December 2010 - Blind-sysadmins - lists.hodgsonfamily.org

Telephony systems
by Andrew Hodgson 14 Nov '12

14 Nov '12

Hi all, Our current Call Manager 4.x servers are creaking under their age, and we are looking at replacing this either with a new Cisco telephony system or a completely new system altogether. The system has to use IP as the connection to the handsets, as we don't want to add in more cables. Has anyone any experience in deploying a new Call manager setup, or a similar telephony system, and how was the accessibility? Thanks. Andrew.

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let's talk Backup Exec
by Ryan Shugart 21 Dec '11

21 Dec '11

Hey everyone: I just got a promotion at work, and with the goodness of a promotion comes more responsibilities. I'm now in charge of our backup infrastructure. We run Backup Exec 12.5, and have 16 or so media servers in various branch offices around the world. While Backup Exec used to be very accessible, over the last two versions accessibility seems to have gone into something of a decline, I already use scripts just to read the main table of jobs, and might need more just to get around the scheduling window so I can actually schedule a job. I'd consider the rest of the program accessible but clunky, tabbing doesn't always bring you where you think it will, on some screens tab order seems to be dynamic. Backup Exec also has an odd way of bringing up alert windows and grabbing your focus, even when you tell it specifically not to. While clunkyness is OK on one server, when you have fifteen individual servers to manage and no way to do it in a centralized fashion clunkyness is less acceptable. This is also less than a quarter of my new responsibilities as well. The current admin has the remote desktop console setup with all the Backup Exec servers in his favorites, stays logged into each server with a Backup Exec window open, and flicks from screen to screen and can easily glance at the output from each job. For us screen reader users, that doesn't work well. I've already got e-mail alerts set up and am using some Outlook rules to sort failure jobs out from successes, but was wondering if there's anything else I can be doing? I'd think people in really large environments with hundreds of media servers aren't logging into each server on a daily basis, so there has to be better ways to handle this. Any ideas? Thanks. Ryan

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SCSI cards
by Ryan Shugart 30 Dec '10

30 Dec '10

Hi: I was just curious if anyone has ever seen this before, its baffling everyone else I talk to and I'm about at the bang head on desk point. We have a backup server, it was running Windows Server 2003, and had an HP SCSI card inside that is basically a rebranded LSI Ultra 320. We were getting really fast backups, Backup Exec reported the average speed of 2GB per minute, and while someone said we could have even gone faster, that was plenty for us so I never bothered. Anyway, right before Christmas, I wiped the drive, installed Windows Server 2008R2 and installed the latest Backup Exec 2010. Everything works fine accept that the drive now backs up at about 100MB per minute. HP's Library and Tape Tools indicate the SCSI bandwidth has gone down to 5MBPS and should be at least 20MBPS. I don't know a lot about SCSI, but its almost like the card has fallen back to an older form of SCSI in some kind of backwards compatibility mode. The WS2008R2 drivers are up to date, and cabling wise nothing has changed from when it was working. I've gone to Symantec, Quantum (the vendor of the tape library) and HP and they all blame someone else in the chain. So I'm just curious if anyone knows what could cause something like this to happen? Thanks. Ryan

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SCSI cards
by Ryan Shugart 30 Dec '10

30 Dec '10

Hi: I was just curious if anyone has ever seen this before, its baffling everyone else I talk to and I'm about at the bang head on desk point. We have a backup server, it was running Windows Server 2003, and had an HP SCSI card inside that is basically a rebranded LSI Ultra 320. We were getting really fast backups, Backup Exec reported the average speed of 2GB per minute, and while someone said we could have even gone faster, that was plenty for us so I never bothered. Anyway, right before Christmas, I wiped the drive, installed Windows Server 2008R2 and installed the latest Backup Exec 2010. Everything works fine accept that the drive now backs up at about 100MB per minute. HP's Library and Tape Tools indicate the SCSI bandwidth has gone down to 5MBPS and should be at least 20MBPS. I don't know a lot about SCSI, but its almost like the card has fallen back to an older form of SCSI in some kind of backwards compatibility mode. The WS2008R2 drivers are up to date, and cabling wise nothing has changed from when it was working. I've gone to Symantec, Quantum (the vendor of the tape library) and HP and they all blame someone else in the chain. So I'm just curious if anyone knows what could cause something like this to happen? Thanks. Ryan

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removing avast5?
by David Mehler 26 Dec '10

26 Dec '10

Hello, Does anyone have a procedure to remove avast5 from a machine? Add/remove programs won't do it due to the fact that the program has a self protection module. Thanks. Dave

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SQL Server 2008 R2 with Jaws 12
by Andrew Hodgson 22 Dec '10

22 Dec '10

Hi, Anyone here used the above with SQL Server 2008 R2 management studio? I am getting very inconsistent reading of the left-hand pane where we have the master tree view of the databases, management objects etc. I am having to double check all the work I am doing on that side of the screen with the Jaws cursor at the moment, to ensure I hit on the right object... The rest of the system is working fine. Thanks. Andrew.

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SQL Server 2008 R2 with Jaws 12
by Andrew Hodgson 21 Dec '10

21 Dec '10

Hi, Anyone here used the above with SQL Server 2008 R2 management studio? I am getting very inconsistent reading of the left-hand pane where we have the master tree view of the databases, management objects etc. I am having to double check all the work I am doing on that side of the screen with the Jaws cursor at the moment, to ensure I hit on the right object... The rest of the system is working fine. Thanks. Andrew.

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mailman administrator
by David Mehler 19 Dec '10

19 Dec '10

Hello, Do we have any mailman administrators onlist? If so, please contact me privately. I've got a mailman issue and am needing to resolve in a very quick manner. It involves adding a second domain to mailman although sounding easy i've not been able to get this going. I can provide additional details. Some urgency! Thanks. Dave.

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accessible u3 tools for system maintence and repair
by David Mehler 11 Dec '10

11 Dec '10

Hello, I've got a u3 drive that has System Access on it. I'm looking for recommendations for free/low cost preferably free tools for system maintence and repair purposes. I'm assuming that the system I plug the u3 drive into will be infected in some way so am looking for antispyware, antivirus, antimalware programs, as well as a hardware checker type program. Any recommendations or any other suggestions welcome. Thanks. Dave.

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troubleshooting and linux live CD repair and recovery
by David Mehler 03 Dec '10

03 Dec '10

Hello Everyone, I've got a problem and there's some urgency with it. I've got a pc, it's an older dell p4 2.4 ghz I think running xp home. It's no longer booting. It was working fine yesterday afternoon and was powered down. On next power up last night there were no errors on the screen, but the box didn't boot the only thing was a cursor thingy at the top left of the screen. I checked cables, they're all in tight, checked the primary drive I am 50 50 on whether it's getting power it feels like it might be, but i'm not 100% certain. I unplugged it's drive cable and restarted the box it complained immediately that the primary master had been removed. I plugged it back in and said error went away, but no other errors came up indicating that the system detected another issue with the drive. Two reasons i'm very worried about this drive are: 1 I don't think it's been backed up and there's files that are only on this drive, and 2 I don't have another internal hard disk to use with the box. I do have an external ntfs formatted terrabyte drive USB that I can use. Last time I looked there were not any speech accessible windows live CD options that were out there, has this changed? If not, a Linux option would be welcome. I need to get speech then find out if the drive is responding and possibly repair it, a suggestion was made that the mbr could have got corrupted, I do not see how but I don't have any other ideas. Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks. Dave.

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