Unable to remote desktop in Windows Server 2003 SP2 x64

After googling for some time, i couldnt find any source that help to solve this mystery. Here goes:

Symptom

Remote desktop to Win2003 using Administrator suddenly failed with error message shown in the print screen beside. 

Diagnosis

Suspected the OS undergone SP upgrade from Auto Windows Update recently. Check group policy and remote desktop group all correct. Update the Terminal Service Client 6.0 based on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925876 but to no avail.

Resolution

Disable remote desktop in System Property. Then goto Add/Remove Program, Windows Component, found "Terminal Server" is installed. According to Windows help doc, remote desktop using Administrator dont actually requires this component. Thus, the trick is remove the component and enable back remote desktop. After which, remote desktop back to normal.

Declaration of LOVE :)

June 8, 2008 marked a significant milestone to my life. From this day onward, I proudly pronounce i am off the bachelorhood to be with my lovely wife, Si Jie. After an extensive love marathon for 7 years, we finally decided to tie up the knot moving forward to the next phase of our life. The tentative date of our ceremony would be next year end, December 2009. Reason being we want to take our own sweet time to prepare and execute the plan in order.


Exchanging wedding ring, this is for life.


That's it, I'm legally off the market.


Blessing from both family member


Just married couple

To my wife, Si Jie:

Dear, I may not be the romantic person as most woman wanted, in other word I can be boring sometimes :D, what I can assure you is my wholehearted LOVE to you and only you, apart from my family. As a work force in IT project with tight deadline :p , I am sure you understand the job requires me dealing with computer more often than facing you :D. Frankly, I have no much choices as this is my passion of work and also part of my job responsibility. My promise is I will try my best to juggle my time between life and work, at least few private hour with you during weekday and the whole weekend. With your love and understanding, I am confident I will able to strive a greater height in my career and provide you the best and comfortable life that I can.

Least and not less, I would like to reiterate,

Dear,

I LOVE YOU very much + forever. It is my great honor and blessing to have you as my lifelong partner. Really appreciate everything that you have done for me.

Your faithfully,
Andy Wong Lee Sin

Toyota service center

Car maintenance tend to be a painful experience once after few months. This especially true when your car is bearing popular badge, eg Toyota, Honda and Proton. Getting your car service ASAP is literally MISSION IMPOSSIBLE.

In 3 months time after getting my new car, I have hit the mark twice and service is inevitable. Although labour is FOC for the first 2 service, contrary to Honda free 2 years service, i still have strong belief in Toyota Quality. Touch wood..

My first service took place in Toyota service center in Melaka. It is a 2S store (Service and Part). Well, the environment is superb with good reception upon arrival, free flow of drink, sandwich and a lot reading material. In order to expedite the service, I had taken 1 day off and did the booking earlier. My experience, not too bad after waiting there for 4 hours because i requested additional wheel alignment task to be done. Overall, i am satisfied with the service.


My second service don't actually worked out that well. The service center located in Balakong and it is a 3S store with show room. I think because of cramming everything in one roof, something has to be compromised, in this case, the small waiting lounge and below par service. When i reached there sharp at my appointment time. Damn it, nobody actually came out to welcome nor giving any instruction on where to park. I had to stop my car in the middle and went to the reception for query. What surprise me was you need to get number before you can talk to the service adviser. No good... I pissed off with the adviser because he just doesn't seem to be helpful. Apparently my car involved in an minor accident recently and need a small fix at the back bumper. What happened is he requested me to send in my car again another day because the fix will takes about 5 hours. Maybe my face look innocent but i am not stupid, this guy just trying to avoid trouble. The fix should at most takes 2 hours. As a result, I complained to his immediate superior and everything suddenly move on very fast. Instead of having to wait 7 hours or come another day, the whole service took only 4 hours.

Moral from the story, if you not satisfy, speak it out and loud :D

Maxis broadband "disconnected"

While browsing web in my office as a Maxis broadband service subscriber (fyi, Sri Hartamas is a Maxis territory), once in a while we may get "The page cannot be displayed." error. From there on, all WWW is no longer accessible and the common solution for this is to restart and router. But what happened if u need to restart every 30 mins or less? That is simply too much a effort.

A quick ping testing indeed explains everything. As for my analysis, i took www.yahoo.com as example. This is done before get "disconnected".
ping www.yahoo.com
Pinging www.yahoo-ht3.akadns.net [87.248.113.14] with 32 bytes of data:

From the pinging output, we can derives that domain name is actually translated to the following IP via DNS server.
www.yahoo.com=87.248.113.14

In order to determine the DNS server is the real culprit, i did a separate ping on the domain name and the translated IP when the error page returned.
ping www.yahoo.com - Negative result
ping 87.248.113.14 - Positive result

As a result, it clearly shows the internet connection is up but the DNS server failed to translate the domain name to the corresponding IP. In other words, you can still access to yahoo web site if you hit the site IP directly. Eg, http://87.248.113.14

According to Maxis, all the broadband user DNS settings should be set as automatically. The problem is sometimes the DNS settings might lost in the space and hence "disconnecting" the user. In fact, this also affects Streamyx subscriber frequently. Thank to Google, i managed to find a Maxis DNS IP that revitalize my browser. Apparently this DNS settings is meant for the GPRS service, but as long as it works:D

These are the one and only Maxis DNS server found in the net:
Primary DNS: 202.75.129.101
Alternate DNS: 202.75.129.102

Alternatively, should you run out of idea what DNS IP to use, you can always opt for the public DNS server. Check it out at http://www.opendns.com/

Hope this could help some of the desperate Maxis broadband subcriber out there;)

Forbidden. You don't have permission to access /.. on this server.

Finding the root cause of this issue took me 1 day. Without talking much nonsense, let us have a look on the problem and resolution.

Problem:
We have a new web application deployed into Websphere application server (WAS). Similar to the standard production environment, we have a IBM HTTP web server that routes all the request to application server. Problem arises when we try to access the application via web server and get the error page as mentioned. However, the application is accessible if we hit the app server IP directly.

Diagnosis:
Normally for any issue related to web server, there are only 2 config files that need to be looked into: httpd.conf and plugin-cfg.xml. From the httpd.conf, we can find the path of plugin-cfg.xml the web server referred. As for my case, this is the one i get
WebSpherePluginConfig /usr/IBM/HTTPServer/Plugins1/config/webserver1/plugin-cfg.xml.
Therefore we need to make sure we are modifying the correct plugin-cfg.xml in order for the changes to get reflected. A thorough check on the plugin-cfg.xml revealed the new application context path is missing. There is a portion in the file where we need to configure all application context path. For example, i have a web application with context "ABC", this would need to be included as below
UriGroup Name="default_host_server1_AppSvrNode01_Cluster_URIs"
Uri AffinityCookie="JSESSIONID" AffinityURLIdentifier="jsessionid" Name="/ABC/*"/

Resolution:
If your application is deployed into WAS, you can conveniently retrieve the plugin-cfg.xml from the WAS admin console, web server portion. Right after u click on the web server link, there will be a link forward you to the plugin configuration. Another click on the view button will show you the file content that supposed to be referred in web server. A simple step to replace the web server plugin-cfg.xml with the one from application server will solve the "Forbidden" issue. You can also add this new line directly to the web server plugin-cfg.xml without referring to the WAS admin console provided you know the application context path.
Uri AffinityCookie="JSESSIONID" AffinityURLIdentifier="jsessionid" Name="/ABC/*"/

In the end, the whole issue is because of the missing 1 liner in the config file. Well, i think the time spent on troubleshooting is well worth it. At least i have learned more on the web and app server configuration. Special thank to my sifu, Jenny :).

CVS: creating repository from existing config

Quick guide to create new CVS repository in the existing server setup.

--create new directory in CVS server, the path should be your new repository dir location
mkdir /var/cvsroot

--we need to grant access to all user who have access to the server, R implies recursive into all subdir
chown -R cvsuser:cvsgroup /var/cvsroot
--the cvsgroup could differ in the server setup

--without this, user couldn't check in code cos of short of privilege, change to dir mode to read&write
chmod g+rwxs /var/cvsroot

--initialise the cvs repository, which will populate all cvs related config into the directory
cvs -d /var/cvsroot init

Finally, My Dream Phone

As a budget conscious guy like me, i seldom invest on gadget. However, having a smart phone has always been my top priority to replace my feature-less Nokia 3610.

With the price well below 1K and comes with wifi support, running on the latest Windows Mobile 5.0 OS, this particular phone is simply irressistable.

The objectives of getting this phone is to be as my laptop best companion. Opening my laptop while on the move is really a hassle. A smartphone features would surely meet most of my needs. Here is the list of the useful software that i have used.

1. Clearvue suite - Open MS office doc, powerpoint, excel and pdf file. This suite helps me keep up to the work-related or vice versa document all the time. The downside is you will need to zoom in everytime and scrolling across the screen is abit slow.
2. Repligo - Convert whatever PC document into a readable format in smartphone screen. One of the most sought after software because i have a lot ebook but have no time to open my laptop to read it.
3. Agile Messenger - Similiar to PC version of Trillian, I able connect to all messenger services such as MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk and etc. The only thing required is the internet connection either through Wifi, GPRS/Edge (Expensive) or USB cabel which acts as LAN cable.
4. Lextionary - Have to admit my english proficiency is not yet top graded, sometimes still need to flip the dictionary for some mistery vocabulary. This smartphone dictionary helps me to find the word faster. At least now i don't need to flip the bulky Oxford Dictionary or search Answer.com for this purpose.
5. Windows Media Player (built-in) - Play music or movie: mp3, wma, wmv, 3gp & avi that spice up my life while waiting for those unreliable public transport.
6. POP mail (built-in) - Allow me to read my gmail, hotmail and my outlook email anytime i want. The only shortcoming is my primary webmail - yahoo required subcription in order to have th POP function.

Looking back on how this smartphone changes my life in term of working or leisure, this was really a good buy. Value for the money i spent and features packed. There are a lot more useful software in the market that i haven't try it out. Maybe i can describe further in my next post.