My name is Aaron and devtrends.com is my blog where I share my victories in the Information Technology (IT) world. I am not your typical systems engineer where “geek first” is the motto. I only believe in solutions that work for a business purpose; IT is a support department that, if applied properly, can provide solutions that simplify operations and reduce overall costs.
However, in any professional environment, there is always room for dreaming. All great IT products have sprouted from some idea that was realized into a business worthy product. As we dream, the key is to maintain functionality, purpose, focus and organization, for without these key factors, dreams become distractions and distractions do not help reduce expenses, grow audience or increase revenue.
devtrends.com is a blog where I share my experiences in developing new trends.
:: Aaron Gilbert
IT is not just a job but also a passion. Everything I have accomplished, both personally and professionally, has been generally entertaining, bordering on fun. Some of my projects, such as working with SharePoint Services workflow actions in Visual Studio or building a custom iSCSI SAN using the OpenSolaris, ZFS and COMSTAR, has been quite rewarding. You may think nerd...I think developing a new trend!
Good information. It help me resolve a locked “sa” account in an instance with no Management Studio on it.
Thanks
I like your code, but it works only for documetn libraries, not work for infopath form libraries?
Any idea to achievethis for infopath form libraries
How do I download the source code ?
avi081265@yahoo.com
I don’t have a source code package for this… sorry.
@Avi Kumar
I am uncertain if this would work with InfoPath – I have not used InfoPath as of yet. If I remember correctly from various articles et cetera, InfoPath is a different animal than SharePoint Services.
Thanks, for the info. I messed around with this a little, but I found that when using the COMSTAR directions, I was unable to add the storage to ESX. Unable to open datastore as far as I can remember, when trying to add the storage. Any idea as to why that might be? The standard SUN stuff worked fine. Do you have any observations on performance between the two?
Michael,
I am curious to know what would cause the COMSTAR iSCSI views to not be accessible to ESX. Which version of ESX are you using? I am currently using COMSTAR with ESX 4 – I have not tested it with our ESX 3.5 hosts yet, the plan is to upgrade them soon to gain the thin provisioning VMFS capabilities. Are you able to see the COMSTAR target using a different initiator, such as Microsoft’s iSCSI Initiator?
Although I have read on other blogs that COMSTAR is significantly quicker than the iscsitadm package, I do not have an opinion either way. The reality is that I am only seeing 400mbits/sec throughput on either of targets (iscsitadm or comstar), which is less than I should potentially achieve with gigabit Ethernet.
Now I want to see a script that will find all the possible words using a dictionary file.
I implemented your code, it works very well. Kudos to you !!!
I noticed that If I add some field in message body using “Add Lookup” all the fields are coming alonthwith filename in 1 line rather then each field value in line by line.
Let me know am I missing anything
Disha
Disha,
I have not seen your error – however, I have noticed that the attachments functionality of SharePoint is touchy.
To understand you correctly, if you add a field to the form that is the Lookup type, then the attachments form field displays all attachments horizontal instead of vertical? That is the only change?
-Aaron
Meebo also does something like this.
http://www.meebo.com/rooms/yourown/
For those that are wondering, it is my opinion that the DroboPro is not quite ready for a production VMware environment. I saw performance anywhere from 5MB/sec to 55MB/sec with no change in configuration while cloning a VM from an EqualLogic to the DroboPro. Being that the DroboPro is VMware certified, I had high hopes for an inexpensive and solid iSCSI target when I purchased the DroboPro. For those that are going to use the DroboPro with the Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator I was fairly impressed with the product, both performance and configuration ease.
In case someone at Data Robotics reads this post, these are my thoughts in regards to enhancing the DroboPro:
1. Make the option to create a volume without a filesystem type – although its not really an issue, formatting it NTFS gets confusing when the intent is to add the LUN to VMware and format with VMFS
2. Create a web interface for configuring the DroboPro for those that intend to use the device as an iSCSI target. Keep the Drobo Dashboard for USB/Firewire use.
3. Enable security features such as ACL, CHAP.
4. Provide some method of knowing what the DroboPro is currently doing. I realize that the engineers want the back-end of the DroboPro to be lock out, however, a simple status would be nice as we wait 15 minutes for the DroboPro to figure out what it is doing.
I am actually disappointed that I have to return the DroboPro – I would like to spend some more time troubleshooting, however, work duties make the “calls” and I need a functioning/simple iSCSI target yesterday. For those that are wondering, I re-purposed an older Dell server, some external eSATA storage, and installed the opensource OpenFiler product. Performance is pretty good with OpenFiler. If you want more robust SAN capabilities, try OpenSolaris and COMSTAR – just keep in mind that OpenSolaris is picky on the hardware and performance is DIRECTLY affected by the hardware you choose.
That is it for now…
-Aaron
I see questions about resetting the sa password and enabling the account quite often.
If you are not comfortable with scripts, this can be done with a few simple clicks.
1) if you don’t have it yet, download sql 2005 management studio express
2) login as a windows administrator using win. integrated auth.
3) go to security, set a new sa password
4) uncheck ‘disabled’ in status.
Peter,
To be honest I am not certain why I chose to use osql. This was something I had needed a few years back; I am going to speculate that the Express of SQL Management Studio was not available or I had no idea it was available. Thank you for the tip.
-Aaron
This is exacly what I was looking for. After digging into it a little more, I figure out you can shorten it to:
(echo.|set /p =”%USERNAME%”)>session.nam
Earl, thanks for the post, I’ll have to try your shortened version. I used to think that batch files were swell, until I just recently got into Linux shell scripting. Shell scripting is considerably more impressive.
-Aaron
On a real boggle board, each letter does not have the same probability of appearing. Also, “Qu” is a letter. I’d like to see a script that better reflects this, because this boggle board does not look like any I’ve ever seen before.
You make a valid point. The randomization on the script would be any of the 26 letters, whereas, in a real Boggle game each cube only has a chance of 6 letters. When I have a moment, I’ll update the code.
Doing some testing with:
Dell R610
Drobo Elite
Dell Powerconnect 2724
- jumbo frames enabled start to end (vswitch, vmnic, vmkernel), on the switch, and on the Drobo Elite
Doing an upload/download from a Windows 7 workstation to the Datastore on the Drobo yields about 20MB/sec throughput (as reported by Windows). A similar upload/download to a normal file server jumps upwards of 80MB/sec.
I thought performance would be a little better than that…
I can 2nd your results. I’m just finishing my testing of a DroboPro and am VERY dissapointed by the VMware performance. Even connected directly to the server I was only getting at most 6MB/sec. This is unacceptable for a device that costs this much. It’s interesting that a device can be VMware Certified and “Supported” but not actually work.
In our environment, the DroboPro was going to be used as storage for test/DR virtual machines, temporary storage and for the occasional production virtual machine. The performance was so poor that VMware would sometimes fail during a machine migration from one datastore to another. The replacement for the DroboPro was to use OpenFiler on some older Dell equipment. Currently we use OpenFiler as an iSCSI target on a PowerEdge 2650 and PowerEdge 2850, both with eSATA attached storage. Surprisingly, OpenFiler on these older systems is quite stable, 60+ days up time on one – to top it off, OpenFiler’s iSCSI (which is the IET project) has compatibility with ESX 3.5 U3, which the DroboPro couldn’t do.
Any idea why after picking custom action in Sharepoint Designer wouldn’t see “RuleDesigner” sentense? After I pick “Email List Attachments”, nothing is displayed on the right to set up the rules.
Well, from that information I would guess that there is an issue with the WSS.ACTIONS file. Are you certain you inserted the text into the correct location? Check the “RuleDesigner Sentence”, “FieldBind”, and “Parameters” to make sure they match up.
-Aaron
Hi i am getting this error what do you this is about?
‘TestingWorkflow.SentEmailwithListAttachments.Execute(System.Workflow.ComponentModel.ActivityExecutionContext)’: no suitable method found to override.
Thanks for your help.
Very great code thanks
Keyaa,
Look at your code, specifically the .Designer.cs file, and verify that the partial class name matches that in the .cs file. Also, in the .cs file, check the function in the “override” region and verify that the name/class matches there.
-Aaron
@ECHO OFF
del “[FULL PATH TO SQL FILE]”
osql -S [SERVER]\[INSTANCE] -U [USERNAME] -P [PASSWORD] -i “[FULL PATH TO SQL FILE]“
If you del “[FULL PATH TO SQL FILE]“ surely it won’t be there when you address it with the next line. Shouldn’t it be something more like delete the old backup file then point osql at the script to create the new one?
James,
Thank you for the post, I’ve updated the example to reference [FULL PATH TO SQL BACKUP FILE] instead. The original intent was to delete the .bak file prior to running the script again.
-Aaron