Tag: Microsoft

Ruby & Rails using Passenger

Posted by Shane – July 28, 2008

I have been toying with a MySQL server at work for loading data from a legacy database and creating user accounts in Microsoft’s Active Directory. I am using linux along with MySQL, Ruby and the Rails framework. While I am certainly no über-expert at this, I am finding the task not only manageable, but altogether pleasant. My current workflow looks like this:

  1. Mount Windows share using Samba
  2. Load data into MySQL and perform a bunch of transformations on it
  3. TODO: script creation of Active Directory accounts from MySQL Database (Python??)

I found that I needed to view the data as I was testing the MySQL transformations, so I turned to Ruby and Rails. I have not had a great deal of luck in the past with configuring Apache to serve up dynamic content via Mongrel or lighty, so I decided to give Passenger a go. For those of you that are unaware, Passenger works directly with Apache and requires almost no configuration. It is dead simple to use. So, within a matter of minutes (minus the time to tweak my database to conform to the Rails conventions) I had a web site up and running to display my data as I was testing it!

Open Source Software is becoming (for me at least) a more viable solution to the problems I face than the proprietary alternatives. The wealth of information available and the relative ease with which a great deal of work can be done is amazing.

WSUS 3.0 SP1 & 0×80190194

Posted by Shane – May 22, 2008

I know that the title probably makes no sense to any one of the 2 people who read my weblog on a semi-annual basis, but I have decided to try to post more stuff related to my work as a Network Engineer. That being said…

Today I ran into a problem with our Microsoft WSUS server. Recently I upgraded the WSUS from 3.0 to 3.0 Service Pack 1 (SP1). This is the second time our WSUS has been broken by an update. Usually Microsoft’s updates are pretty solid, but WSUS updates seem to be a tad iffy. The upgrade from WSUS 2.0 to WSUS 3.0 broke completely and I had to completely rebuild the server, luckily I run the WSUS on a virtual server using VMWare’s ESX server, so rebuilding it was very simple.

The particulars of the problem are that the client machines would not download updates! Normally I don’t check on the update status of machines very often, but I was creating a new image for a laptop and the thing just would not download updates. I checked the WSUS log on the client machine and noticed that there was a 0×80190194 error. A quick search on Google pointed me to a number of forum posts that state this is an HTTP 404 (Page not found) error. Unfortunately, none of these posts had any information about a solution. A bit more searching led me to a post on Microsoft’s TechNet Discussion Groups that had the solution, Re: WSUS 3 sp1 do not distribute patches to clients in Windows Server Update Services (URL is rather deep and may be broken, no warranty). The noteworthy part of the post:

  1. Create a new virtual directory called ‘selfupdate’
  2. Set the pathname to
    %programfiles%\Update Services\selfupdate

Hopefully Microsoft will put some more resources into testing the updates for WSUS, it is a really nice product, but the updates always seem to break it!