Category Archives: Technology junk

I’m a SAN administrator. Stuff relating to system/network/storage administration goes here.

Weather Underground broken radar through Squid Proxy

Technology junk,

One of my clients said that the weather was coming in fine, but the nifty WUG extended forecast and radar widget was missing. This is what she had:

Typically with this customer it’s problems of misbehaved applications such as this one trying to access the public network using the system proxy settings but not bothering to authenticate to the proxy – a no no on my networks. I watched for “TCP_DENIED” on the squid logs and saw a couple things to add to the ACL that can get out without auth. The things I added were .wxug.com, .weatherunderground.com and .cloudflare.com (NFI what that last one is). This didn’t solve my problem.

Just for testing purposes I sent the client straight through to the Internet, which did solve the problem. Obviously there is something whacky with Squid.

Further digging into the logs revealed some network errors, 503 errors to be exact. The other weird part of these errors were IPv6 peer hosts, that ain’t gonna work I’m afraid.

Quick Google and I found that the simple solution is to tell Squid to prefer IPv4. I added the following line to the end of my squid.conf:

dns_v4_first on

then did a:

squid -k reconfigure

Now all the peer hosts are IPv4 and life is good again:

Find your lost window in Windows

Technology junk,

More than once I’ve added a monitor or changed a monitor configuration and lost my applications to the nebulous missing screen area that once was. Almost everybody knows the secret of right clicking your taskbar icon, clicking move, then tapping an arrow key to fasten your missing window to your cursor… it’s the bomb-diggity way.

What happens when you right-click though and the familiar Alt Menu with Minimize, Maximize and Move just doesn’t appear? Some Windows windows are apparently generated without the option to bring up that menu from the taskbar. There is still a way – do your normal left click on the taskbar item for the window you’re missing, then tap Alt+Space. Tada, the familiar Alt Menu just showed up somewhere in your viewable screen area, hopefully.

Now if you have Windows that are programmed without taskbar entries – good luck. I haven’t encountered it yet, when I do I’ll update.

No APN Specified on Device – KitKat non-stock ROM on Verizon SOLVED, and simple!

Technology junk, , ,

I fought this far too long. Generally I’m a guy who doesn’t like fiddling with root, aftermarket bootloaders and non-stock Android ROMs. At the same time I carry around 2 phones, an iPhone 5 and a Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx (Spyder or XT912 if you prefer). Because I’m spoiled by the iPhone for part of my life, waiting for simple things like search results or even the keyboard to slide up for even milliseconds can be infuriating. Android phones are like Windows computers, they seem polished and usable on day one, but as time goes on they somehow manage to get crufted up and slower than molasses. So once again I find myself dicking with my phone to make it useful in the way I want it.

The process is easier than ever on this phone, and SafeStrap allows you to do it all without ever compromising your stock Android. It’s nice to have that safety net. I got LiquidSmooth 3.0 (KitKat) going without a hitch. The phone was faster, smoother, better than ever in every way. Unfortunately I got the message in the title whenever trying to send or receive MMS :( It is a dealbreaker. After fiddling with apns-conf.xml, build.prop, loading 3rd party messaging apps, and spending countless hours flashing, reflashing etc. I found the only solution ended up backing out to JellyBean, I used Eclipse which was fine.

Determined yesterday I returned to my KitKat endeavors. There are some features in it I just don’t want to be without. I spent the same countless hours doing the same things. There are hundreds of people on the Internet with apparently the same problem, but no silver-bullet sort of solution pops up. For me that silver bullet was as simple as changing my “Preferred network type” setting from Global to CDMA+LTE/EVDO. That was it!!! I even tried it on a couple of different ROMs just to make sure.

Hopefully someone else finds this and saves themselves the same amount of time troubleshooting that I did. It would make sense for me to revisit the countless threads on different forums scattered across the net and put my findings there, unfortunately it’s just not going to happen. Hopefully this post finds it way to the top of the Google heap.

Uninstall AD LDS Instance on Server 2012

Technology junk, ,

The top Google result when searching for how to uninstall an Active Directory LDS (Formerly known as ADAM) instance doesn’t seem to apply to 2012 anymore. It was more straightforward in 2008 R2 and before as each instance just showed up as a Windows Feature.

Googling the problem didn’t yield the simple solution, but it truly is simple. Before you waste a bunch of time right-clicking random crap in Server Manager and going through the add/remove features seven ways from Sunday, hopefully you found my howto here. It’s as simple as this:

c:\windows\adam\adamuninstall.exe /i:instanceName

Click through a few dialogue and warning boxes and you’re done.