Blogger Scheduling is Not Working

I am a big fan of the scheduling feature with blogger. It allows me to blog as much as I want, and stagger the posts to keep my content seemingly fresh every day of the week. Lately, I have been noticing that it has not been working.

I looked into it today (Finally) and it turns out that it is a known issue with Google, and their engineers are working one it. Here is a quote from the Google Known Issues blog:

Scheduled posting is currently unreliable for some users. We're looking into this and will post and update when we have more to share.

Thanks for your patience.

I am really hoping they get this fixed soon. It is one of the features I use the most. What about you? Do you use scheduled posting with blogger? Let me know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: blogger,scheduled,posts,not,working,known,issue

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Bypass MDS on Blackberry Devices

The other day I was told by one of our senior Systems Administrators that I needed to perform an upgrade to the latest version of Blackberry Enterprise Server within a few days to help us move to Microsoft Exchange 2007. We were running BES 4.1.4 fine, but apparently it isn’t supported with Exchange 2007.

No problem I thought, I checked the online documentation on the Blackberry Website. I canned Blackberry support to pick their brain, and to check my stuff to make sure there wouldn’t be any issues. After I was satisfied, I went ahead and backed up the VM that my BES is running on, took a snapshot of it as well, and backed up the SQL database. Yeah, perhaps I was a little over cautious, but Blackberry is one of the high profile killer apps at my company. I couldn’t afford failure.

I decided to go the in place upgrade route. It is was easier than the cutover process. The install for 5.0 was pretty smooth, and everything worked fairly well. Or so I thought.

The very next day I noticed that I couldn’t browse the internet any more. I would get an error saying:

A communication failure occurred with the selected Mobile Data Service. The server may be busy, please try again later. If the problem persists, contact your administrator.

Hmm, that didn’t sound good. I quickly logged into my BES, and saw that the Blackberry MDS Connection Service was stopped. I thought it would be a simple fix. I started the service and pow! Nope! The service would start, then after about five minutes it would stop.

I checked the BES log files and saw some of this awesomeness:

General Error connecting to the database.: application.handler.ldap.DEFAULT_PRT

Now, this whole time, everyone could send and receive emails, they just couldn’t access the internet through the MDS service. I called Blackberry support. They had me check some stuff, but after a while they were stumped and escalated the issue to their developers. GREAT! Now what am I supposed to do when the users come calling?

I’ll tell you what I had my users do. This of course is a workaround until Blackberry can get back to me with a permanent solution, but hey it works. I had my users perform the following on their devices:

• Go to Options>Advanced Options> Browser
• Change the Default Browser Configuration to use Internet Browser
• Press the menu key, and save the change
• On the main screen, open the browser
• Press the menu button and select Bookmarks
• Highlight your first bookmark, press the menu key and select edit bookmark
• Change the browser option to Internet Browser and accept the change
• Do that to any other bookmarks you may have.
• Once complete, try to browse the internet on your device.

Using The Internet Browser instead of the Blackberry Browser sends your users web traffic out across the carrier’s network, instead of back through your BES. This is actually fine for us as we don’t have any internet policies enforced for our mobile users anyway. If you do though, then this may still be a good temporary solution until you can get your stuff fixed.

Have any of you experienced problems with the MDS service on BES 5.0MR1? Did you fix it? Care to hook a brutha up? Let me know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: bes,blackberry,5.0,mr1,mds,browse,bypass,internet

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WOW Freak Out. Real or Fake?

Yesterday, one of my co-workers forwarded me this video allegedly of a kid who is freaking out because his mom canceled his World of Warcraft (WOW) account. At first I thought this may be a real clip of a kid having an emotional breakdown, but getting near the end of it, I started to have different thoughts.

Either way, if it were real, this is probably one of the funniest reactions I have ever seen to something as trivial as a video game. Sure it's easy for me to say, but then again I don't play too many games. Still though, no matter how important something was to me, I am fairly certain I wouldn't try to shove a TV remote up my rear end... Oh wait, you haven't seen it yet...

Before I get too much further, here it is, the alleged "Greatest WOW Freak Out Ever":



What do you think? Real? Fake? Have you ever got this worked up over a game, or anything else for that matter? Hit me up in the comments.

Technorati Tags: wow, freak, out, world of warcraft, humor, funny, video

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Forcing Demotion of a Domain Controller

The other day I was attempting to install a new antivirus software on one of my company’s remote domain controllers. Everything was going fine except the antivirus couldn’t create the user account it needs to perform updates.

I checked the knowledge base for my antivirus company (It’s Sophos if you must know) and they suggested trying to manually create the account in Active Directory if it is on a Domain Controller. When I opened up Active Directory Users and Computers, it defaulted to the next closest Domain Controller. When I tried to select the server I was on, I got an error message.

Apparently, one of our Systems administrators was doing some meta data cleanup a few weeks ago to try to fix some replication errors, and may have accidentally deleted this particular server’s roll as a Domain Controller. Ouch!

It was still a part of the domain, so I tried to simply demote it and re-promote it again. This is where I ran into an issue. When I tried to demote it I got the following error:

Error: An error occurred:
Win32 Error 8419(0x20e3): The DSA object could not be found.

I tried a few things with DNS, but nothing worked. I finally had to break down and force the demotion of the server. If you have never done it, you run the following command:

dcpromo /forceremoval

This runs dcpromo and ignores all errors. Once complete, the server will reboot and will no longer be a part of the domain.

When that was complete, I deleted the server object from Active Directory Users and Computers, and forced replication to the other Domain Controllers. I then ran the ntdsutils command line utility to make sure there wasn’t any stale metadata left over.

After that I tried to rejoin the server to the domain. I wasn’t able to, apparently the SID data was still in AD. To correct that I ran newsid from Sysinternals to change the SID and rebooted it. When it came back up, I rejoined it to the domain, and ran dcpromo successfully.

I’ve been keeping my eye on it, and everything seems to be replicating without issue. Hurray!

This just goes to show you that when trouble shooting the underbelly (AKA the Schema) of Active Directory, be careful, and pay close attention to what you are doing. One simple mistake can cause big problems.

Has anything like this happened to you? What caused it? How did you fix it? Did you do something similar? Let me know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: Error 8419(0x20e3),dcpromo,force,removal,domain,controller

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Alternative Mobile Voicemail

Many many moons ago, when T-Mobile first appeared in San Diego, my wife and I signed up for their service because it was the cheapest thing available. For the most part we liked their services, but what we didn’t like was that every time you got a voice mail message you got an alert on your phone saying you had a voice mail, you also got a text message. They have since removed that feature, but it was sort of annoying.

Currently I am on Verizon, and their voice messaging is okay. I mean, it does what it is supposed to do. What I don’t like about Verizon’s is that when I dial in from my cell phone I still have to put in my pin number, then to play a message, I have to select “1’ or something to play it. It is rather inconvenient when I am driving, and I am supposed to be “hands free” yet I still have to look down to dial pin numbers, and menu items just to check a voice message.

All of those annoyances have gone away for me though. My buddy recommended an alternative voice messaging service, that is free to use, and has some really cool features. The service is called Youmail, and here is what they offer:

• Visual Voicemail - See who called, from where, and even their picture
• Use your smart phone or your computer - or you can still dial in like before
• Save time - Point, click and play or delete
• Personal Custom Greetings
• Voicemail Sharing
• Unwanted caller blocking
• Voicemails at MP3’s direct to your email

Setup for me was really easy, and they have detailed instructions for just about every carrier out there to switch over to their service.

Another feature they offer (for a premium of course) is speech to text, so you can just read your voicemails. Pretty cool sounding, but I am not paying for that myself.

I have been using it for a week, and so far I like it way better than the stock Verizon voicemail. It is more convenient, and if I am close to the computer, I can play my messages through Windows Media Player, and I never have to call my voicemail.

What do you think? Do you find your current provider’s voicemail kind of annoying? What don’t you like about it? Have you tried Youmail? Know of a similar service? let us know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: alternative,voicemail,free,mobile,cellular

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Remember When Megabytes Were Expensive?

My buddy Sundance sent me this picture the other day, and I almost fell out of my chair. Looking at old advertisements like this makes you almost snicker inside considerent what you can get these days for under $30! Seriously, you can get a Bauer-Power Gear 4 GB USB drive for $24.99.

When you consider that, then paying almost $3,000 for 15 MB seems pretty outrageous. Back then though, it was probably a bargain!

Not only is the disk almost $3000 by itself, you also have to spend almost $80 on the appropriate installation kit! Are you friggin kidding me?

Check out the ad I'm talking about:

Thankfully I entered the I.T. game when I did. I couldn't imagine forking over that kind of dough for so little storage capacity. What about you? Were you working in the computer field when 15 MB was a premium amount of space? Do you remember paying these prices? Let us know know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: old, computer, advertisement, 15mb, hard drive

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New Contest: Win a Free Bauer-Puntu Computer!

Oh yes you read that correctly! I got my grubby little hands on a little mini computer, and I am going to be giving that mofo away free and clear to one lucky winner! This puppy will come with Bauer-Puntu Linux 9.04 pre-installed for some awesome hacking fun!

I will run this contest just like the last one which is via Twitter! It just makes things easy for everyone! Entering is really simple, and takes only a few seconds of your time. If you are a Twitter user you know how following someone, and retweeting a message only takes seconds of time, but in this case those seconds can get you a mutha friggin' computer!

All you have to do to enter is

1. Follow me on Twitter: (@ElDiPablo)
2. Retweet about this contest: (Click here to retweet correctly)

Doing those two very easy things will get you one entry in the contest! YOU HAVE TO DO THIS TO ENTER! If you want another entry all you have to do is subscribe to my RSS feed, and post a link to a screen shot of Bauer-Power in your RSS reader in the comments. If you want, yet another entry (Yes, three chances to win) write up a blog post linking back to this contest. Post a link to your blog post in the comments!

I will add each entry to an Excel spread sheet, and I will use a random number generator to pick a winner. Drawing will be July 3rd at 2:00PM Pacific time via Twitter.

So what kind of computer will you all be competing for? A used Compaq EVO D51e with a 2.0Ghz Pentum IV Processor and 1 GB of RAM. Sure, the specs aren't top of the line, but it runs Bauer-Puntu Linux like a son-of-a-bitch! Plus, it's small as hell and free (So stop complaining!)

In interest of full disclosure, I obtained this machine from my current employer (Who shall remain nameless) as we recently cleaned out our store room and designated a number of machines to be sent to the recycling center. My boss, who got approval from his boss, said that we could pick through these obsolete machines to take home. The only stipulation? We can't sell these for a profit (Which I'm not, I am giving it away). I have received a signed receipt from management authorizing me to have this computer.

With that out of the way, here is a picture of the computer:

What are you waiting for? Start retweeting, and tell all your friends!

NOTE: Contest Open to U.S. Residents Only

Technorati Tags: contest, free, computer, twitter

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