in Geek: USDA Chooses Microsoft for Cloud Services Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to create geeky LED holiday lights with old bottles, dig deeper in Windows Defrag via the command prompt, use Google Chrome’s drag/drop feature to upload files easier, find great gift recommendations by looking through the How-To Geek holiday gift guide, and have fun adding Merry Christmas fonts to our computers. Photo by ntr23. Random Geek Links It has been a busy week, so we have extra news link goodness with information that is good for you to know. USDA making the move to Microsoft The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced that it has chosen Microsoft to host things like e-mail, instant messaging, and collaboration through the software giant’s Business Productivity Online Suite. Google says it was cut off from USDA project bid Google is claiming that it was not given a chance to bid on a cloud-computing project for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for which the contract was awarded to rival Microsoft. Apache is being forced into a Java Fork When Oracle rolled over Apache and Google’s objections to its Java plans in December, the scene was set for Apache to leave and, eventually, force a Java code fork. Tumblr explains daylong outage After experiencing an outage that started on Sunday afternoon and stretched through most of the day yesterday, Tumblr has explained what happened. Google demos Chrome OS, launches pilot program During a press briefing this week in San Francisco, Google launched the Chrome application store and demonstrated Chrome OS, its browser-centric netbook operating system. Don’t expect Spotify in U.S. this holiday season As of last week, Spotify had yet to sign a single licensing deal with a major label, after spending more than a year negotiating, multiple music sources told CNET. December 2010 Patch Tuesday will come with most bulletins ever According to the Microsoft Security Response Center, Microsoft will issue 17 Security Bulletins addressing 40 vulnerabilities on Tuesday, December 14. It will also host a webcast to address customer questions the following day. Hacker plants back door in Symbian firmware Indian hacker Atul Alex has had a look at the firmware for Symbian S60 smartphones and come up with a back door for it. PC quarantines raise tough complexities The concept of quarantining PCs to prevent widespread infection is “interesting, but difficult to implement, with far too many problems”, said security experts. Symantec: DDoS attacks hard to defend It has surfaced that the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Visa and MasterCard Web sites on Wednesday were carried out by a toolkit known as low orbit ion cannon (LOIC). Web Sockets and the risks of unfinished standards Enthusiasm for a promising new standard called Web Sockets has quickly cooled in some quarters as a potential security problem led some browser makers to hastily postpone support. Internet Explorer 9 to get tracking protection Microsoft is making changes to Internet Explorer 9’s security features that will better enable users to keep sites from tracking their activity across browsing sessions. NASA sold PCs with sensitive data NASA failed to remove sensitive data from computers that it sold, according to an audit report released this week. Cybercrooks create fake Amazon receipts The bad guys have created yet another online scam, this one involving fake Amazon receipts. World of Warcraft character move fees waived Until December 22, Blizzard will allow free realm transfers from 25 highly populated servers to alleviate log-in queues or performance issues. (The free transfers are one-way and one-time only.) SpaceX Dragon reaches orbit atop a Falcon with a fiery tail The Space Exploration Technologies corporation has become the first nongovernmental entity to put a vehicle into low Earth orbit. Geek Video of the Week If birds have wings, then why are the Angry Birds using slingshots? Photo by Dorkly Bits. Wait… Birds have Wings, Why are the Angry Ones Using Slingshots? Sysadmin Geek Tips How To Setup Email Alerts on Linux Using Gmail or SMTP Linux machines may require administrative intervention in countless ways, but without manually logging into them how would you know about it? Here’s how to setup emails to get notified when your machines want some tender love and attention. Random TinyHacker Links Red Panda Webcam Support Firefox and the Knoxville Zoo’s Red Panda program. Christmas Icons (Icons we like) Superb set of holiday icons by lgp85 at deviantArt. Download the .zip and use as .png or convert to .ico at Convertico.com or with tiny app Imagicon. Super User Questions Enjoy reading the great answers to this week’s popular questions from Super User Useful USB boot disks? DVD/CD burning .zip: is it more reliable, faster, longer lasting to burn a zip of files rather than the files as a folder? What are other ways to backup my files if I do not have an external drive? Anti virus what is the difference between these all? How can I block all Facebook elements/content? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Have you had a busy week between work and preparing for the holidays? Get caught up on your HTG reading with our hottest articles of the week. 20 Windows Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? How to Use and Customize Google Chrome Web Apps One Year Ago on How-To Geek This week’s batch of retro geeky goodness is all about customizing Windows 7. ClassicShell Adds Classic Start Menu and Explorer Features to Windows 7 Get an Aero-Styled Classic Start Menu in Windows 7 Customize the Windows 7 Logon Screen Get the Classic Style Network Activity Indicator Back in Windows 7 How To Enable Check Boxes for Items In Windows 7 The Geek Note We would like you to join us in welcoming Jason Fitzpatrick to the writing staff here at How-To Geek. He started with us this past week, so take some time to read through his articles about the Wii, Kindle, & PlayStation 2 Peripherals and leave a friendly comment to say “Hi”! Got a great tip to share? Make sure to send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by real00. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better The How-To Geek Holiday Gift Guide (Geeky Stuff We Like) LCD? LED? Plasma? The How-To Geek Guide to HDTV Technology The How-To Geek Guide to Learning Photoshop, Part 8: Filters Improve Digital Photography by Calibrating Your Monitor Our Favorite Tech: What We’re Thankful For at How-To Geek Settle into Orbit with the Voyage Theme for Chrome and Iron Awesome Safari Compass Icons Set Escape from the Exploding Planet Wallpaper Move Your Tumblr Blog to WordPress Pytask is an Easy to Use To-Do List Manager for Your Ubuntu System Snowy Christmas House Personas Theme for Firefox

  Read the article

• Week in Geek: US Govt E-card Scam Siphons Confidential Data Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to “back up photos to Flickr, automate repetitive tasks, & normalize MP3 volume”, enable “stereo mix” in Windows 7 to record audio, create custom papercraft toys, read up on three alternatives to Apple’s flaky iOS alarm clock, decorated our desktops & app docks with Google icon packs, and more. Photo by alexschlegel. Random Geek Links It has been a busy week on the security & malware fronts and we have a roundup of the latest news to help keep you updated. Photo by TopTechWriter.US. US govt e-card scam hits confidential data A fake U.S. government Christmas e-card has managed to siphon off gigabytes of sensitive data from a number of law enforcement and military staff who work on cybersecurity matters, many of whom are involved in computer crime investigations. Security tool uncovers multiple bugs in every browser Michal Zalewski reports that he discovered the vulnerability in Internet Explorer a while ago using his cross_fuzz fuzzing tool and reported it to Microsoft in July 2010. Zalewski also used cross_fuzz to discover bugs in other browsers, which he also reported to the relevant organisations. Microsoft to fix Windows holes, but not ones in IE Microsoft said that it will release two security bulletins next week fixing three holes in Windows, but it is still investigating or working on fixing holes in Internet Explorer that have been reportedly exploited in attacks. Microsoft warns of Windows flaw affecting image rendering Microsoft has warned of a Windows vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control of a computer if the user is logged on with administrative rights. Windows 7 Not Affected by Critical 0-Day in the Windows Graphics Rendering Engine While confirming that details on a Critical zero-day vulnerability have made their way into the wild, Microsoft noted that customers running the latest iteration of Windows client and server platforms are not exposed to any risks. Microsoft warns of Office-related malware Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center issued a warning this week that it has spotted malicious code on the Internet that can take advantage of a flaw in Word and infect computers after a user does nothing more than read an e-mail. *Refers to a flaw that was addressed in the November security patch releases. Make sure you have all of the latest security updates installed. Unpatched hole in ImgBurn disk burning application According to security specialist Secunia, a highly critical vulnerability in ImgBurn, a lightweight disk burning application, can be used to remotely compromise a user’s system. Hole in VLC Media Player Virtual Security Research (VSR) has identified a vulnerability in VLC Media Player. In versions up to and including 1.1.5 of the VLC Media Player. Flash Player sandbox can be bypassed Flash applications run locally can read local files and send them to an online server – something which the sandbox is supposed to prevent. Chinese auction site touts hacked iTunes accounts Tens of thousands of reportedly hacked iTunes accounts have been found on Chinese auction site Taobao, but the company claims it is unable to take action unless there are direct complaints. What happened in the recent Hotmail outage Mike Schackwitz explains the cause of the recent Hotmail outage. DOJ sends order to Twitter for Wikileaks-related account info The U.S. Justice Department has obtained a court order directing Twitter to turn over information about the accounts of activists with ties to Wikileaks, including an Icelandic politician, a legendary Dutch hacker, and a U.S. computer programmer. Google gets court to block Microsoft Interior Department e-mail win The U.S. Federal Claims Court has temporarily blocked Microsoft from proceeding with the $49.3 million, five-year DOI contract that it won this past November. Google Apps customers get email lockdown Companies and organisations using Google Apps are now able to restrict the email access of selected users. LibreOffice Is the Default Office Suite for Ubuntu 11.04 Matthias Klose has announced some details regarding the replacement of the old OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 packages with the new LibreOffice 3.3 ones, starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Alpha 2 release. Sysadmin Geek Tips Photo by Filomena Scalise. How to Setup Software RAID for a Simple File Server on Ubuntu Do you need a file server that is cheap and easy to setup, “rock solid” reliable, and has Email Alerting? This tutorial shows you how to use Ubuntu, software RAID, and SaMBa to accomplish just that. How to Control the Order of Startup Programs in Windows While you can specify the applications you want to launch when Windows starts, the ability to control the order in which they start is not available. However, there are a couple of ways you can easily overcome this limitation and control the startup order of applications. Random TinyHacker Links Using Opera Unite to Send Large Files A tutorial on using Opera Unite to easily send huge files from your computer. WorkFlowy is a Useful To-do List Tool A cool to-do list tool that lets you integrate multiple tasks in one single list easily. Playing Flash Videos on iOS Devices Yes, you can play flash videos on jailbroken iPhones. Here’s a tutorial. Clear Safari History and Cookies On iPhone A tutorial on clearing your browser history on iPhone and other iOS devices. Monitor Your Internet Usage Here’s a cool, cross-platform tool to monitor your internet bandwidth. Super User Questions See what the community had to say on these popular questions from Super User this week. Why is my upload speed much less than my download speed? Where should I find drivers for my laptop if it didn’t come with a driver disk? OEM Office 2010 without media – how to reinstall? Is there a point to using theft tracking software like Prey on my laptop, if you have login security? Moving an “all-in-one” PC when turned on/off How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Get caught up on your HTG reading with our hottest articles from this past week. How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? Did You Know Facebook Has Built-In Shortcut Keys? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics One Year Ago on How-To Geek Enjoy looking through our latest gathering of retro article goodness. Learning Windows 7: Create a Homegroup & Join a New Computer To It How To Disconnect a Machine from a Homegroup Use Remote Desktop To Access Other Computers On a Small Office or Home Network How To Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and Vista Allow Users To Run Only Specified Programs in Windows 7 The Geek Note That is all we have for you this week and we hope your first week back at work or school has gone very well now that the holidays are over. Know a great tip? Send it in to us at [email protected]. Photo by Pamela Machado. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC HTG Projects: How to Create Your Own Custom Papercraft Toy How to Combine Rescue Disks to Create the Ultimate Windows Repair Disk What is Camera Raw, and Why Would a Professional Prefer it to JPG? The How-To Geek Guide to Audio Editing: The Basics How To Boot 10 Different Live CDs From 1 USB Flash Drive The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 Arctic Theme for Windows 7 Gives Your Desktop an Icy Touch Install LibreOffice via PPA and Receive Auto-Updates in Ubuntu Creative Portraits Peek Inside the Guts of Modern Electronics Scenic Winter Lane Wallpaper to Create a Relaxing Mood Access Your Web Apps Directly Using the Context Menu in Chrome The Deep – Awesome Use of Metal Objects as Deep Sea Creatures [Video]

  Read the article

• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

  - by Argenis

    This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups had completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

  Read the article

• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

  - by Argenis

    This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups have completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

  Read the article

• Notifications for Expiring DBSNMP Passwords

  - by Courtney Llamas

  Most user accounts these days have a password profile on them that automatically expires the password after a set number of days.   Depending on your company’s security requirements, this may be as little as 30 days or as long as 365 days, although typically it falls between 60-90 days. For a normal user, this can cause a small interruption in your day as you have to go get your password reset by an admin. When this happens to privileged accounts, such as the DBSNMP account that is responsible for monitoring database availability, it can cause bigger problems. In Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c you may notice the error message “ORA-28002: the password will expire within 5 days” when you connect to a target, or worse you may get “ORA-28001: the password has expired". If you wait too long, your monitoring will fail because the password is locked out. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get an alert 10 days before our DBSNMP password expired? Thanks to Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Metric Extensions (ME), you can! See the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Administrator’s Guide for more information on Metric Extensions. To create a metric extension, select Enterprise / Monitoring / Metric Extensions, and then click on Create. On the General Properties screen select either Cluster Database or Database Instance, depending on which target you need to monitor.  If you have both RAC and Single instance you may need to create one for each. In this example we will create a Cluster Database metric.  Enter a Name for the ME and a Display Name. Then select SQL for the Adapter.  Adjust the Collection Schedule as desired, for this example we will collect this metric every 1 day. Notice for metric collected every day, we can determine the exact time we want to collect. On the Adapter page, enter the query that you wish to execute.  In this example we will use the query below that specifically checks for the DBSNMP user that is expiring within 10 days. Of course, you can adjust this query to alert for any user that can cause an outage such as an application account or service account such as RMAN. select username, account_status, trunc(expiry_date-sysdate) days_to_expirefrom dba_userswhere username = 'DBSNMP'and expiry_date is not null; The next step is to create the columns to store the data returned from the query.  Click Add and add a column for each of the fields in the same order that data is returned.  The table below will help you complete the column additions. Name Display Name Column Type Value Type Metric Category Unit Username User Name Key String Security AccountStatus Account Status Data String Security DaysToExpire Days Until Expiration Data Number Security Days When creating the DaysToExpire column, you can add a default threshold here for Warning and Critical (say < 10 and 5).  When all columns have been added, click Next. On the Credentials page, you can choose to use the default monitoring credentials or specify new credentials.  We will use the default credentials established for our target (dbsnmp). The next step is to test your Metric Extension.  Click on Add to select a target for testing, then click Select. Now click the button Run Test to execute the test against the selected target(s). We can see in the example below that the Metric Extension has executed and returned a value of 68 days to expire. Click Next to proceed. Review the metric extension in the final screen and click Finish. The metric will be created in Editable status.  Select the metric, click Actions and select Deployable Draft. You can do this once more to move to Published. Finally, we want to apply this metric to a target. When managing many targets, it’s best to add your metric to a template, for details on adding a Metric Extension to a template see the Administrator’s Guide. For this example, we will deploy this to a target directly. Select Actions / Deploy to Targets. Click Add and select the target you wish to deploy to and click Submit.  Once deployment is complete, we can go to the target and view the Metric & Collection Settings to see the new metric and its thresholds.   After some time, you will find the metric has collected and the days to expiration for DBSNMP user can be seen in the All Metrics view.   For metrics collected once per day, you may have to wait up to 24 hours to see the metric and current severity. In the example below, the current severity is Clear (green check) as it is not scheduled to expire within 10 days. To test the notification, we can edit the thresholds for the new metric so they trigger an alert.  Our password expires in 139 days, so we’ll change our Warning to 140 and leave Critical at 5, in our example we also changed the collection time to every 5 minutes.  At the next collection, you’ll find that the current severity changes to a Warning and any related Incident Rules would be triggered to create an Incident or Notification as desired. Now that you get a notification that your DBSNMP passwords is about to expire, you can use OEM Command Line Interface (EM CLI) verb update_db_password to change it at both the database target and the OEM target in one step.  The caveat is you must know the existing password to use the update_db_password command.  To learn more about EM CLI, see the Oracle Enterprise Manager Command Line Interface Guide.  Below is an example of changing the password with the update_db_password verb.  $ ./emcli update_db_password -target_name=emrep -target_type=oracle_database -user_name=dbsnmp -change_at_target=yes -change_all_references=yes Enter value for old_password :Enter value for new_password :Enter value for retype_new_password :Successfully submitted a job to change the password in Enterprise Manager and on the target database: "emrep"Execute "emcli get_jobs -job_id=FA66C1C4D663297FE0437656F20ACC84" to check the status of the job.Search for job name "CHANGE_PWD_JOB_FA66C1C4D662297FE0437656F20ACC84" on the Jobs home page to check job execution details. The subsequent job created will typically run quickly enough that a blackout is not needed, however if you submit a script with many targets to change, your job may run slower so adding a blackout to the script is recommended. $ ./emcli get_jobs -job_id=FA66C1C4D663297FE0437656F20ACC84 Name Type Job ID Execution ID Scheduled Completed TZ Offset Status Status ID Owner Target Type Target Name CHANGE_PWD_JOB_FA66C1C4D662297FE0437656F20ACC84 ChangePassword FA66C1C4D663297FE0437656F20ACC84 FA66C1C4D665297FE0437656F20ACC84 2014-05-28 09:39:12 2014-05-28 09:39:18 GMT-07:00 Succeeded 5 SYSMAN oracle_database emrep After implementing the above Metric Extension and using the EM CLI update_db_password verb, you will be able to stay on top of your DBSNMP password changes without experiencing an unplanned monitoring outage.  

  Read the article

• Can't install SQL Express 2008R2- caspol.exe application error - the application failed to initialize

  - by Nir

  I'm trying to install SQL Server Express 2008 R2 on Windows 2003 Server (enterprise edition). I get the following error message: Title: caspol.exe - Application Error Text: The application failed to initialize properly (0x000007b), Click on OK to terminate the application. I get the same error message both when downloading the installer and running it and when using the web platform installer. All the pages on the internet I've found about similar problem say it's a corrupt .net installation issue - This server runs multiple .net apps and I've never had any problems with any of them. I've uninstalled and reinstalled .net (causing a painful outage) and nothing changed. Does anyone here has any idea what might cause this? Update 1: additional information I forgot to include: 32bit version of Windows running in a virtual machine, no anti virus Update 2: when running caspol.exe from the command line I get the same error

  Read the article

• Why PC reboots when there’s a power failure even with UPS?

  - by Jamil

  I've purchased a Line Interactive UPS 1200VA. It's supposed to give 8~20min backup (as written in the manual). This UPS has transfer time < 10ms. It works fine when the mains is active. But the problem is that when the power went off, the PC also went off for a fraction of a second and started rebooting. The strangest thing though is that it has to be a proper power failure by the service supplier. If I just turn off the power at the wall plug, the UPS kicks in immediately and the PC carries on working fine. What's the solution of that? What should I do? My hard drive was physically damaged because of improper shut down & restart. I've 5~8 times power outage in my country so I badly need an UPS.

  Read the article

• Can one have multiple name servers that don't all belong to the same TLD/provider?

  - by Simon

  In light of the GoDaddy outage we updated our name server list for our domain to include an additional name server provider. The list looks something like this: ns61.domaincontrol.com ns54.domaincontrol.com ns1.dreamhost.com ns2.dreamhost.com Both Godaddy and Dreamhost have zone entries to handle the A and MX records. The idea is that if one provider goes out the other will be a fall-back. However, when I tested my config with http://www.intodns.com/ I am getting a warning about SOA serials not being agreed. Have I misunderstood some fundamentals in name-server config? What can I do to prevent future problems?

  Read the article

• HP OfficeJet 5600 w/ Dlink DPR1260 not printing except from Notepad

  - by joelarson

  I have an OfficeJet5600 attached to a Dlink DPR1260 wireless print router. It has worked great for a long time. Today we had a power outage and the thing was inaccessible. I reset the DPR1260 and reinstalled drivers and soforth. I can now print from Notepad, but not from any Office programs, IE, or Chrome. I have toggled on and off many settings such as spooling/not spooling, etc. Nothing has helped. Any ideas? I have Windows Vista.

  Read the article

• Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press Enter.

  - by torbengb

  Similar to this related question, I came home and found that my media center pc showed this message, Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press Enter Before I do anything with the (defective?) harddisk, what are the best first steps I can take to fix this with a minimum of damage? Normally the machine (Win Vista) is always on and never reboots by itself (Windows auto-updates are disabled too). Something must have caused it to reboot, though I'm sure we didn't have a power outage. The machine can't reboot on that disk, but it will boot on another disk I just plugged in for testing. I haven't changed anything, or even touched the machine, for several days, and it has been running fine until now. I did replace the power supply some weeks ago, because the old one suddenly stopped working. It has been working fine with the replacement PSU.

  Read the article

• Citrix Secure Gateway not redirecting to login URL

  - by Dave

  We have an older setup for XenApp - users log in through Citrix Secure Gateway running on a windows box. (We hope to start using a NetScaler soon.) Earlier today, connections to https://citrix.company.com/ starting throwing up a 503 error page, instead of redirecting to https://citrix.company.com/Citrix/XenApp/ If you go directly to the /Citrix/Xenapp/ URL, the user is properly directed to the login page, and can launch apps. We've restarted the service, and rebooted the server. We haven't yet tried uninstalling and reinstalling the software. Before we do this, I'm looking for ideas as to how we can get the redirect working again without a fairly major outage window. To make things more interesting, many of our users have Citrix Receiver installed, also pointed at https://citrix.company.com/. Receiver makes itself the default launcher for ICA files, and gives a connection error when it tries to load apps - probably because of the same non-functional rediect?

  Read the article

• Probability of failure with larger number of network elements

  - by MikeKulls

  I'm having a discussion with a work colleague. I'm saying that a network with 100 elements will have pretty much 10 times as many failures as a network with 10 elements, ie a tech will need to replace faulty hardware 10 times more often. He suggests that the failure rate doesn't go up in a linear fashion and the failure rate will be significantly less than 10x, in fact only slightly more failures. This is not the probability of an outage etc, we are just talking in relation to the amount of parts that a tech would need to swap out in a given time frame.

  Read the article

• Experience with AMCC 3ware 9650se raid cards? Ours seems dead

  - by antiduh

  We have a 8-port 3ware 9650se raid card for our main disk array. We had to bring the server down for a pending power outage, and when we turned the machine back on, the raid card never started. This card has been in service for a couple years without problems, and was working up until the shutdown. Now, when we turn the machine on, the bios option rom that normally kicks in before the bootloader doesn't show up, none of the drives start, and when the OS tries to access the device, it just times out. The firmware on it has been upgraded in the past, so it's possible we've hit some sort of firmware bug. We're using it in a Silicon Mechanics R272 machine with gentoo for the OS. The OS eventually boots, but alas, without the card. We've ordered a new one, but I'm worried that if we replace the card it won't recognize the existing array. Has anybody performed a card swap before? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

  Read the article

• Is a cluster the most cost effective redundancy method for windows server 2003?

  - by Ryan

  We had a server with bad ram which caused a long outage while they figured it out and our client facing apps had to go down for a while. We are coming up with a solution for instant fail-over but are not sure what the most cost effective method would be. Is a windows server cluster the best method for this? Also note we are using Parallels Virtuozzo if that makes any difference here. We found Parallels has a documented method for setting this up but it said it required a Domain Controller as well as a Fiber connection to shared storage, is all that really needed? Thanks.

  Read the article

• Automatically reconnect to ODBC sources?

  - by stefan.at.wpf

  I am using Asterisk 1.8.10.1 and a MySQL database connected via ODBC to store CDRs. When my MySQL database isn't available when Asterisk starts or has an outage while Asterisk is running, I would expect Asterisk to retry to connect to the database, but this doesn't happen! Anyone knows where I can enable some kidn of automatic reconnect to databases in Asterisk? My res_odbc.conf looks like this: [asterisk] enabled => yes dsn => asterisk-connector username => user password => pass pre-connect => yes pooling => no limit => 1 idlecheck => 1 negative_connection_cache => 1

  Read the article

• Syncronizing multiple exchange servers 2007

  - by Mustafa Ismail Mustafa

  We're introducing a new exchange server for several reasons. After the introduction of the new server, and synchronizing it with the old one (mailboxes, contacts, rules, the whole shebang) we're going to be formatting the old machine, install XenServer 5.5 on it, and create a slices, one of which will have Exchange server, which again will need to be synchronized. Then, we'll have 2 different routes to the mail servers (mx1, mx2) so that if there is an outage on one, the other should be available. So now, I'm wondering how to synch? I can move a mailbox from one server to the other, and I'm sure that can be done in bulk, but that's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking to make both Servers equal, the first time so I can make a backup of the original, and the second time so that they can be made into peers. This is with Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008 R2 (x64) Suggestions? TIA

  Read the article

• SLA Violations - Compensation expectations and vague contracts

  - by llllxllll

  Tagging this as cautionary tale. I took over for an admin a year and a half ago, and reviewed the 3 year contract with our ISP. There were no specific SLA promises in the contract that I found, and have been meaning to review the contract with our rep. Of course, we had an outage this past week that resulted in almost four days of downtime !!!!! This involves eff-ups of epic proportions on our ISP's part and a telco they colocate with. Details can be provided. I am the network / systems / purchasing / and helpdesk at my company...and am willing to fight with the ISP. I also have more management that can get involved, including the name on the contract. First, if there are not concrete guarantees about compensation and downtime, we are screwed right? Two, if we want out of our contract, does anyone have experience going the legal route, and if so, who knows a lawyer? =)

  Read the article

• NVRAM for journals on Linux?

  - by symcbean

  I've been thinking about ways of speeding up disk I/O, and one of the bottlenecks I keep coming back to is the journal. There's an obvious benefit to using an SSD for the journal - over and above just write caching unless of course I just disable the journal with the write cache (after all devicemapper doesn't seem to support barriers). In order to get the benefits from using a BB write cache on the controller, then I'd need to disable journalling - but then the OS should try to fsck the system after an outage. Of course if the OS knows what's in the batter-backed memory then it could use it as the journal - but that means it must be exposed as a block device and only be under the control of the operating system. However I've not been able to find a suitable low-cost device (no, write-levelling for Flash is not adequate for a journal, at least one which uses Smartmedia). While there's no end of flash devices, disk/array controllers with BB write caches, so far I've not found anything which just gives me non-volatile memory addressable as a block storage device.

  Read the article

• Citrix Access Gateway not redirecting to login URL

  - by Dave

  We have an older setup for XenApp - users log in through Citrix Secure Gateway running on a windows box. (We hope to start using a NetScaler soon.) Earlier today, connections to https://citrix.company.com/ starting throwing up a 503 error page, instead of redirecting to https://citrix.company.com/Citrix/XenApp/ If you go directly to the /Citrix/Xenapp/ URL, the user is properly directed to the login page, and can launch apps. We've restarted the service, and rebooted the server. We haven't yet tried uninstalling and reinstalling the software. Before we do this, I'm looking for ideas as to how we can get the redirect working again without a fairly major outage window. To make things more interesting, many of our users have Citrix Receiver installed, also pointed at https://citrix.company.com/. Receiver makes itself the default launcher for ICA files, and gives a connection error when it tries to load apps - probably because of the same non-functional rediect?

  Read the article

• DNS failover across multiple datacenters?

  - by Jae Lee

  I've got a site that is starting to get a lot of traffic and just the other day, we had a network outage at the datacenter where our loadbalancer (haproxy) is hosted at. This worried me as despite all my efforts of making the system fully redundant, I still could not make our DNS redundant, which I think isn't an easy solution. Only thing I was able to find was to sign up for DNS failover from places like dnsme, etc .... but they cost too much for budding startups. Even their Corporate plan only gives you 50 million queries per month and we use that up in a week. So my question is, are there any self hosted DNS we can do that provides the failover like how dnsme does it?

  Read the article

• Windows server 2008 UPS support

  - by Rory McCune

  I'm looking to set-up a UPS on a Windows Small Business Berver 2k8 and I've noticed that there are some large price differences for similar capacity in-line UPSs. The most important point for me in UPS selection is that the server should have the ability to shut itself down before the UPS power runs out, so that if the server is unattended during the outage, it should minimize the risk of data loss. From some reading it appears that Windows Server 2008 should has the ability to natively recognise a UPS, which can then be managed through the battery settings on the server or via WMI. What I'm wondering if anyone know is, Is Windows 2008 servers UPS support specific to certain brands of UPS (eg, APC) or is it likely to work with any UPS which has a USB port, which I can connect to the server?

  Read the article

• IBM x3620 Server takes a long time to boot past UEFI to OS

  - by Joel Coel

  I have a pair of IBM System x3620 servers. These servers do fine once they finally reach the point where the operating system takes over, but it takes them forever to get past the new-fangled UEFI boot system... a good five minutes or so; maybe longer. I haven't timed it, but it's the kind of thing where you go get a cup of coffee while you wait and it's still going when you come back. Normally the only time I shut these down is for a monthly maintenance cycle (usually just windows updates), and so it's not a big deal. But in the case where I might have an outage I'd sure like to get that 5 minutes back. Is there anything I can do to tell them to just go ahead and boot already?

  Read the article

• What happens with the Guest OS's on ESXi in the event of a power failure?

  - by Jeremy Holovacs

  Many small businesses would prefer to let their server drop on power failure than to pay even $100 for a cheap UPS. It's often difficult to convince them of the value of something like that; it's why they like ESXi. It's free, they can save a lot of cash by putting a bunch of linux servers on one machine, and then I get paid. :) If the ESXi server experiences a power outage, it is set to come back on automatically when power is restored. What happens with the guest OS's? Ideally I would like them to all come online again as well, assuming they were on when power was lost, but I see no option for choosing this. I don't want to yank power to the system just to try it out, of course. I'm sure someone knows what happens by default, and perhaps how to make my system to work as I would wish.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9  | Next Page >