Error on Evan Hoffman

Exchange (OWA) CAS crashes with 503 error - again

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 12:22:46 +0000

This just started happening again, with these errors appearing in the event viewer:

Log Name: System
Source: Microsoft-Windows-WAS
Date: 9/18/2011 11:16:33 AM
Event ID: 5011
Task Category: None
Level: Warning
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: exch2010fe1
Description:
A process serving application pool 'MSExchangeOWAAppPool' suffered a
fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service.
The process id was '3760'. The data field contains the error number.

Log Name: System Source: Microsoft-Windows-WAS Date: 9/17/2011 6:47:07 AM Event ID: 5009 Task Category: None Level: Warning Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: exch2010fe1 Description: A process serving application pool ‘MSExchangeOWAAppPool’ terminated unexpectedly. The process id was ‘3108’. The process exit code was ‘0x800703e9’.

Amazon SES - "Illegal Header" errors

Mon, 16 May 2011 12:37:49 +0000

My thoughts on the “illegal header” error some people are encountering when relaying mail through postfix/SES. Plus some perl code that should help fix it.

Integrating Amazon Simple Email Service with postfix for SMTP smarthost relaying.

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 12:23:47 +0000

How I configured an EC2 instance to relay mail through Amazon’s SES, and some of the bumps I encountered along the way.

Going back to FiOS

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 01:40:05 +0000

I’m not sure why these guys operate this way - they’re more than happy to lose me as a customer and then throw huge discounts at me to get me back. If they’d just give me a good price I’d love not to have to go through this rigmarole. But after being with Cablevision for 2 months I checked Verizon’s pricing and it beat my current deal with Cablevision.

FiOS digital voice with number ported for free; 25/25 Mbps internet; HMDVR free “forever” plus a second HD STB, Showtime, Movie Channel and Flix. Since I already had the battery thing installed last time I had FiOS they gave me a fair discount. Basically the whole package for $87/month + tax, price locked for 2 years, no contract. Not as great of a deal as I’d had with FiOS originally, but it’s pretty good, and FiOS’s service is definitely better than Cablevision’s. I’ve heard Cablevision was rolling out their “DVR plus” service with all programs recorded “in the cloud” rather than on the actual box, but it’s been two months and I haven’t heard of it coming to Long Island. So basically 2 years later Cablevision’s service is exactly the same while Verizon has iPhone apps to control the DVR and use the phone as a remote, plus DVR that’s much faster and just generally better service.

How I fixed my Wii's noisy disc drive & read errors.

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 00:10:31 +0000

I got my Wii in late 2006 and around 2009 I noticed it was starting to sound like a circular saw when the disc drive was spinning. This was annoying but it didn’t affect the games so I never thought much about it.

About two weeks ago, however, New Super Mario Bros. Wii stopped working:

The Wii basically worked except for the disc drive. As soon as I put a disc in, I’d get the error above - even if I didn’t start start the game. I tried blowing in the disc slot (the only thing I could think of… worked for my old NES!) but the problem continued. I figured I had two choices: buy another Wii or attempt to fix mine. Since mine was already essentially useless I figured it couldn’t hurt anything to try fixing it.

After switching back to Cablevision, FiOS users can't call us.

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 12:39:02 +0000

So we switched back to Cablevision and it went pretty well, but apparently Verizon users can’t call our house number (ported from Verizon to Cablevision). Verizon users have to call from their mobiles in order to complete the call. I’m guessing that Verizon hasn’t updated their systems to indicate that they no longer “own” our number and is trying to route the call inside their network. Sucks because I can’t imagine Verizon jumping to help fix this since I’m not their customer anymore.

VMware Workstation 7 - virtual ethernet fails to start after changing vmnet8 subnet

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 10:29:22 +0000

After my recent wipe of my laptop, I reinstalled VMware Workstation and my Win XP VM was working fine. The one wrinkle I faced was that the subnet for the vmnet8 (NAT) vnic had changed from 192.168.250.0/24 to 173.16.132.0/24. The host machine had been 192.168.250.1 so rather than reconfiguring everything on the guest to point to a new IP for the host I figured it would be easier to change the subnet for vmnet8. I went into the Virtual Network Editor and just changed the subnet. Seemed to work correctly, but after doing a release/renew in Win XP I couldn’t get an IP.

Wasted time with Exchange 2010, SquirrelMail, and IMAP-SSL

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:32:11 +0000

I’m setting up SquirrelMail to point to my Exchange 2010 server via IMAP (don’t ask) and couldn’t get SM to talk to Exchange on port 993 (imaps). Even though the servers on the same subnet, any time passwords are being sent over the network I like to opt for SSL. I found a couple of sites suggesting that the problem was that there was no SSL certificate installed, but I knew for a fact there was a valid certificate because I could get to https://webmail.example.com/ for OWA.

Ruby/Sinatra part 2

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 15:38:19 +0000

Following up on my previous post, I decided to go the easier route and just install an older version of Ruby that didn’t have the problem with Sinatra, since I wanted a setup I could replicate easily, and editing the server.rb each time I installed wasn’t what I was going for. I downloaded 1.9.2-rc2 from http://ftp.ruby-lang.org//pub/ruby/1.9/, compiled it and it works:

[evan@evanfc12 ~]$ ruby --version
ruby 1.9.2dev (2010-07-11 revision 28618) [x86_64-linux]
[evan@evanfc12 ~]$ ruby hi.rb ^C
[evan@evanfc12 ~]$ cat hi.rb

require ‘sinatra’

Trying to teach myself Ruby (again)

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 17:09:28 +0000

Now that I have a real web project to work on I figured it’s a good time to try and teach myself Ruby again. Sinatra seems to be the new hotness so that’s what I’m trying, but so far things aren’t going quite as I expected. Everything appears to be installed, but when I run the “Hello, World!” script, the webserver doesn’t start as it’s apparently supposed to do:

[evan@ehoffman 16:59:34 ~]$ ruby --version
ruby 1.9.2p0 (2010-08-18 revision 29036) [x86_64-linux]
[evan@ehoffman 16:59:39 ~]$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'sinatra'
=> true
irb(main):002:0>
You have new mail in /var/spool/mail/evan
[evan@ehoffman 17:00:20 ~]$ cat hi.rb
#require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

get ‘/’ do “Hello World” end [evan@ehoffman 17:00:24 ~]$ ruby hi.rb [evan@ehoffman 17:00:33 ~]$

Amazon EC2 - ext3 mkfs takes 30+ minutes?

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 11:33:42 +0000

I’ve been playing around with Amazon EC2 for a new project I’m working on and so far I’m really impressed. One thing I’ve noticed, however, is that it takes forever to create an ext3 filesystem on a new volume. For example, the below command took over 30 minutes to create the filesystem on a 300 GB volume:

mke2fs -j -m0 /dev/sdf1

mke2fs 1.40.4 (31-Dec-2007) Filesystem label= OS type: Linux Block size=4096 (log=2) Fragment size=4096 (log=2) 39321600 inodes, 78642183 blocks 0 blocks (0.00%) reserved for the super user First data block=0 Maximum filesystem blocks=4294967296 2400 block groups 32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group 16384 inodes per group Superblock backups stored on blocks: 32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208, 4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616

Outlook 2007 & Exchange 2010 Autodiscover SSL certificate error annoyance

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:51:54 +0000

One of the more annoying side effects of migrating my mailbox to Exchange 2010 has been the nagging of Outlook 2007’s Autodiscovery feature. Now, every time I start Outlook I get hit with a certificate error for autodiscover.domain.com. Now, autodiscover.domain.com is a CNAME to mail.domain.com, which is the OWA URL for the CAS. The SSL certificate is valid - but it’s valid for mail.domain.com. I could buy a SSL certificate from GoDaddy for $12.99 (an insanely great price, btw) for “autodiscover” but that would also require using another IP address on the CAS (since you can can only bind one SSL certificate to an IP:port pair), and that seems like a waste of an IP address.

vCenter: Error parsing the server "(server IP)" "clients.xml" file

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:18:59 +0000

I got the above error today after running Windows Update on my XP VM a few days ago. A quick search showed that the error is caused by a Microsoft update to the .NET framework. To resolve it, remove update KB980773 (Add/Remove programs, make sure “Show Updates” is checked; KB980773 is under “Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2”). I removed it and was able to log in without problems.

vCenter: Error parsing the server "(server IP)" "clients.xml" file

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:18:59 +0000