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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.

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.

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!

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.

Ok, I’m going to admit this one had me working for a few minutes with a pencil. RMB’s young son had gone to his dad for help with some maths homework, and they’d blasted through it with ease except for one question, which they eventually came to me with before calling shenanigans on the whole thing and proclaiming it broken:

O O O
O   O
O O O

In the circles above, take the numbers one through eight and arrange them so that each side of the square adds up to fifteen.

[Read More]

I’ve had an issue where there every 100 seconds or so, I was seeing something similar to this showing in my ISC dhcp server logs:

Mar 16 23:50:06 dnsbox dhcpd: DHCPINFORM from 10.0.0.20 via eth0
Mar 16 23:50:06 dnsbox dhcpd: DHCPACK to 10.0.0.20 (00:19:d1:9f:aa:e6) via eth0

This was for every windows client on the network, luckily I’ve only got two or three at any given time 🙂

It took me a while to figure out, but it seems it’s actually Windows doing its automatic proxy auto-discovery (WPAD). If the DHCP server doesn’t respond with a “valid” response, it just keeps asking.

When I’m at work I tether my laptop to my mobile phone. Only having 1.5GB of data per month to use, this can get eaten up quickly with Dropbox and or SugarSync working, not to mention other things that use the data.

Dropbox has a manual “pause” button, but SugarSync doesn’t. Since I’ve changed it’s even harder to remember that things are syncing, so I looked for a way to kill it while I’m tethered.

Ok, seriously Logitech. I installed your terrible software to try and make my mouse buttons mappable, and that didn’t go so well. Why can’t I just set it to a key, or a key combo without having to learn your weird macro functions? Your old software was good, now… not so much.

And after I reboot, I get asked about a survey. I say no, because I don’t want to fill it out. Then you bug me again? How is this good interface design? I’ve got two dead mice from you (a G5, and now an Anywhere MX which drifts all over the place) and you’re bugging me about a survey?

Every day I make use of literally hundreds of interlinked projects which come under the banner of open source or free software.

I started writing this article on a phone powered by Android, in the Epistle editor, in the markdown format. The router I’m connected to is based on Linux, and I will post this onto my blog powered by WordPress. My house has at least twenty virtual machines running Ubuntu, on an ESXi host, providing a range of internal and quasi-external services with 99% of them being free software solutions. About the only software I pay for is games, operating systems and things that Atlassian sells (I’m falling more in love with them all the time!)

I had an issue with the sidebar of my OSX Finder window in Snow Leopard. Even though the old folders were there (and later removed) some shortcuts I had created wouldn’t go away.

Command-clicking and trying to remove it wouldn’t work, and dragging it away wouldn’t either. I finally got annoyed by them being there, so I started googling around a bit.

I found this discussion on the official Apple Support Community which led me to Command-Click and Dragging the items into the trash.