Sometimes the funniest things are the simplest...
My two favorite skits from Sesame Street are when you're being taught the difference between Near/Far and Here/There .
So, for your enjoyment:
Near and Far:
Here and There (in Hebrew).
I apologize to those of you who don't understand Hebrew. Trust me - It's hilarious.
Inspiration for this post came from here and here.
-- Robert
Not every problem is a nail-biting, headache-inducing, going-to-loose-sleep-over-it mammoth. Some problem are just minor head scratchers...
Within ITM, you can create Graphical Views which will display the information in a visual fashion. I.e, you could have a floor map or draw a line of business or whatever, and add icons representing the various monitored objects. You could consider it BSM-lite or TBSM on the cheap.
One problem I just encountered was adding a background image. I did the various right-clicking necessary to bring up the list of images, but for some reason the one I wanted simply didn't show up!
Eventually, a bit of trial and error showed that the files was not showing up because it was called background.JPG instead of background.jpg. Can you see the difference?
Oh, Why can't computers overcome the minor errors and just do what we want?
-- Robert
I've encountered a few cases in which the TEPS service would not start. The error I found in the log was something like this:
KFW1005E The version of the product 'v620_kcj7310a.tms620' does not match the data in the KFWDBVER table.
Opening up the TEPS database and looking at the KFWDBVER table shows that it's just a list of upgrades from version to version of ITM.
Part of the TEPS startup routine is evidently checking that the latest version marked in the database matches the current version.
I have no idea why or how an miss-match might creep in, but each time I've encountered an error like this was after a newbie was let loose on a test server and told to "play with it & try out upgrading"...
So, how do we solve this problem? I've solved it in three different ways, but take into account that these were all test servers, so I had nothing to loose.
In short, this is an annoying problem with a short(though surgical) solution which brings you back to normal or a "hammer" solution. You've just got to choose which you prefer.
-- Robert
My latest Internet find is Academic Earth; an aggregation of video courses and lectures from various top universities and scholars.
Let's look at this lecture for example...
Donald Kagan, Introduction to Ancient Greek History (Yale University: Open Yale Courses), http://oyc.yale.edu (Accessed April 2, 2009). License: Open Yale Courses Terms of Use
Professor Donald Kagan explains why people should study the ancient Greeks. He argues that the Greeks are worthy of our study not only because of their vast achievements and contributions to Western civilization (such as in the fields of science, law, and politics) but also because they offer a unique perspective on humanity. To the Greeks, man was both simultaneously capable of the greatest achievements and the worst crimes; he was both great and important, but also mortal and fallible. He was a tragic figure, powerful but limited. Therefore, by studying the Greeks, one gains insight into a tension that has gripped and shaped the West and the rest of the world through its influence. In short, to study the Greeks is to study the nature of human experience.
But not only does this site have the video - let's face it, anyone can just video a lecture and pop it onto the net these days - it also has some very nice options, which tell me that some thought was put into this:
I read much faster than I can listen or watch and I'd love to have transcripts of much of what I watch.
The various lectures are on a wide variety of topics, covering what any thinking person could want and more is being added all the time, of course.
In short, this site is very well done and a lot of thought has been put into how people can extract information from it. This is what the "Internet" is all about - easy access to high quality information.
Enjoy!
-- Robert
I recently "inherited" a small ITM environment. It had been used as a Proof of Concept trial, passed with flying colours and now the client wanted to start using it. Obviously, the way to save time is to simply reuse the existing environment, because it already works.
And at first glance, it did. Everything seemed to function properly for the first day or two, till I wanted to export all the situations to a file before I did some heavier work.
That's when I discovered that the command tacmd login didn't work. It just hang there for a few minutes and exited with a KUIC00006E timeout error.
Eventually, I found the solution, which is also documented here*. The problem was that some change had been done to the network on the server which meant that just about everything worked.
So the lesson learned here is that when you come to an unknown environment, no matter how simple and small it appears - make sure everything works properly before signing off on it :)
-- Robert
* This actually happened a few months ago, but the publication of this note reminded me.
When a server is virtualized, i.e. converted from a physical server into a virtual server, then TADDM had a problem.
Because these are different computers, that merely share the same name (fully qualified domain name - FQDN), they show up twice in the inventory list.
Worse, the old server exists in all the business applications, but the new one doesn't. I'd have to manually update all the applications with the new servers.
Fortunately, TADDM 7.1.2 Interim Fix 1 has just been released. Among it's improvements there is this:
IZ44531 Reusing fully qualified domain names causes operating systems to be shared among old and
new computer systems. In 712, one can now prevent OS FQDN from being set by using the following collation.properties setting:
com.collation.discover.agent.ComputerSystemAgent.ignoreFQDN
If property does not exist in collation.properties, the default value is taken.
Default value is false. If the customer set it to true, FQDN will not be set for the OS.
Property can be configurated through the OS or IP:
com.collation.discover.agent.ComputerSystemAgent.ignoreFQDN.Linux.1.2.3.4
or
com.collation.discover.agent.ComputerSystemAgent.ignoreFQDN.Linux
or
com.collation.discover.agent.ComputerSystemAgent.ignoreFQDN.1.2.3.4
Where Linux is the OS name and 1.2.3.4 is the IP.
Example for ignoring FQDN on VMWare operating systems:
com.collation.discover.agent.ComputerSystemAgent.ignoreFQDN.Vmnix=trueNote that the os.fqdn is not unset if it is already there. This change only applies to NEW operating systems.
To find operating systems that share computer systems, use this query;
./dbquery.sh "select GUID_X, PK__OSRUNNING_X, LASTMODIFIEDTIME_X,
CONTEXTIP_X, SIGNATURE_X from COMPSYS where PK__OSRUNNING_X IN (SELECT
comp.PK__OSRUNNING_X from COMPSYS comp, OPSYS op where
comp.PK__OSRUNNING_X = op.GUID_X || '-0' and
op.PK__PARENTOPERATINGSYSTEM_X != comp.GUID_X || '-0') order by
PK__OSRUNNING_X, LASTMODIFIEDTIME_X"
The api delete command can be used to remove the computer system which is no longer valid.
Some other interesting tidbits in the new fix:
Good luck with the new version :)
-- Robert
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