RAID Forever

MegaCLI (LSI) PERC Command line client is here in case you're looking for it too. This is a zip containing a zip containing an rpm file. Just alien it and you're almost done. The cheats sheet you can find on the internet is rather ok, except for the download link I just wrote down.

IIS fails and "the service did not return an error"

If your IIS doesn't want to start and do not give you any error. Just try to reinstall it: uninstall it from the add/remove programs and add it again. Made my day. Kudos to the databaseforum for the fix I was looking for in the internet.

COLLATE

Never, never forget to add the COLLATION of your temporary tables when you write MS-SQL server stored procedures. If you forget to do that and you ever migrate from say SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2000 some database, you end up doing the following:

• naively reimport everything
• try to compile the SP just to receive some weird errors message about the existing COLLATION if you ever have a conflict between your COLLATIONS
• later, try to run the SP and get some nice runtime errors because tempdb uses a different COLLATION than the one in your database
• lose one complete afternoon scripting stuff like ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN foo varchar(3) COLLATE ....
• hope this si something that is never going to happen again.

That's what I just did. Thank you.

Crowded room.

The archive room where one of our poor intern is just trying to sort 4 years of MSDN CDs. We plan to keep only a few of these, but before, we need to know what we have here. It's an interesting thing to do. At least on the organization point of view (Note the small tables under the main one :D).

Tools I use

List of software I use daily at work : AutoHotkey Autohotkey provides a scriptable way to automate most of the management of my Windows XP. I currently use one script that enable X-Windows style window dragging/resizing. Thunderbird Firefox Google Calendar Sync QuickMonth Calendar Putty SuperCopier Launchy

The velocity engine

We're about to use the velocity engine soon in one of our project. The velocity engine is a java library that performs template rendering for your applications. It uses a custom language to populate the template called the VTL. We will integrate the library with one of the latest Spring version and use it to render our view automatically.

rman is clever

Well, sort of. Today, after patching one of my oracle database server against a migration issue that prevented it from shutting down clean. I finally managed to run the magic command:

alter database archivelog;

That would enable me to backup the database. Unfortunately, the disk space on this server is too low to allow two full backups of the database. I wanted to delete the old backup before doing the new one in rman but rman is too clever: You cannot delete the last remaining backup! I now have to find larger disks.

Powerdns

Powerdns is a very nice DNS server. It provides out of the box Geo sensitivity, enabling you to redirect your customer to different servers according to their origin. We use that we a quite complex zone setup.

Also it can be plugged onto a SQL backend (such as mysql, postgresql or sqlite). The whole stuff can then be managed by dedicated web tools. We use pdnsadmin (php based, requires mysql) and this is enough for simple uses.