So, while trying to get to the Right People ™ to fix one of our remote 3G IPWAN services, somehow I got through to a consumer-grade accounts person. The Telstra IVR is a horrible mess of “Uh, I’ll mash buttons until someone answers”.
After a few minutes of trying to convey the point, he decided to try and transfer me to a Bigpond 3G helpdesk person. Terrible idea, since they wouldn’t have the foggiest idea how to deal with my Cisco 881G router, nor access to our service details.
[Read More]Going for a real “Evil Mad Scientist” shtick today. I have been pondering some simple DIY projects for making my little living space a little better, and decided that drawing them up might be handy to visualise/work on ideas.
The first one’s a bit of a storage cabinet/shelf to sit over the toilet cistern, which normally wasted space full of dust.
Basically there’s two “legs” which hold toilet paper rolls on hinged roll-holders like you’d normally see in people’s toilets, but covered by a bit of a door so they’re out of the way. On top of the legs are a shelf or two for putting things away. While drawing this up I scribbled a few ideas down for how the toilet roll holders would work, and as I thought of the implementation steps the idea morphed into something significantly easier. (from a weird elevator-pulley idea to just a hinge)
[Read More]I decided that since I’m approaching 30 years old, I should be able to order a bottle of wine and have a vague understanding of what I’ll get when it arrives.
My first choice was to go with Guzman y Gomez burritos - a 2010 Curious Kiwi Pinot Noir. RMB said either a Pinot Noir or a Rose, and I knew I didn’t want something as light and fruity as the Rose for my spicy dinner.
[Read More]This is going to be image-heavy and explanation light because I’m lazy. I went looking for lantern/lighting ideas and hit up IKEA / Spotlight / Anaconda / Freedom today.
For the put-your-feasting-gear-in-a-basket idea, I present IKEA’s sole solution to the problem, the BRANAS basket:
Branas-Basket
The small one’s about $7, the big one’s $10, and unless you’re using just bowls you’ll need the big one. They come in White, Black and Birch, and all the signs I see mention “Last chance to buy” so they might be disappearing soon. Bugger.
[Read More]I was cruising WalletsWeLove the other day after being introduced to it by a friend. Wallets and bags are very similar, and I seem to be obsessed with finding the perfect one for any given application I can dream up.
The perfect wallet for me is incredibly thin, ideally it would take up no more space than the items it holds, but still have a relatively simple billfold shape. I don’t like money clips (they’re ungainly) and can’t see the point of having more than one space for bills, let alone all that extra material and bulk for a trifold.
[Read More]I was getting an error trying to run a remote command on a Windows XP machine on our domain today:
“Error communicating with PsExec service on [hostname]: No process is on the other end of the pipe.”
As usual, google came to the rescue but it took a lot of forum scanning to find a result. The quick fix is to do this:
pslist \\[hostname]
You should find a process called PSEXESVC, if you pskill it, then you should be able to use PsExec again.
[Read More]I had a workmate with issues using privilege escalation this morning, he kept getting an error like this:
I had a workmate with issues using privilege escalation this morning, he kept getting an error like this:
RUNAS ERROR: Unable to run - cmd
1327: Logon failure: user account restriction. Possible reasons are blank passwords not allowed, logon hour restrictions, or a policy restriction has been enforced.
After googling around a bit, most of the responses were about group policy or other restrictions causing issues, but it was actually much simpler!
[Read More]I’ve had an issue with some of my Ubuntu VM’s lately destroying the available resources on my ESXi box. The hard drives were going crazy due to a combination of normal disk access and also memory paging into swap file.
Running top showed a process “update-apt-xapi” which was top of the charts for memory and cpu usage.
I googled around a bit, and found that the update-apt-xapian-index process is Ubuntu’s way of updating the synaptic indexing. Considering this is a cli-only vm where I use puppet to manage the packaging, it’s useless. Also, there’s many many many posts on the web about this package going mental on low-resource machines.
[Read More]