Bournemouth Collegiate School Swimming Pool

The school have apparently got a nice pool, where you can get lessons and your child can learn to swim, however the entrance to the facilities are classified. Top Secret - eyes only.

I'm going to bust open the mystery of how to get in, think of this post like wikileaks for BCS!

Park in the street, go through the gate to the minibus parking, and follow the gravel path and to the right of the main school building.

Why the school don't sign-post this is beyond me, nor does it obviously appear in any Google search results... Until now.

Happy 🏊

PDFtk Burst PDF in a Windows Command Prompt (Batch File)

I had a user at work who needed to expand PDF files into their individual pages. 
This is the solution I came up with, using PDFtk and a bit of cmd script.
It creates files in a sub folder called output, so make sure that exists before you try and run it.

<code>

@echo off

setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion

set "source=%~dp0"

set "name=%1"

IF DEFINED name (

 call :burst %name%

 ) else (

 call :usage

 )

goto :xit

:burst

 set "file=%~nx1"

 echo Working on %file%

 for /f "skip=1" %%x in ('wmic os get localdatetime') do if not defined mydate set mydate=%%x

 SET "mytime=%mydate:~0,14%"

 pdftk %name% burst output "%source%output\%file%_%mytime%_%%04d.pdf"

 for %%d in (%source%output\doc_data.txt) do del %%d

 echo Done!

 goto :EOF

:usage

echo Nothing to do... drag a file onto me!

goto :EOF

:xit

endlocal

timeout /T 3

<\code>

Acer BSOD 0x000000F4 after SSD Upgrade

Today a colleague presented me with his Acer laptop and the BSOD pictured above. (0x000000F4)
It's a couple of years old (20011?) and was recently upgraded with a Crucial MX100 SSD and 8GB of Crucial RAM.

It had never exhibited this error prior to the memory or SSD upgrade, so I was less than amused by the situation, especially since the SSD was not accessible without powering off the machine, leaving me with no Dump File to check.

After much testing, it transpired that it would only crash when on battery power, and never in Safe Mode. This led me to look at the drivers which were loaded during a "normal" boot.
After a bit of trial and error, upgrading the Intel drivers etc, I uninstalled the Acer Power Management software. This has resolved the issue and the laptop will now transition between mains and battery power just fine.

remote desktop gateway server is temporarily unavailable

I've been playing with RD Web this week, and was getting the following error when attempting to Connect to a remote PC - "remote desktop gateway server is temporarily unavailable" on my Server 2012 R2 test rig.

I'm able to use Remote Desktop Connection if I manually specify my gateway server settings. 
After much Googling it occurred to me that it could be because I'm running my RDWeb server on an unusual external port. I've already had to configure the HTTP and UDP Transport settings to match my bespoke port (RD Gateway Manager properties), so I drilled down into the Application Settings in IIS Manager and added :PORT# to the end of my FQDN in the DefaultTSGateway field.

I've ended up with something along the lines of:    rdw.domain.com:1234

This subtle change (after a refresh of the REWeb portal in the browser) seems to have done the trick.

samba reload - how not to drop existing connections

I had a requirement to make changes to a live samba server, where there were many many open files with locks reported by smbstatus

Previously I have forced users to close files so that configuration changes can take place, or done them out of ours (yawn!)

I stumbled across this Ubuntu forum post from 2008 in which bdowne01  imparts their wisdom and explains how to make the changes active without dropping open file locks.
I have successfully followed the advice and reloaded the smb.conf changes with 82 locked files open!

Thanks bdowne01 (Brian Downey?)

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=903896

Re: samba restart without connection loss ?

 Originally Posted by dmizer 

A samba server MUST be stopped and then started before any new changes to smb.conf can be made available. There is no way to keep samba active and initiate changes to smb.conf. Most server services function in this way.

This is why I mentioned failover. If you need 100% uptime, you need a backup to your server.

No, no, no. This is absolutely false. I registered on this forum to reply to this message specifically. To get samba to recognize changes to its smb.conf *without restart*, as root:

1) First test your configuration file for errors:
# testparm /path/to/smb.conf; echo $?

If it exits '0' you're good to go.

2) Find the parent SMBD
# ps -ef | grep smbd

In the list find the process parented by Init, or process 1. This is the parent smbd daemon to the other servicing children.

#) Issue that pid a SIGHUP:

kill -1 <yourPID>

Done. This is regularly performed and confirmed to work without interruption a Samba cluster hosting thousands of clients.

Softether VPN client default route

Softether VPN Client

I've been using the built in Windows VPN client (L2TP) to connect to my VPN server, but had a problem with the MAC Address changing, thus was unable to assign a static one via DHCP.

To overcome this, I swapped to using the Softether Client, but discovered another issue.

I wasn't able to stop the VPN becoming my default route. It became THE gateway for all of my internet traffic... Something that I didn't want to happen. I'm using this to provide remote access to servers, not to hide my internet traffic, so I don't want it going half way across the world before getting out of the building.

There doesn't seem to be an obvious toggle to change this behaviour in the client software unlike the nice tick box that Microsoft provide, but I have discovered a work-around.

This is working for myself and a colleague, but YMMV. If there is a better way, please do let me know!

It involved a couple of steps:

• In softEther VPN Client Manager edit the Properties of your VPN. On the Advanced Settings... button, tick the No Adjustments of Routing Table under Other Configurations.
• Run ncpa.cpl (Network Connections from Control Panel)
• Edit the Properties of your VPN Client Adapter. Change the IPv4 TCP/IP settings; under Advanced change the Interface metric to 100 (for example)
• Edit the same value for the NIC you want to use for your internet and change it to a really low number. I used 1 for LAN and 2 for WiFi.

Test! You can check the routes and metric values from a command prompt using route print

This certainly worked for me and doesn't seem to have impacted my LAN sessions, even when the VPN is not connected.

It's not ideal, but if you find yourself in the same situation, it might just help!

AF Token present before mount (Reason is AF Token File Exists before AF Mount)

Hadn't seen this one before, so thought I'd better get it written down, before I forget how to fix it!

Microlite edgemenu giving the following error:

AF token present before mount

This is another historic site using af0/fsp0 attached file systems, and not SharpDrive.

I can't be fussed to change the config, I just need it to work.

In this example the fsp0 gets mounted onto af0. 

Our af0 is /usr/lib/edge/system/mnt/af0

Change directory to your af0 folder and then check with an ls -al

I expect you to see a .edge_af file - delete it!

rm .edge_af

Test!

Update Oct 2014:
I also had the same but the message was:

Reason is AF Token File Exists before AF Mount 

My mount path has also changed in v3 to :
/opt/microlite/backupedge/system/mnt/af0/