Snow Leopard

After a good three years of use, I finally upgraded my MacBook from Mac OS X Tiger to Mac OS X Snow Leopard. So far the system is quite stellar. It behaves just as responsively and all the functionality seems to be there. I'm still playing around with all the new features, but it seems to be quite a quick and simple OS to use.

One of the beautiful things about the OS is that upon first boot, it automatically detected that I had one incompatible application, Parallels Desktop, installed on the machine. When I first got the Mac, I was using Boot Camp with Parallels to access my Boot Camp partition while in Mac OS. However, since that time, I've hardly ever used Parallels (it seemed to have issues trying to run Mac OS, Parallels, and Windows simultaneously), I decided to get rid of it. I also had not used Windows in ages, since the partition was too small to be of much use (only 10gb), I removed that as well (very quick and easy to resize the partition in Mac OS X Snow Leopard without reformatting the drive).

The only blip I had was that after I deleted my former Boot Camp partition, the system acted a little strange. I tried to empty the trash, and I would get a strange Mac OS X generic error. I would try to move a file, and I'd get the same error. No matter what I did, it seems that if I was updating the file system, the system would have a fit and wouldn't let the operation complete. I was really worried at this point, I thought I had corrupted the file system or something, so I ran Disk Utility, both Verify Disk and Verify Permissions. The system came out clean. Upon Restart, the system was running smoothly and I had normal access once again. Perhaps I missed reading a prompt instructing me to reboot once the removal of the Windows partition was complete? Or perhaps it was just a fluke.

Outisde of that, I've been taking a look at the new 27" iMac with the Magic Mouse. It looks like quite the beautiful machine, but it's price tag is a little high for me and and I'm still not much of a fan of the all-in-one design. I'd much rather have a Mac Pro, but those are even more costly! Ahh well, such is life. I plan on making a trip to the Troy Apple store to check out the new iMacs and the Magic Mouse specifically, as well as taking a peak at the new MacBooks. However, from what I'm getting from my fellow Mac Fanatic, Mark, the Apple Store at Somerset is closed for remodeling! ~sigh, very disappointing. It should be open again in a few days, I'll have to make a special trip sometime after work next week.

Updated Remedy Servers

This post is related to For Review.

In my previous post, I detailed how our Remedy ARS Server 7.0.01 patch 003 with MidTier (MT) 7.0.01 patch 010 was generating ARWARN 66 upon logon to the system. Well, our team team implemented ARS Server 7.0.01 patch 011. This rectified the issue, however, it generated a few issues with the default intrinsic permissions in our Remedy forms. In the end, we did have some forms that loaded without any data. Fortunately it was none of our major forms.

A few things to keep in mind when updating is dealing with the multilicense file, which we had some issues with, causing our server to go into Demo mode for about 20 minutes (during our down time window). And planning to go into Admin Only mode for the server... We didn't do this last one, usually our upgrades are pretty smooth, so we let the help desk continue to use Remedy and switch over to our Hot-Standby server. However, this time, when our main server came back online after the upgrade, our system took the services off of the Hot-Standby and placed them onto the main server, which was in Demo mode. ~sigh.

We switched it back over quite quickly, but we were really worried there for a minute.

For Review...

It has been a while since I last really got in-depth with a post. For the past eighteen months, I have been working with one of the (few) growing mid-size (now large) IT companies in the Detroit Metro area. I now work with a ticket tracking system utilizing BMC Action Request System (Remedy) version 7.0.01 (and an older server running Remedy 5). It's a much different work environment than I'm used to, seeing as now I'm doing a lost of administration and some development for this system which supports supports coming up on 2000 support users and also has a directory of a 100,000 people and tracking for nearly 2 million incidents.

Since we deal with complicated contracts and HIPPA regulated information, I am very cautious about what information I provide, but there are a few things that we are working with presently that we just have not been able to solve.

On to the issues...
The Details
Our ARS (7.0.01 patch 003) also runs Mid-Tier 7.0.01 (patch 010). Recently, we began tracking of users logging into our system upon loading of the default form (one of two customized forms that is set as default by the system administrators) and we have set a Temp field which contains a list of the groups (by ID number - eg: "101, 210, 6027" and not "Help Desk, Software Support, and AS400 Development" - this runs a search of our "notification records" form, not of the default BMC Remedy User form's "Groups." This is set so we can list just the support groups, and none of the permissions. We also now don't run into accidental over-flow of information, for example users who are a member of the "Help Desk Triage" group cannot see tickets for the "Help Desk" group in the "Tickets assigned to your other groups" table on our primary default form (the original cause of this problem was the command $GROUPS$ LIKE "something%", which is enough of a wild-card to cause these issues, but not something that we can really process in a way that is significantly different.

Not long after these two new concepts were deployed, we began getting the following message from using logging into the Mid Tier: "ARWARN 66 - The query matched more than the maximum number of entries specified for retrieval." and in most situations, the error message will display twice.

The Conditions
The only time this message occurs is when a user has logged into the Mid Tier (web-version of Remedy) and is a non-Administrator user. The message only occurs on one of the default forms (as far as we have been able to detect). It affects users system-wide, regardless of if they are logging in via the web locally or remotely, it even occurs in Firefox, IE, and doesn't seem to be cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) sensitive. The warning message does not occur on the Windows User Tool (WUT) which most users have installed 7.0.01 patch 10, nor does it occur in our Citrix implementation of Remedy (which are also based off of patch 10).

One of our active links has required us to use the special run-if qualification: $CLIENT-TYPE$ != 9 (or whatever it is for the Mid-Tier) allowing us to write a second active link for $CLIENT-TYPE$ = 9. The workflow is associated with the support group listing detailed above.

The default form that loads has several tabs, most of which contains between 1 and 4 tables worth of data that runs some type of query. When right clicking on the table and selecting "Refresh" the error does not occur. Only when loading the form itself. NOTE: There are several hidden tables which are inaccessible to regular users (including my test ID) which I cannot refresh with our current implementation.

Troubleshooting
Note: Only our PRODUCTION system currently connects to the Mid Tier. All testing has been preformed on our production system, with the specialized workflow limited down to execute only for our test user.

We have tried setting and clearing the limits in the form AR System User Preferences. No change

We have attempted to modify the active links and filters that are associated with the two bits of code above which would "deflect" my test user logon from executing any of the recently implemented code that seems to generate the error.

We have tested the limitations of the server by running high-result searches, which up to 10,000 entries have returned successfully (albeit a little slowly).

And for those ARS Admins concerned about the MT's Cache, we are flushing it after implementing new test code and before logging into the MT again.

We have checked arerror.log and found nothing major in there.

We have ran Active Link and Filter logging from both the WUT and the MT. We have also ran Filter logging on the server. Nothing shows "ARWARN 66" but the last bit of code that executes in all three situations before the ARWARN displays is the code for tracking users logging into the system.

FWIW: We are running in a Windows Server 2003 environment with MS SQL 2005. Some of our code was pushed out from ARS Admin Tool 7.0.01 patch 10 into our patch 3 server. We have resaved the primary default form from a downgraded (patch 3) version of the Admin tool. We have not changed the code on any of the tables.

Situation Analysis
After working with one of our vendors, we are working toward upgrading the server itself from 7.0.01 patch 003 to patch 010 due to a BMC ARS Software bug that causes ARWARN 66 when a filter has executed with an "Create New Request" or "Modify first result" action in it. Unfortunately, due to scheduling conflicts, we keep having to push this off.

However, we have somewhere around two-thousand filters in our system, none of which have caused this issue in the past. Many of which execute only on other forms, but upon loading of those other forms, even now, we still do not get this warning.

I am curious to find out if anyone else has had the ARWARN 66 mysteriously pop-up on their ARS Servers and what you have done to fix it or what troubleshooting steps you took to pin-down the issue.

iPod Insanity

See Update Below

I am really in a strange situation here... I've got my good ol' iPod Nano (gen 1 baby!), where I keep a lot of my tech Podcasts in a Playlist so that I can easily manage just one show at a time.

Today however, I realized that in the Windows Weekly podcast playlist shows that episode 75 is still the first on the list, but I'm up-to-date with the podcast and should have just the most recently episodes (episodes 100+) on there. So I did some checking, and it looks like the iPod has Episode 75 listed in the playlist, but nowhere else on the iPod.

I don't want to just delete it from the playlist, I want to remove it completely from the iPod. The file has long since been removed from my Mac. So the question is, where is the data file at on the iPod?

My first thought, "Oh, it must have been classified incorrectly, and is hanging out in the Music folder." WRONG. I searched there, to no avail. I even checked the Audiobook area just incase, but I also had no luck with that.

Then I thought, "Well, it's gotta be on the iPod somewhere, so if I do a 'Get Info' command on the file, I should have some rudimentary information about where the file is located at on the iPod." WRONG. Get Info did not list a single thing about the actual location of the audio file. Just gave me an indication that the file was playable on the iPod and had several variables that I could set.

That's when I realize that I might be able to push the episode from being a "Podcast" to being "Music" or something. I tried that out as well from the Get Info prompt, but had no luck. I can change the Genera, but the media type is greyed out.

I tried moving the song from the playlist to the iPod in general, but also had no luck. I tried moving it to my Music on iTunes and to the Mac desktop, but I had no luck in this at all. The only thing I can do (or so it seems) is move it between playlists on the iPod or delete the entry from the playlist (and I would rather not have the space wasted on an entire episode like that).

Googling so far has not returned any useful results. I'm not even sure what to be looking for, just trying to come up with some solution.

I'm going to keep looking, but I've got a looming fear that I may have a decision to make, either format the iPod to remove the episode, or just delete the file from the playlist and not worry about the extra space that it is taking up.

***Update
Not wanting to give up so easily, I fired up the one sure way to view the contents of the *true* file system, and not these virtual folders with hidden objects that Finder gives you, I'd use Terminal!

I enabled my root user (for just a bit, I promise) and did

AkiraBook:~indigo$ su
Password:
AkiraBook:/Users/indigo root# cd /Volumes/Saji-chan/iPod_Control/Music/F03
AkiraBook:/Volumes/Saji-chan/iPod_Control/Music/F03

From here, I did an ls -sk to show me the files and size in Kb. I looked though F00 to F05, but there was only one file that was close, WDXV.mp3 that was 35700-some Kb, which is really close to the 35.1 Mb that I was looking for. Not wanting to be unsure, I copied the file to the desktop and opened it. Sure enough, it opened in iTunes and said that it was "Windows Weekly 75."

I did a quick rm -v command, and it got rid of the file. The iPod now has an additional 35 MB of free space, and I promptly removed episode 75 from the Windows Weekly playlist. SUCCESS!

Good Things Come in Small Packages

But serious innovation comes in the smallest designs.

I just got the announcement today that Apple has released a new iPod. My first response: *Yawn* I didn't even look at the email. Apple keeps releasing new iPods. The newest Nano was pretty decent, but nothing major changed. Just got rid of the fat shape and replaced it with a sleek and skinny version. The iPod Classic hasn't changed in ages and there's never any big innovation on the Shuffle, since it is a pretty bland device... No screen? What can be done on a device without a screen?

Apparently, a whole lot. This new iPod (shown above, with its immediate predecessor) looks awesome. Smaller than ever before, and even though the old shuffle wasn't really thought of as bulky or fat, it wasn't really thought of as stylish. The new guy is the definition of sleek and stylish. It's got an awesome 10 hour batter (according to Apple) and uses "VoiceOver" a new technology from Apple that will read out song/album titles and with this feature, the new Shuffle now supports playlists... The first Shuffle to support playlists!

I plan to be visiting the Apple store within a week to check this guy out. My own Nano (first generation) is really showing its age, but I've loved the Nano style so much, I was really leaning toward a new Color Chrome Nano, but perhaps a Shuffle is in my future instead.

Visit: iPod Shuffle

so long, old friend

Last night, I came to the conclusion that my old iPod with Video (5G) had finally died out, it was my first iPod, my first HDD-based MP3 player, and the first to be over 1GB in capacity (my iPod was 30 GB).

The symptoms of impending failure were very minor. For about two years now, I've occasionally got the "You need to restore this iPod" message at start up or as I connected the device to iTunes, but the messages were really rare, and when they did occur, disconnecting the iPod and doing a reset (hold down "Select" and "Menu" for 6+ seconds) cleared up the issue. Occasionally, the iTunes database would be corrupted, and I would have to restore the iPod. Very annoying, but not the worst thing that could happen.

That is, until yesterday, when I synched up some video podcasts. I was getting behind on them and decided that using the iPod 5G would be the best option to get caught up -- the battery on my nano is starting to go anyway, requiring it to be on the charger more and more these days than. However, upon trying to play the video podcasts on the iPod 5G, the video would start although it would eventually have some type of processing problem and skip to the next episode or continue playing the sound while not updating the video. Sometimes, it would just give up and out-right freeze, requiring a reset of the device to get it up and running again. At first, I thought this was just symptoms of a poorly encoded video file stressing the iPod's CPU and causing it to crash and require a reset.

Unfortunately these frequent resets only seemed to make things worse over the evening. After two or three of those force-resets, the device powered back on and said that it was corrupted and needed to be connected to iTunes to be restored.

The restore went fine, but when I attempted to synch for the first time (a manual synch of a few dozen audio podcasts), the iPod crashed again and needed to be reset, and once again, restored.

But, this time, the restore function didn't work out so well. It seemed to freeze up as the iPod System Software was being installed, and even though the device wasn't disconnected from the Macintosh, the Mac said that it had been improperly removed. Retrying the restore didn't work either, the device was getting worse, freezing right after being connected via USB and by this time, it was crashing iTunes as well.

It seemed I was out of luck. None of the diagnostics said that there was anything wrong with the iPod, yet it seems to be having more and more difficulty starting up. It even seems to have trouble getting past the Apple logo and into diag mode now, which deepened my concern that the iPod was in serious hardware failure.

I'm pretty sure that it is hard drive failure that is getting to the device, but the Apple system diagnostics (upon reset, press and hold "Select" and "Previous" as the iPod is starting up), I found nothing wrong listed in the system diagnostics for the HDD... But, the diagnostics only list the SMART data for the drive, it doesn't actually do any sector by sector analysis.

I did do some research on running SprinRite on the iPod, but it looks like if I am to do that, I'll need to order special drive converters, disassemble the iPod and then attach the iPod's HDD to my computer (via IDE) and run SpinRite that way. I was hoping for an easier fix, such as being able to run SpinRite via USB, but it seems "via usb" isn't an option.

My only other recourse available last night was to run Disk Utility on the device, which returned no problems. The only remaining thing I can think of to try would be some of the Mac drive diagnostic utilities, which may have something in there that can work on a USB drive - I haven't gone though this option as of yet.

For the interim, I am more than able to just get by with my iPod nano (1G). I'll be looking forward to getting the latest iPod nano once the battery in this one starts to go so I can start watching videos on my iPod again, yet at the same time, I really will miss my nano 1G. Perhaps a trip to the Apple store is warranted after work sometime this week.

Error 643

I have the unfortunate luck of running into this issue after being told 30 minutes before the end of my day that this particular laptop needed to have a Norton Ghost image loaded onto it and then deployed.

My co-worker indicated that she was unable to figure out the problem.

It took me about five minutes on google... Mostly because the fist few posts went on and on about adjusting the pagefile size. That is until I ran into a fellow blogger's post, cloning a hard disk with Ghost 10 and a USB external disk from Mark Lund. He had several notes at the end of his post, including details about Error 643, where he indicated to get around the error he deleted the partitions on his hard drive and the loaded a new image onto the drive.

This is exactly what I did. Simply, I used the HP Drive Sanitizer that our new laptops come with (in BIOS). I quickly got rid of the partitions and then got Ghost up and running.

[Side Note]
I did have a much more detailed description of this issue written up on my corporate laptop... Which promptly crashed yesterday evening, losing my post. :(

Adobe is annoying.

For the past few days, I've been working on an Adobe problem at work. We had to reinstall Windows on an end-user's computer, so we pulled her licensing logs and reinstalled all her software.

Except for Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional. Her licensing code wouldn't work. After spending three hours on the phone with Adobe support, I finally got to someone who would "Re-serialize" the software... Under the contingency that I provide proof of purchase. After spending an hour pulling detailed records of her software install requests and then working with our Purchasing department to find all of our requests for Adobe software from just one of our software providers, I finally pinned down her PO, which allowed me to request the proof of purchase from our software vendor.

I cannot articulate how frustrating this has been. I'm in the process of waiting for our end user to become available for another round with Adobe support - hopefully this hasn't been a total waste of time and money.