run odbc32ad.exe as administrator

while trying to login to the agent/supervisor desktop the user received the following message:
“Login failed due to a configuration error.  Please ask your system administrator to associate your phone with the RM JTAPI Provider user ID according to the instructions in the Administrator Guide.”

pretty much exactly as the error message describes…the uccx rm user (application user) in call manager was not associated to that user’s phone.

source: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/custcosw/ps1846/products_tech_note09186a0080223b87.shtml

i received an error today while trying to use the vmware converter plugin for vcenter.
the error message simply said:
“a fatal error occurred. the reason for this might be a network connection failure.
the wizard will close now. please check your network connection and try again.”

the solution to this problem involved restarting the vmware converter services on the vcenter server and then closing and reopening the vsphere client.

source:  http://communities.vmware.com/message/1676872

it wasn’t too obvious to me how to view message headers in outlook 2010 so i did some googling and came across this blog:
http://absoblogginlutely.net/2010/04/view-headers-or-source-in-outlook-2010/

in short, you can customize the ribbon and add the message options button to it to access the header information. also someone pointed out in the comments that you can go to file->properties of a message as well. note: these options only exist when you’ve double-clicked a message to open it.

with vsphere, RDMs can be converted into vmdk files by using the datastore migration feature. however, to accomplish this you must choose a thick or thin conversion. using the “same as source” option will only transfer the RDM pointer files and not accomplish much. hot/live migrations have worked out just fine several times. also if cold datastore migrations are failing repeatedly try a hot migration (oddly enough it seems to have a higher success rate).

also on vmfs volumes…in our instance we seemed limited to 1.99TB volumes and could not create 2TB or greater volumes for some reason, despite max vmfs volume size being 64TB.

update 11/7/2011:
you can use extents to create datastores greater than 1.99TB, i’ve only dabbled with it however. just today i learned that VMFS5 (ships with vsphere 5) will support up to 64TB on a single extent.

update 5/29/2013:
my last update is absolutely true despite bickering and misinformation in various internet forums. in vsphere 4.x you simply cannot create a single extent VMFS datastore over 2TB.
source: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2007328

a windows utility for checking MD5 and SHA-1 checksums:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841290

i know there’s plenty of md5sum ports and the like, but here’s an official microsoft one.
once installed run fciv.exe against a file. default algorithm is md5.

this is my current set up for a sql maintenance plan (i use the plan wizard):
backup (full backup)
optimize (rebuild indexes, update statistics, shrink database, check integrity)
cleanup (delete expired backups)

on different days if possible

today i attempted to use darik’s boot and nuke bootable ISO on two 1998-1999ish dell dimensions (pentium 3 era). DBAN would display “error reading sectors” or it would be unable to discover any attached disks. the solution to this problem was to download an older release of DBAN such as verson 1.0.7.

source: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/forums/forum/208932/topic/3784755

i was just looking at some averages today and on average our virtual machines consume 250MHz of CPU usage and 4.7GB of RAM each. if this holds true then you could effectively have 96 VMs per 24GHz of available CPU resources. however, you’ll only get about 41 VMs worth per 192GBs of RAM. so probably as a rule, you will always max out your RAM resources before you do CPU resources. this is especially true with lots of windows server 2008 VMs.

when upgrading from vma 4 to vma 4.1:
sudo vima-update scan
sudo vima-update update

after vma is upgraded to 4.1 the command becomes vma-update.
to check the vma build run “cat /etc/vma-release”

see  http://resinblade.net/?p=1088 for info on upgrading vma 5.1