Found a cute little project and added it to my about page. Flickaday is a site where you can chronicle yourself through one picture a day. Kinda cool idea, so the stream for that is on my about page if you wanna check it out.

Ok, blip.tv failed me, maybe google video will be kinder

So yeah, I’m starting to get into this whole web 2.0 stuff finally. You can now follow me on twitter at twitter.com/Able_X, and I finally got around to buying a decent webcam, and I just uploaded a test video to my youtube.

Enjoy teh suck

Once again, the internet proves that any computer problem you find yourself with, the internet has already had:

http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2006/06/22/438094.aspx

Shadow Copy failures: Scheduled task fails with General page initialization failed, error 0x8007000d.

I’ve rippled through quite a few nagging problems since my server failure at home a few weeks ago. One of the more intriguing problem I only noticed a couple of days ago. One server had not been running scheduled Shadow Copies. When you schedule shadow copies in Windows Server 2003 R2, not suprizingly it sets up a normal Windows Scheduled Task with name ShadowCopyVolume{volume} as shown below.

But, as you can see, it’s never run and has status “Could not start”. If you double click the task, you get the error “General page initialization failed. The specific error is 0x8007000d: The data is invalid”. Once you dismiss the dialog, you see the normal task details, but cannot edit the user field (greyed out and blank). You could however create manual shadow copies, so that pretty much narrowed it down to a problem with the scheduled task rather than shadow copies itself.

Some searching on Technet and the MS Knowledgebase drew a blank (or at least nothing appearing to be directly relevant). There’s an article here which gives some information which is close but only allows you to setup the task again with a domain account. I didn’t want to do that as the Shadow Copy scheduled task is supposed to run under the NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM account.

However, I bow to Anil’s greater knowledge from his blog entry here, specifically the update part at the end. Indeed, deleting C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application
Data\Microsoft\Crypto\RSA\S-1-5-18\d42cc0c3858a58db2db37658219e6400_xxxx”, deleting the scheduled task, disabling shadow copies and setting it back up again with a schedule creates it correctly.

Thanks Anil!
Cheers,
John.

Ok, so normally i’m not a product whore, but I found a really neat tool for monitoring windows servers at www.poweradmin.com

I’ve loaded it up on our data server and it enables all kinds of monitoring and notification options. I’m gonna keep it monitoring this server for a bit, and if it seems to stay as good as it looks now, I’ll add more servers to my monitoring. The all in one place monitoring is slightly awesomesauce as well.