I have a client that does a yearly holiday mailing, which involves exporting contacts from their CRM and doing a Word mail merge. Every year I walk their office manager through it the first time (she usually has to do it 2-3 times as she finds addresses that need to be cleaned up). She takes notes, but since it's a task she does every 12 months, I don't expect it to stick.

My wife doesn't understand why they need me to do it, but eh...if they want to pay me my going consultant rate to do it, who am I to say no?

@scottalanmiller Totally understood, which is why I suggested what I suggested...

Fitness FTW!

Over the years I've had my ups and downs with weight, my highest being 285 lbs. Last summer I joined a gym and started to pay more attention to what I ate and how much I ate. Before I started this, I was 230-240 ish. I'm happy to say I'm a decent 197 lbs as of this morning (I'm 6' tall FWIW). It's great!

"Number-on-a-scale" wise I think I'm good. At this point I want to work on toning up a little. I've still got more fat around my mid section than I'd like (significantly less than in the past, though)...and I don't drink beer. My wife says that a good portion of it is loose skin. Hopefully I can improve on it.

Hey All,

I have a pool of XenServer 6.5 hosts that share a FC SAN (an inherited configuration that will change when we upgrade, and for those of you who've read past posts of mine YES the hosts in question are the blades...please hold the lecture I know this is all bad ). Somehow some of the LUNs on said SAN (3PAR 7200) were exported multiple times which inflated the number of actual paths available. I went ahead and cleaned these up, however now XenCenter is complaining about failed paths. Rightfully so, as the number of paths Xen is expecting has decreased.

Does anyone know how to have Xen reset the path count for a given SR? There was an out-of-the-box script that was supposed to do this (/opt/xensource/sm/mpathcount.py), but apparently does not work under XS 6.5. due to changes in how it handles multipathing (I believe it now uses dm-multipath exclusively). I posted on the official Citrix forum, but did not get a whole lot of help there. I'm hoping someone here may have suggestions on things to try.

Thanks!!

I received an email from one of the outside agencies we work with. The email itself was completely fine. However, the dude has his actual SIGNATURE in his signature. I can literally copy and paste his signature into a document and forge anything I want.

Tell me why putting your actual signature in your email signature would ever be a good idea...

@BRRABill said in Backup MX or no?:

@anthonyh said in Backup MX or no?:

This article was written around a specific mail platform, and is roughly 4 years old, but I'm curious on y'all's opinion. It's an argument against a secondary/backup MX.

https://blog.zensoftware.co.uk/2012/07/02/why-we-tend-to-recommend-not-having-a-secondary-mx-these-days/

It brings up an interesting question that hopefully someone here can answer.

What does happen to a piece of e-mail that is sent when your server is down? Does it really go back to the sending server, and queue up to be retried?

I'm no expert, but my understanding is that SMTP was written with the idea that the Internet is not reliable. Therefore, RFC compliant SMTP servers should queue messages and periodically re-try sending for a period of time.

There is a bunch of info here (thanks, Google!): https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2821.txt

I like SusanDB better, personally (sorry, couldn't help it!).

I need help troubleshooting one of my SRs.

I have a ~2 TB HBA SR that has two virtual disks (20 GB and 1024 GB respectively) attached to one VM. XenCenter reports that the SR has 1793.2 GB used. There are no current snapshots for said VM as far as XenCenter can see. I suspect there is some back-end cleanup that needs to happen. Screen shots for those who are visual:

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Now, in the world of thinly provisioned EXT4 SRs, I'd simply cd do the SR and delete virtual disks that I knew were no longer needed. However, in this case, it doesn't look the same.

Any suggestions?

So, are you saying I shouldn't migrate to a Netgear NAS?

All joking aside, it sounds like the consensus thus far is a reboot? I can cycle the hosts one by one...I suppose it's worth a try...

Hey Guys and Gals,

In our environment, we have ONE physical server left. This is because it is a specialized IVR system that interfaces with one of our databases (allows people to call in and check on status, postpone things, as well as update some information), and it utilizes these PCI voice cards. Ironically, we take the output of these cards and connect them to ATAs to interface with our VoIP system.

The system I am talking about is an IVR interface for our Jury Management System (I work for a court). It interfaces with said JMS system and allows Jurors to check when they need to report for jury duty and submit any responses requested based on the Juror Summons they received in the mail. They key in their badge number, their last name, and then based on their jury duty history are then presented with various options (check whether or not they need to report for jury duty, request an excuse from jury service if they are eligible for exclusion based on their jury duty history, update their juror information, respond to supplemental juror questions if there are any, etc.).

In the world of VMware, last I recall you can do PCI bus passthrough. Unfortunately, we are a XenServer shop and last I checked this feature does not exist with Xen.

So, this has me wondering...is there such a device that'll allow you to encapsulate the PCI bus over Ethernet? The idea being that we put these PCI cards in this magical box that is then IPed. On the IVR server, we install the magical drivers that allows the OS to interface with the box and essencially extend the PCI bus via IP.

Does such a thing exist?

@scottalanmiller said in PCI over Ethernet?:

@anthonyh said in PCI over Ethernet?:

@scottalanmiller said in PCI over Ethernet?:

http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_PCI_Passthrough

Hmm. This looks intimidating (but that has never stopped me). I wonder how well this would translate to the XenServer world though. What would happen when I deploy patches? Hmm. Something to check out though.

DO you need pathces wtih XS 7? I've not looked. It is very current, though.

Holy crap XenServer 7! I feel like I JUST upgraded to 6.5. I'll need to investigate what new features XS 7 brings...

I've had to reluctantly learn Crystal Reports to develop a multitude of reports for one of our systems that the vendor has refused to develop without a hefty development fee. #JustOneOfManyHats

In any rate, I have a report that pulls the most recent record from a given table. The way I do this is basically I pull all records that match my criteria, sort them in descending order based on their entry date, then put the desired fields in the report header (so only the first record shows). This works beautifully.

However, I've been asked to display the second record in said scenario above if one of the fields matches a field in the first record. Ok, simple enough (or so I thought).

I moved the fields down to the details section and then set a suppression formula as so:

{table.field} <> previous({table.field})

However, it doesn't display the second record. Even if there are only two records and the field's match.

I suspect this is probably due to the order of operations in Crystal Reports. I don't know when it sorts vs when the suppression logic comes into play. I tried adding "whileprintingrecords;" to the suppression logic but it didn't seem to help.

Any ideas?

@scottalanmiller

I do have a spare radio. I can pull the PoE injector from that one and swap it around to test I suppose.

@JaredBusch said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@anthonyh said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@Dashrender said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@JaredBusch said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@anthonyh said in Ubiquiti AF5 Connection Question:

@scottalanmiller

I do have a spare radio. I can pull the PoE injector from that one and swap it around to test I suppose.

The PoE injectors can definitely screw this up. They get in the way of the autosensing.

If you can hard set the adapters (though my spidey sense tells me that scott scolded me once because there's no longer a such thing - maybe I was dreaming that?).

I wanted to try this as a test, but it'll only let you hard set the interfaces to 10-half, 10-full, 100-half, or 100-full. No gig options.

Then your radios are likely only 100mbps interfaces and you get 1gbps from the injector?

No idea what the specs of this unit are. I guess I should look before spewing random crap.

The AF5's have a gigibit interface. The radio links are faster than 100Mbps.

@travisdh1 I always use the IP, so DNS should be out of the mix. SSH does not have this issue.

You want to know what's even weirder?! If I SSH into my box, while I'm ON that box (ssh 127.0.0.1), I can start a telnet session without any sort of delay.

What...the...heck???

Ha. One of those "well, I feel stupid" moments. Specifying the source interface in the tftp command resolved the problem!

copy tftp://serverIP/filename.bin;int=inside flash: 

The new ASA software version is copying over. Though it's quite slow. I'll have to see what tweaks I can make there...definitely not an issue for this thread.

Well, what is the context of "good IT" in this scenario?

Is it good IT as in simply doing IT the "right" and "proper" way?

Is it good IT as in doing good IT for good causes (like philanthropic organizations)?

Ok, I uninstalled "host-upgrade-plugin-1.1.0-1.noarch" and installed "upgrade-plugin-2.1.1-xs2435.noarch.rpm" and it was still a no go. So, I decided to check the install media again. I thought, that cp -Rf also copied hidden files? Looks like I was missing ".treeinfo" at the root of the installer media. Copying the file over from the ISO gives me a nice pretty green check-mark when testing the location of the network install files. Yay!

So, perhaps, the next time I upgrade a host XenCenter will apply the appropriate RPU update(s) and the install path will be seen as good.

This one should be easy, I think...

What is the easiest way to export a list of distribution lists? I don't need the members. I just need the lists themselves.

Thanks!