Michele’s blog

13December2009

Krampus in Sterzing

Posted by Michele Baldessari under: en; life.

13December2009

Eclipse on Debian Sid

Posted by Michele Baldessari under: en; tech.

If you get the following error on debian sid (Dec 2009):

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 4 0 2009-12-13 16:37:36.790
!MESSAGE Application error
!STACK 1
org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: XPCOM error -2147467262
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.error(Mozilla.java:1638)
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.setText(Mozilla.java:1861)
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Browser.setText(Browser.java:737)

Just add the following to your eclipse.ini:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.1/xulrunner

25November2009

Checkpoint HA Nagios monitoring

Posted by Michele Baldessari under: en; tech.

For a number of reasons I need to be able to know which firewall is the active on in a Checkpoint cluster. I’d like to be notified when the active node switches to the secondary box. I did not finding anything like that around the net so I took one of the check_snmp_* scripts by Patrick Proy and adapted it. Now, I do own the Camel book, yet I’ve never been able to grow fond of the Perl language. You’ll have to excuse my suckage in this script

Here it is: http://michele.pupazzo.org/files/check_snmp_cpfw_ha.pl

5November2009

Pygmy

Posted by Michele Baldessari under: de.

Finished Chuck Pahlaniuk’s last book. Quite difficult read given Pygmy’s engrish but nonetheless I liked it a lot

4November2009

Convert .ppt to .scr

Posted by Michele Baldessari under: en; tech.

I’ll note it here, may be it will be helpful for anyone receiving a similar request.

Had a rather weird request to convert a powerpoint presentation into a .scr screensaver executable. I tried with the many tools available on the net for that (mostly shareware, but paying was not an issue in this case), but had little success. Either they crashed, or they opened powerpoint without doing anything or didn’t even start.

Changing approach proved to be helpful (although you lose the transitions and the animations):

1. Export the powerpoint presentation to multiple images
2. Convert the images to a flash animation using (http://www.flash-slideshow-maker.com/)
3. Convert the flash file to a .scr using Instantstorm (http://www.instantstorm.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=529)
4. Rejoice

Update

In the end I chose another way of doing it: convert the pps to pdf (either with Microsoft PDF addon or via PDFCreater and then use the swftools and pdf2swf)

30August2009

Schlern

Posted by Michele Baldessari under: Uncategorized.

Schlern

16August2009

VbScript

Posted by Michele Baldessari under: en; tech.

This year due to a rather big Active Directory consolidation project, which will migrate different companies of the group to the same AD forest, I’ve been “reluctantly forced” to pick up more vbscript than I ever wanted to. The language clearly sucks beyond words, but life is hard and it’s the only thing you get on all flavours of Windows. Here’s a template that I will hopefully use in the future so at least all scripts will have the same skeleton

16August2009

Thinstation as Citrix thin clients

Posted by Michele Baldessari under: en; tech.

At work, we have a few very old pc’s that I set up with a custom Thinstation Linux distribution. Since getting the configuration file to connect to Citrix needed quite some trial and error work, I’ll post it here so I won’t forget. Note that the thin clients connect to a Farm called “VIPCORPFARM” and that they connect to a shared application called “Desktop”:

ICA_USE_SERVER_KEYBOARD=Off
ICA_BROWSER_PROTOCOL=HTTPonTCP
ICA_APPLICATION_SET="VIPCORPFARM"
#ICA_SERVER=
#ICA_OPTIONS="-domain CORP"
#ICA_ENCRYPTION=Basic
#ICA_COMPRESS=On
#ICA_AUDIO=On
#ICA_SMARTCARD=Off
#ICA_AUDIO_QUALITY=Low
#ICA_PRINTER=Off
#ICA_SEAMLESS_WINDOW=Off
# Default Session
SESSION_0_TYPE=ica
SESSION_0_ICA_SERVER=Desktop
SESSION_0_ICA_APPSRV_LOCTCPBROWSERADDRESS=10.10.10.1
SESSION_0_ICA_APPSRV_LOCHTTPBROWSERADDRESS=10.10.10.1
SESSION_0_ICA_APPSRV_LOCTCPBROWSERADDRESS2=10.10.10.2
SESSION_0_ICA_APPSRV_LOCHTTPBROWSERADDRESS2=10.10.10.2
SESSION_0_ICA_APPSRV_LOCTCPBROWSERADDRESS3=10.10.10.3
SESSION_0_ICA_APPSRV_LOCHTTPBROWSERADDRESS3=10.10.10.3


13July2009

Wyse Firmware Policy

Posted by Michele Baldessari under: en; tech.

is simply fucking retarded. You need a maintenance contract to get updated firmware! Picture this:

• You have around 200 Wyse thin clients
• You are being bitten by a bug which is triggered by a Citrix update, but affects only one series of Wyse thin clients
• You are asked about 4k EUR to get updated firmware for your clients

Now: I’m fine with paying maintenance contracts to be able to open cases and to have some help with troubleshooting. But refusing to give out firmwares is plain stupid. Especially since they give out firmware for the out of production ones. I know which brand of thin clients I will never buy again.

12July2009

New gpg key

Posted by Michele Baldessari under: en; tech.

Switched to a new gpg key;

michele@conrad:~$ gpg --fingerprint 75155C6D
pub   4096R/75155C6D 2009-07-12
Fingerprint = C2A5 9DA3 9961 4FFB E01B  D0BC DDD4 DCCB 7515 5C6D
uid                  Michele Baldessari <michele@pupazzo.org>
uid                  Michele Baldessari <michele@baldessari.info>
sub   4096R/46E72B67 2009-07-12

The new key has been uploaded to the key servers and it is signed with my old key : E4B4 4826 0E0C BF0D 3935 ED35 A1F6 EE94 240B 4C3D