I used to get pretty much 2 days use out of a full charge – I dont use the phone loads, just normal texting, a few phone calls and a bit of facebook / twittering, but after the 3.1.3 firmware upgrade, I immediately found I was getting only a days worth of battery life

Wasn’t happy especially as apple stopped me from downgrading to 3.1.2 which was nice and lovely.

So to help me get the best of what I had I made 2 changes which made a big difference and have resulted in me getting my 2 days usage back, and maybe even a bit more.

1: Disable location services – Go into settings > general, and change location services to off.

This does mean you no longer have your GPS active, but if you like me only use this infrequently, i’d rather switch it on in the odd occasion I do use it, than have it sucking my battery away.

2: Disable wi-fi scanning – Go into settings > wi-fi and change Ask to Join Networks to off. This means that rather than constantly scanning for available wi-fi networks, it will only use the ones you have pre-configured. Should you want to connect to a new network, you can either switch this back on or go back into settings > wi-fi and pick it from the list or add it manually. Again this saves loads of battery time as the wi-fi is not scanning.

These 2 simple tips made a big difference to mine and a few friends iPhone life, hope it helps you too.

After much debugging on the network side, thinking that perhaps there was a misconfigured NIC with the wrong VLAN config, the problem was still happening.

So ssh’ing onto the host, I started to trawl through the log files, and came across the below in the /var/log/vmkwarning file:

Feb 17 13:44:19 vminfraboxvmkernel: 18:00:00:11.865 cpu4:4222)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceAttemptFailover: Retry world failover device “naa.6090a028004f243d08ab44c26687e3dd” – issuing command 0×410002074040
Feb 17 13:44:19 vminfrabox vmkernel: 18:00:00:11.865 cpu4:4222)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceAttemptFailover: Retry world failover device “naa.6090a028004f243d08ab44c26687e3dd” – failed to issue command due to Not found (APD), try again…
Feb 17 13:44:19 vminfrabox vmkernel: 18:00:00:11.865 cpu4:4222)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceAttemptFailover: Logical device “naa.6090a028004f243d08ab44c26687e3dd”: awaiting fast path state update…

This was occuring repeatedly every half hour and the entries above filled the logs solidly for about 2 minutes continuously every half an hour.

After doing some digging on the google, I found out that ESX4 has a bug whereby if you have a duff or old connection to an iSCSI LUN – perhaps one that no longer exists – but you never rescanned to remove it – when the host tries to check the paths every 30 minutes, it finds this duff connection and goes through the motions of trying to find failover paths. The bug is that this causes very brief network loss to your guests.

The fix for me was to simply re-scan my adapter, which removed the old mapping to one of our removed LUNS’s and the problem went away.

To extract files from a .msi file at the command line, type:

msiexec /a PathToMSIFile /qb TARGETDIR=DirectoryToExtractTo

For example, to extract files from c:\installer.msi into c:\install you would type:

msiexec /a c:\installer.msi /qb TARGETDIR=c:\install

The destination directory does not need to exist prior to running this command.

If this doesnt work, a crude way is to rename the msi file to a rar file, winrar will then allow you to extract all the files – however… it doesnt name them properly, so I used a combination of LesMsierables a .net file which allows you to view msi files and compared the size to find the specific file I wanted..

ATA (ata) Handshake sounds if modem speaker is enabled. Modem tries to answer call with handshake sounds. Press Enter to stop this process. The no carrier message is normal with this command. This command does not apply to Windows XP.

ATDT <ISP Phone Number>

For example, ATDT1234567 (where 1234567 is the connection number to dial for Internet service).

To connect to a test server in the US you can type:

ATDT18666633665 Login: _ Connects to a test server. If you can get to a login, your modem is working correctly.

ATDT (atdt) Dialtone if modem speaker is enabled. Indicates that the modem can get a dial tone. The message “no dial tone” indicates that either the modem or phone line is not working correctly. Press Enter to stop this process.

AT&F OK Resets most modems to factory defaults.

ATI0 (ati) 56000 ok The response varies between modems, but returns the modem speed..

ATI3 (ati) <Version and name> Returns the modem product type and firmware version.

ATZ (atz) ok This command resets the modem.

ATH (ath) ok Hangs up modem

ATS0=2 (ats0=2)

Zero, not the letter O . ok This command sets the modem to receive. Call the computer’s phone number and you should hear the handshake signal. Ring, ring displays on HyperTerminal screen, followed by no carrier , when the caller hangs up.

its usage is as follows to live debug traffic according to your filter:

# fw monitor -e “accept src=10.0.0.x;”

This will output in realtime the traffic going into your firewall from ip address 10.0.0.x

You will see output similar to the below:

Lan1:i[84]: 10.0.0.1 ->192.168.0.1 (ICMP) len=84 id=0 <———– This shows traffic coming into interface Lan1 but before rules have been processed thats the lowercase i.

ICMP: type=8 code=0 echo request id=64597 seq=5025

Lan1:I[84]: 10.0.0.1 -> 192.168.0.1 (ICMP) len=84 id=0 <——— This shows traffic still on interface Lan1 but after rules have been processed hence the uppercase I, if firewalls were dropping this packet you would not see this.

ICMP: type=8 code=0 echo request id=64597 seq=5025

Lan5:o[84]: 10.0.0.1 -> 192.168.0.1 (ICMP) len=84 id=0 <———-Now we see traffic going out of the destination interface Lan5 but again before the rules have been processed – lowercase o.

ICMP: type=8 code=0 echo request id=64597 seq=5025

Lan5:O[84]: 10.0.0.1 ->192.168.0.1 (ICMP) len=84 id=0 <———-Finally we see traffic going out of the destination interface Lan 5 after successfully traversing the rules – uppercase O

There is a load of filters you can apply, the example above uses src, but you can also use keywords such as dst, sport, dport etc..

Check this doc for a full list of what you can and can’t do..

http://www.checkpoint.com/techsupport/downloads/html/ethereal/fw_monitor_rev1_01.pdf

# cphaprob stat

This command shows you the current status of your ha configuration – ideally you will see OK’s rather than problem, it will also tell you the which node is the primary.

# cphaprob -ia list

This give you a bit more detail on any problems and which if any daemons have failed. So for example, if your fwd daemon has failed you would see a state of problem.

# cphaprob -a if

This shows you the interfaces, whether they are up, and whether they are running multicast or broadcast – this should be the same on the secondary node.

#fw stat

Shows you the host and the currently installed policy along with a list of your interfaces in use.

# netstat -i

Regular linux command, but useful as it shows you the state of your interfaces, and whether there is a possible network problem.

To change this, do the following..

Edit your pure-ftpd config file – usually in /etc/pure-ftpd.conf

change the line

LimitRecursion 2000 8

to

LimitRecursion xxxx 8

Where xxxx is the number of files you want to limit it to…

Restart the pure-ftpd service and you should be done!

Here are the steps to do this (at your own risk! this means anyone with access to the registry will have your username and password)

1: Open regedit

2: Navigate to the below registry key

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

3: Create value DefaultUserName as a REG_SZ and enter the username you want to auto logon.

4: Create value DefaultPassword as a REG_SZ and enter the password for the user above.

5: Create value AutoAdminLogon as a REG_SZ and set it to 1

6: If applicable create DefaultDomainName as a REG_SZ and set it to the required domain.

Close regedit, reboot and it should now automagically log you on with the above details.

Did I mention this is horrible?

So follow the below steps to ensure your guests power on automatically on host startup.

Open vSphere Client

In the left hand pane, highlight your choosen host, then click the configuration tab in the main pane.

Click Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown under the software Section.

Click Properties in the top right hand corner of the main pane.

Then check Allow virtual machines to start and stop automatically with the system, then change the startup order of your guests in the box below as appropriate.

If you want all to startup with the host, then move them all up to automatic startup.

Now when your host restarts, your guests will come up automatically as well.

The Central Management Server has failed to start. Press ‘Retry’ to attempt

to start it again or ‘Cancel’ to skip any actions dependendent on the Central

Management Server. (STU000213)

When trying to do a Business Objects Xi3 install

I bashed my head against the wall for ages on this, the cms.exe service did actually seem to be starting – it was listed as a running process in task manager – I could see it bound to port 6400 using netstat, so I couldnt understand what was causing the issue and throwing the above error message.

The business objects help was far from helpful suggesting I click retry! wow – unsurprisingly this didnt work.

So trying to logically work through it, I came down to  the fact that it must be related to my install using an existing database.

I had read a few posts which talked about the CMS Administrator password – and it dawned on me that it might be because I was using a existing database that I needed to input the existing CMS Administrator password – which wasn’t blank.

I was trying to use the option, configure this later for the CMS Admin password, and just didnt really pay much attention to this, but when I tried to re-install for the 5th time, I put in the existing CMS Admin password, and HEY PRESTO, Business Objects FINALLY installed…

What in hindsight seems relatively obvious, caused me such pain! Please Business Objects, lets have some better / more verbose output / logging on your error messages…

Anywho.. .hope this helps someone, cos it took me ages