encountered an issue a few months ago where a couple of users reported duplicate messages in their unity mailboxes. i verified that this was indeed the case. same exact time stamp and same content. i looked around for a solution and found something on a forum that suggested restarting the Connection MTA service. this service is only active on the server currently running as primary.

so, i went to restart the service and the system reported that the server must perform a failover for the service to be restarted. then i figured if i must do a failover i might as well reboot the server completely. after reboot the issue went away. this was unity connection 8.5 SU2.

i upgraded to ubuntu 12.04 two months ago and i don’t have much to say about it. which could be taken as a good or bad thing. to me, it’s mostly good because i keep getting a desktop that i want with little to no changes. i know there’s still so much talk about the HUD, unity, and gnome3. i watch videos on them from time to time, but i really have no interest in trying them out. i’ve firmly decided those desktop models are not going to work for me. so as long as new ubuntu releases keep including a gnome classic option i’ll keep using ubuntu. otherwise i’ll probably move on to linux mint and cinnamon.

for about the first month after upgrading i was receiving a message after login – “system program problem has been detected”. seems like it was something related to the gnome-settings-daemon crashing. at some point ubuntu updates resolved this issue.

i’ve decided to get rid of the new hovering scroll tabs. i actually liked them a lot at first, but then they really get in the way of resizing windows. on a small laptop screen i am constantly resizing windows and every time i tried to horizontally resize them the scroll tabs pop up. anyways, cool idea i just think it needs to be tweaked some more. to return to the normal visible scrollbars uninstall the packages “overlay-scrollbar” and “liboverlay-scrollbar*”.

the screensaver is all jacked up in release 12.04 apparently due to the inclusion of gnome-screensaver. to return xscreensaver functionality, gnome-screensaver will first need to be removed and then the xscreensaver daemon will need to be added to startup applications like so “xscreensaver -nosplash”.

i’ve also noticed that the battery indicator applet appears to be missing from the system tray region. i’ve enabled it to always be present under power options yet it still isn’t visible. this appears to be a reported bug on launchpad.

screensaver info source:
http://www.howtogeek.com/114027/how-to-add-screensavers-to-ubuntu-12.04/

couple of weeks ago something very strange was affecting one virtual machine. our monitoring solution showed the VM losing connectivity every couple of minutes. the windows system logs showed “LSI_SCSI Event 129 – Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort2, was issued”  occurring every minute. clearly sounded like a storage issue, but the SAN performance was fine at the time. we tried uninstalling and reinstalling vmware tools with no luck.

eventually, we noticed the vm hardware version was still 4, as this particular vm had been around since ESX 3.x. so we did a vm hardware upgrade to version 7 and the issue (so far) has disappeared.

i learned something today about thin provisioning that never dawned on me before. a thinly provisioned disk clearly grows as more storage is required…but when data is deleted from the guest OS volumes the thin provisioned disk does not shrink accordingly. so if you let a 1TB thin provisioned volume grow to say 800GB then you’re stuck with a 800GB vmdk no matter how much data you delete from the guest OS. there’s forum posts and blogs regarding the use of a utility called sdelete to work around this issue, but there appears to be no easy native way to downsize a thin provisioned disk.

source:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1005418

after a text install of solaris 11, here’s a quick way to get x & gnome up and running:
sudo pkg install slim_install
sudo svcadm enable gdm

also of note is that all current releases of solaris are 64-bit only…despite some releases still being listed as x86.

and…nice first steps article from oracle:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-admin/o11-112-s11-first-steps-524819.html

source:
http://www.dai-mao.com/solaris/solaris-11-install-gnome

i’ve meant to post this forever…
in short how to get the quicklaunch bar back in windows 7:
add a new toolbar
browse to c:\users\%username%\appdata\roaming\microsoft\internet explorer
then select the quick launch folder

source:
http://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-enable-or-disable-quick-launch-bar-toolbar-in-windows-7/

to get the pano controller functional with vmware view as the broker i had to do the following:

• setup pano controller appliance as a zero client controller only (for vmware view)
• disable “use secure tunnel connection to desktop” in view (per panologic docs)
• on the pano controller, set vmware view as the broker
• create a vmware view DVM collection on the pano controller if necessary (it was auto-created in my case)
• alter the vmware view base image: install the pano direct service, shutdown and create a new snapshot, and then recompose the pool. if starting from scratch install vmware tools, view agent, then pano direct service (the order seems to matter)

on a fresh install of windows 2008 r2 w/ latest updates applied RDP sessions would immediately disconnect after login. then RDP services would appear to become unavailable. event viewer->application showed “faulting application name: svchost.exe_termservice… faulting module name: rdpcorekmts.dll…”

this is evidently caused by an update being applied prior to SP1 being applied. the solution i used was to uninstall update 2667402 and then install the latest windows updates again and reboot.

source:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2667402

there’s no native method of emptying a single user mailbox in unity connection that i’m aware of. the user could go to the web inbox to empty it, but there’s no way to do it from an admin perspective.

i googled some for a solution and found that the unity tool bulk user delete will do it. when i first saw the name of the program i was like no way i’m going to use that utility. but no, really, it is the bulk user delete utility that can accomplish this task. the utility has a user reset feature that has various options. so…one could just choose the empty inbox option and then do a string search for a single user. obviously, you have to be very careful when running this utility to avoid mass destruction. also as of 5/9/2012 this is not a TAC supported utility.

bulk user delete help page:
http://www.ciscounitytools.com/Applications/CxN/BulkUserDelete/Help/ConnectionBulkUserDelete.htm#_Toc239146385