In an effort to diagnose it myself with the least amount of work possible I stumbled upon this VB Script which pings a host defined in a text document and outputs it to excel.

I hacked on it a little bit and came up with this:

Set objExcel = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
objExcel.Visible = True
objExcel.Workbooks.Add
intRow = 2

Set Fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set InputFile = fso.OpenTextFile("list.txt")

count=0

Do While Not (InputFile.atEndOfStream)
	objExcel.Cells(1, 1+count).Value = "Machine Name"
	objExcel.Cells(1, 2+count).Value = "Results"
	count=count+2
	InputFile.ReadLine
Loop
objExcel.Cells(1, 1+count).Value = "Time"
objExcel.Cells(1, 2+count).Value = "Date"

Do While 1
	Set Fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
	Set InputFile = fso.OpenTextFile("list.txt")
	count=0

	Do While Not (InputFile.atEndOfStream)
		HostName = InputFile.ReadLine
		Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
		Ping = WshShell.Run("ping -n 1 " & HostName, 0, True)
		objExcel.Cells(intRow, 1+count).Value = HostName
		Select Case Ping
		Case 0
			objExcel.Cells(intRow, 2+count).Value = "On Line"
			objExcel.Cells(intRow, 2+count).Interior.ColorIndex = 4
		Case 1
			objExcel.Cells(intRow, 2+count).Value = "Off Line"
			objExcel.Cells(intRow, 2+count).Interior.ColorIndex = 3
		End Select
		count=count+2
	Loop

	objExcel.Cells(intRow, 1+count).Value = TimeValue(Now())
	objExcel.Cells(intRow, 2+count).Value = date

	intRow = intRow + 1

	WScript.sleep 30000

	objExcel.Rows(1).Select
	objExcel.Selection.Interior.ColorIndex = 19
	objExcel.Selection.Font.ColorIndex = 11
	objExcel.Selection.Font.Bold = True
	objExcel.Cells.EntireColumn.AutoFit
Loop

All you have to do is create a text document “list.text” in the same directory as this vb script and it will layout the excel document for you without any modifications. Only thing you may want to change is the delay/sleep I put in on this line “WScript.sleep 30000″ which tells it to wait 30 seconds before continuing.

The best part is that I could feasibly give this to a non-technical tenant use it to troubleshoot their connection problems.
The host list would include something like their AP, the Gateway, google.com and another host thats known to be reliable to ping like 4.2.2.2

To my amazement an actual person answered the phone after just 2 rings. In an age where EVERY company I deal with, both for work and in personal life, makes you navigate a phone menu maze it was astounding. I got my order confirmation number from the guy in under 1 minute. Just another reason Cabela’s is great and they’re earning a lifetime customer.

The last thing I want to do is maintain another service, WordPress/Drupal/sharepoint/blah+blah all mean backups and security lists. So I advocated a hosted solution where I would only be responsible for some initial setup and training then it would be up to content people to do the content stuff. Which is really ~90% of the battle. Good content can overcome poor design, bad technology and terrible graphics.

Jason @ Pignite web design in Chehalis/Lacey/Olympia had told me about Posterous a few weeks before so I went downstairs to pay him a visit. After about 1 hour of nerd talk I was confident Posterous would be perfect. ~2 hours later and I had purchased a domain name from godaddy, setup an account and started hacking on one of the prebuilt themes to fit our red/black/white logo/website branding and we’re done. Presented it to a group the next day and people were generally satisfied. And there you have http://thefarmstand.org .

We still need some graphics done up but otherwise it’s mostly complete. A few of my coworkers also took some initiative and finished the site out by adding a list of contributors with profile pictures and bios.

I found the SBSMonitoring instance of SQL using 1.2 GB ram. For an application that looks relatively simple that amount of ram consumption seemed too high. To fix the problem I did some digging and found these pages:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178067.aspx
Use Performance Monitor to set the “correct” ram usage on the SQL Server instance by using  the SQLServer:Buffer Manager object. Or just guess randomly like me.

http://dogriley.blogspot.com/2005/08/sqlservrexe-high-memory-usage-for.html
Set the maximum ram though CMD prompt

If you’ve got SQLServer Management Studio installed you can do it though GUI instead of CMD.

Connect to the instance of SQL, in this case “ServerName\SBSMONITORING”
Right click the Database instance and select properties
Then click the Memory section and put in your “Maximum Server Memory” (I set mine to 100MB)

Since our staff uses sharepoint VERY little I decided to limit that instance to 500MB. Connecting to that with SSMS wasn’t as easy as the SBSMonitoring instance. If you type in “ServerName\MICROSOFT##SSEE” it doesn’t connect. However this text does work “\\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query”

Update 2:

http://www.solarpowerrocks.com/washington/
(long winded and annoying, but has info on incentives)

http://solardat.uoregon.edu/NorthwestSolarResourceMaps.html
(PNW solar potential)

http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/lacey-washington.html
(Solar path diagram- they’re kinda hard to read, but that’s basically the path the sun follows across the sky from equinox to equinox.)

Update 1:

http://www.windsun.com/ChargeControls/ChargeCont.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmb5MB9_TaM

Sun tracking solar panel w/ arduino
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATnnMFO60y8

Arduino solar Tracker
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1224541956/9

http://www.batteryuniversity.com/partone-13.htm

http://www.discovercircuits.com/B/batt-chrg2.htm

Links:

How to make solar power generator

http://www.rain.org/~philfear/how2solar.html

Solar generator diagram

http://www.thefarm.org/charities/i4at/surv/solargen.htm

Optomize Panel w/ mirrors

http://www.thefarm.org/charities/i4at/surv/panplus.htm

Harbor freight solar panel demo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caeEyhJZnTs

pt2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N86eHRGRJwQ

Inverter:

http://www.lanescarproducts.com/225-watt-power-inverter-450-watt-peak.html

inverter faq:

http://www.donrowe.com/inverters/inverter_faq.html

What are amps, watts, volts and ohms?:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/question501.htm

DC Cabling Calculator:

http://www.energymatters.com.au/climate-data/cable-sizing-calculator.php

Problem: Macs couldn’t access shares over SMB
Solution:

Group Policy Management > +Domains > +Domain.Name > +Domain Controllers > Right click Edit Default Domain Controllers Policy

+Policies > +Windows Settings > +Security Settings > +Local Policies > Click User Security Options

Microsoft network client: Digitally sign communications (if server agrees) : ENABLED
Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications (always) : DISABLED
Microsoft network server: Digitally sign communications (if client agrees) : ENABLED

Start > Run > gpupdate /force (not sure if this step is needed)

Run this command from the Exchange management shell to allow anonymous connections.

Set-ReceiveConnector -Identity “Default <insert server name>” -PermissionGroups “AnonymousUsers”

In the Firefox address bar type “about:config”
Locate the key called “network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris”

Double click and put in a comma seperated list of all your internal sites. In this case I needed to add “companyweb” Didn’t even need a restart and FF no longer asks me for authentication to the SharePoint site

[user@test ]$ tail -f /var/log/samba/log.smbd

[2009/07/29 10:06:14, 0] printing/print_cups.c:cups_connect(69)
Unable to connect to CUPS server localhost:631 – Connection refused

After some google work I found this.

For those seeing the same error, it’s apparently solved by adding this
line to [global]:
printcap name = /etc/printcap

So a quick trip to “/usr/local/etc/smb.conf” and I uncomment:

;     printcap name = /etc/printcap

Then I start samba “/usr/local/sbin/smbd -D” and all is good in the world once again.

This test is just to pull out Office and Windows verision/keys. Not interested in extra stuff like Visio or Project right now since they’re special cases.

Had to do some hacking because even though only Outlook from SBS 2003 is installed on a few computers OpenAudit reads it as full Office 2003 messing up the reporting. To fix this on machines that had OEM Office 2000 installs that don’t register I added the search for ‘Microsoft Office Outlo’

SELECT s.net_user_name, s.system_name, m1.ms_keys_uuid,
if( left( m1.ms_keys_name, 22 ) = ‘Microsoft Office Outlo’, ‘n/a’, m1.ms_keys_name ) AS OfficeVersion,
if( left( m1.ms_keys_name, 22 ) = ‘Microsoft Office Outlo’, ‘n/a’, m1.ms_keys_cd_key ) AS OfficeKey,
m2.ms_keys_name as WindowsVersion, m2.ms_keys_cd_key as WindowsKey
FROM `system` AS s
INNER JOIN `ms_keys` AS m1 ON s.system_uuid = m1.ms_keys_uuid
LEFT JOIN `ms_keys` AS m2 ON m1.ms_keys_uuid = m2.ms_keys_uuid
WHERE left( m2.ms_keys_key_type, 6 ) = ‘window’
AND (left( m1.ms_keys_name, 22 ) = ‘Microsoft Office Profe’
OR left( m1.ms_keys_name, 22 ) = ‘Microsoft Office Small’
OR left( m1.ms_keys_name, 22 ) = ‘Microsoft Office Outlo’)
GROUP BY m1.ms_keys_uuid