travis' brain dump

So, another year down… another to go.

2010 had some pretty interesting challenges, lessons learned, blah blah the usual nonsense. What does 2011 hold? Who knows at this point. NYE went pretty well… it was a calm one. Just spent it hanging out with Andy and Amanda and the kiddos gorging on food continuously for the entire evening… gotta get in that last night of crazy eating before those weight loss new years resolutions kick in eh? I’ve actually done really well this holiday season, partly due to the fact I’ve been sick most of it. This cold has been such a pain in the rear end but it seems to finally be getting out of my system.

So much I could throw on the list of new years resolutions and goals but at the very least, this year, I’ve got to do the final kill on these few extra pounds lingering… I’m goaling for the first three months of 2011 to get that done… this past summer really screwed me up with that crazy work schedule. I was within my goal weight by 10lbs and ended up gaining 10 back due to working so much. 🙁 On my list of goals is to run another 2 10k’s this year and get a better time than last year by at least 10 minutes. I think I can do better than that, but we’ll see. I figure if I can drop 20lbs by April and kick training into high gear from the end of March through the end of May, I should be able to tear up the Bolder Boulder this next year.  Eventually I want to work myself up to a half marathon, but I’m not going that crazy this year. That’s just way to ambitious for me with my schedule, lol.

I’ve got the usual various other goals to work on too… you know those personal goals for finances, the ever looming Camaro project that is slowly but surely moving forward, etc… I just want to make some major dents this year. On the plan as well, remove that horrible old swing set from the back yard and build the kiddos a mega-plex to play in for the summer. Should be a fun project but I’m definitely done with that archaic setup we’ve got going on. It should be a pretty interesting year. But for now, I’ve still got 3 solid months left of snowboarding season and that’s got priority. 🙂

So in other news… on the tech side of things… I’ve integrated my blogsite with Facebook. Now it’s easier to login to the site using facebook credentials. Anyone with an existing account can login the same way and link their blogsite account to their FB account from their user profile screen. Also new accounts registering can do so using their FB credentials. This is all part of the eventual removal of the traditional registration/login system that has been allowing about 50 spammers a month to sign up using automated methods. Really irritating. More to come on this as I play with more features, etc. 🙂

Anyway… enough boring nonsense.

SO, where to begin?

After going on a serious technology sabbatical, at least from a personal stance, I am back. I think. 😉

After working so much during the summer, I tried to get back into my usual personal technology quests (blogging, mobile modding, gaming, home server/network stuff, etc) but just found that by trying to dive back into my personal time with technology, I came to hate it even more… so I just quit for a couple months. It was actually a pretty nice “break” for me. I still couldn’t avoid it since technology is my career, but not engaging in activities involving it after hours helped to smooth over my jaded feelings towards all things tech.

And… after a few days of “hitting it hard” again, I actually feel pretty good about technology once more. I’ve upgraded the blog site software running on this server, updated the VMWare installations for the hosts, updated the VSA software, rooted my Cliq, loaded a vanilla android installation on it, reloaded all the apps I wanted and pruned out 66 bogus user entries… Oh, with that, if some of you notice that the email coming to your inbox for notifications has switched out mysteriously to another mail account, my apologies. I was playing with a little tool that links up Facebook accounts to WordPress blog accounts and accidentally pulled down the email address you have posted in your Facebook profile. If you want to change it, just log in and update it with another email account. 🙂

I’m also pretty stoked about the beginning of my favorite time of year… SNOWBOARDING SEASON!!!!!!!!!!!! *happy sigh* This is my time to relax, my time to destroy myself on the mountain and feel like I really do something recreational besides a routine daily workout. Can ya tell I’m excited? 🙂 This season should prove interesting since two more members of the family are now geared up and ready for the fun. Arwen got a gear reload this year so she’s all set and Amanda got geared up right at the end of last season so she’s all good to go as well. Hopefully plenty of funny stories and good pics ahead!

With that… updates on the family. Family is doing great… Travis Jr is two now, I can’t believe how big he is. I seem to remember him coming home from the hospital just a few weeks ago, where has the time gone!? Hopefully I’ll get around to updating some recent pictures in the gallery today or perhaps tomorrow. Today will be consumed with cleaning, grocery shopping and a lot of XBOX Kinect. 🙂 That seems to be our new fun thing to do around here… I think it has something to do with the fact even the kiddos can play it. No controller gaming, a 7 year old girl’s absolute dream, especially when she gets to play with virtual tiger cubs for hours. *rolls eyes* lol. I’m still torn on what my favorite game is. I would have to say independently playing I’m partial to Kinetc Adventures and Dance Central. Group playing I would have to go with Kinect Sports and Dance Central. Those are just really fun “party” games to enjoy with a group of people. Kinectimals is a pretty cool idea, kinda fun for the kiddos and Biggest Loser Workout is a workout, so I can’t count that as a ‘Game’ per se. Between our collection and my buddy Randy, I think we’ve got all the games and reviews covered.  We’ll probably pick up another game or two over the next couple of weeks as these start to lose their “new car smell”.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. Nothing really dramatic going on and life is slowly returning to “normal”, whatever that is. Busy day ahead so I’m going to end this for now…

So, I spent quite a bit of time digging around on the internet and came up with no solution to this issue. So I’m posting the solution to this one. I ran across this one while moving a mailbox from one site to another physically across a WAN. Moving mailboxes on the server from one datastore to the other worked just fine, however every time I ran a mailbox move from one location to another, it bombed out with the following error:

[5/10/2010 6:57:36 PM] [0] [ERROR] Error was found for Test User (test.user@testdomain.com) because: Error occurred in the step: Moving messages. Unable to unlock mailbox with error:
MAPI or an unspecified service provider.
ID no: 00000000-0000-00000000, error code: -1056749254
[5/10/2010 6:57:36 PM] [0] [06876] The operation has finished.

One might immediate think there is an issue with permissions since this was a common item found when doing a search on this particular error and showed up most often when doing a migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. In this particular instance, it is due to a problem with a WAN accelerator.

The best way to confirm this is to complete a dump on the interface on the source and target exchange servers when conducting the move. If the WAN accelerator is interfering it may manifest itself by showing a packet on source side that differs from the expected packet on the target side.

In this case, it was a transparency mode configured on a RiverBed device.

Hopefully this post will help someone keep from smashing their head into a keyboard for a couple of days since they can’t find the answer and point them in the right direction. 🙂

Figured this oddity was worth posting.

I was loading up a server today and for some reason, despite setting the nic with static ip, gw and dns information I couldn’t hit outside ip addresses.

When I submitted an “ipconfig /all” I noticed my gw in the config but also noticed 0.0.0.0 listed with and above it. Wtf?

Anyway, reboot didn’t fix it, resubmission of configuration didn’t fix it, but the following did.

1) Open up ‘cmd.exe’ in administrator mode.
2) Type ‘route delete 0.0.0.0’
3) Resubmit your ip settings putting the correct default gateway in.

Should be fine now. (Even after reboot) =)

Not sure what the deal was, but at least its a simple fix for a stupid issue.