What happens when you think too complex...

Being with an escalated support team is fun.. people aren't satisfied unless you follow your statement with a
root cause..

One ground rule: Things can't fail for simple reason.. It has to be something really complex about the failure.. about the behaviour..

However, at times complex thinking proves too expensive. Here is what happened today.

My team lead started experiencing a very strange issue with his mail client. When ever he forwards an email to any one, it is lost from his inbox view.. He figured out that under an option called "All Documents" his mails were safe.. He was concerned so were we..

An immediate quick meeting was called and action items were charted

• Take the back up of the mail data base


• To do that, get an alternate laptop, configure it for back to back connection and dump the data on to it.


• Our lotus notes expert wanted to try a "Design" replace option to see if any of the "Templates" were corrupt. Once the back up was completed, he was  to try that.

Backup went fine. We assembled back to discuss the strategy further.

I thought something related to "Automatic Inbox Cleaning"  agent was playing the trick. Opened the backend script and tried to see if I could find something interesting..

With my halfcooked knowledge, I have enlightened the whole team about the possibility of an automatic inbox cleaning up happening and why it did not happen on my system and why it didn't happen to my lead last week and.......

We took control of the impacted system again.. Asked our lead to test it once again before we were game for the big operation.. Alas.. The issue repeated.. So we called operation mail client "START"

Meanwhile, our only sensible team mate ( at least for the moment) decided to hit the "Insert" button, which is for marking an email "read". To our surprise, that mail too vanished.

He then took the mouse control... Selected a small menu on the right hand top corner.. which initially read " VIEW UNREAD MAILS ONLY"..

He changed it to "VIEW ALL MAILS" and everthing was back to normal..

The whole team was dumb for few moments.. which was followed by uncontrollable laughter..

Sometimes.. it helps if you dont think too complex.. :-)

Cheers guys...

I have pasted the below sticker on my old home door( sreekarun.livejournal.net)

It goes like this..
( http://sreekarun.livejournal.com/14672.html )

"Yes. I found a new place to write online.. :-)

The decision to move over to a new place does not mean I was feeling restricted with free online journals and publishing tools. But I always wanted to know first hand on how to set up a website.. What is like owning one.. and what goes behind setting up a site..

I knew I need to register a domain and then would need some web space to launch it.. Google helped me find a list of providers from which I zeroed in to Znetindia.com. There may be other providers equally or more competative, didn't want to do that extend of research anyway..

They allowed me to register my site sreekarun.net for around 450 Rs an year.. That was one part of it.. To host my site, I started looking for options and they were offering linux based solutions and windows based solutions.. PHP + Mysql attracted me than ASP.. Hence decided with the linux version and paid around 1000 Rs for 6 months hosting charges..

The control panel interface that znetindia has is awsome. Hardly did I talk to their tech experts. setting up things were a cake walk with tools provided in the control panel interface..

Next question was what to put in there.. Did some research on the available components and faced with terms like bulletin board softwares... Content Management Softwares and blogging softwares..

The look and feel of Mambo CMS attracted me initially.. played around with it and finally managed to get a site up under the tag portal.sreekarun.net.. I did write some articles in Live journals back in 2009 and this year too. rewriting them or individually porting them sounded painful.. CMS had lot options and some time felt too many... Moreover I couldn't find a way to add a comment option for my articles and manage them...

I Sat back and though for a while. I realized most of the things that I want to publish are blog like artcles. So decided to try the blogging software, wordpress..

Wordpress impressed me.. Lot of themes. Widgets.. configuration options .. You may even configure it as a CMS. So sticked to it.. Wrote a small php to redirect all traffic to http://sreekarun.net to http://sreekarun.net/blogs

Having tried many themes in Wordpress I am now using F2. One more great thing that made my life sweet is the import functionality.. it allowed me to import all my livejournal posts along with comments to my wordpress blog.. Great isn't it..

I have added couple of widgets like a clock and word of the day.. it all works well..

I think I am happy with the move over.. Atlest till the time znetindia send me a reminder email mentioning my hosting expiry date..

:-)"

A quick and dirty way to run a command prompt under system context

A quick and dirty way to run a command prompt under system context

Pre-requisite: you must have administrator previlege

Open up a command prompt and create a scheduled task using at command..

c:\> at "14:01" /interactive "cmd.exe"

this would start a new shell at 14:01.. dont forget to change the time as per your requiremnt when you try this..

What would you want to do once you get access to this shell.. Well system account is the most powerful account on your system.. Yes.. more than you "Administrator" account..

Have fun guys..

Something about ADS

Windows Alternate Data Streams is one thing you would like to explore.. A nice article in beeping computers explains it well.

www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/tutorial25.html

The command line option to start the embedded exe is not working for Win7 though.. May be something changed ???

Hey.. This is new in Win 7 - Attaching vdisk

Win7 supports attaching vdisks and manipulating it natively.

So next time you have a .vhd file with you, you might want to try if you can attach that using diskpart.. And yes. The diskpart.exe now supports a new create option..

Create vdisk

Have fun guys..

A cmd ping sweeper demo.. I am testing flash blogging too..

Who is hogging My CPU:IE & SVCHOST acting for akamai ( Adobe download manager)

To find a change from  investigating client issues, today I decided to spend some time with my vista system analyzing its performance..

Thought of clearing the %temp% first.. Lot of active .tmp files where present.. That means.. I couldn't delete them..  Got curious about this and decided to investigate it further.. Fired up Process Explorer and Searched for .tmp file in the "Find Handle" option. To my great surprise, all those files were held up by Internet Explorer. I use IE8 on Vista..

I have lots of RSS feeds saved, so suspecting something related to that, decided to review the Feed reader configuration.. Dumb me.. It was accidently configured as 15 mts sync. with my 50+ feeds.. sycning every 15mts.. Now I know why sometimes my system was behaving really odd..

But that didn't answer the .TMP file question.. closed down all IE Windows.. and the files went off..Fired IE windows.. those files came up..
With each tab there were around 4 to 5 new .tmp files created.. So its not just the temporary internet files that IE uses for caching.. It uses
%temp%. Finding out the exact details of this behavior has been stored as a low priority item in my to do list..

I decided to move on.. Playing around with process explorer.. One application was taking so much of private bytes.. the process name was searchindexer.exe hosted as a service " Windows Search". So its the indexing service that is using some resources for searches that I rarely do.. Not a recommendation.. I decided to turn off the service for some days to monitor. The result is very evident..

The next biggest consumer was SVCHOST.EXE a poor generic service host who has to take blame of all the services it hosts.. Windows decided to go ahead with this multihost model to conserve resources..

But this time I am surprised, really really surprised..  As much as I read till this time, SVCHOST Can not be used by third parties to host their application..

And here is one Akmai Download Manager, which I installed to download an Adobe product ( Akmai is Adobe's download manager ) using SVCHOST to serve him..  On top of it, there were large context switches happening..



There weren't any  download happening at that time. So for sure the application was mis behaving.. There was an unistaller in the product folder using which I uninstalled the product.. I should say the system is much better now..

20 mts of small investigation using Process Explorer.. The system is back on feet.. but opened up a pandora's box full of questions to be answered...