Deploying Reporting Services

By Henning Eiben in Programming 0 Comment

So I got involved with Microsoft Reporting Services. After installing a Reporting Server, and integrating this instance with my existing installation of Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS) I installed the Business Intelligence Studio on my workstation.

But whenever I wanted to deploy a project I got an error, that the requested URL could not be found. Crosschecking the project-settings didn’t show any errors. Working with the studio on the server (with the same settings) was just fine.

So after starring a while at my workstation I figured: the BI-Studio was calling some ReportingServer2005.asmx URL instead of ReportingServer2006.asmx. After verifying the version of the Reporting Services component on my workstation this revealed that I didn’t ran the latest version of Reporting Services on my workstation and thus I was accessing some obsolete URLS.

Installing the latest service-pack resolved this issue.

SMART monitoring on Windows

By Henning Eiben in Windows 0 Comment

Well, there is most likely no way to know before-hand that a disk will fail. But you could try to read the signs. And what a surprise, there is help already available. This S.M.A.R.T. thingy could be of help; SMART collects a lot of data of your disks, which can be used to evaluate how “well” your disk is doing. This could show some up-coming trouble.

To read the SMART-Data, there exists quite a few programs. For Linux you would most likely use smartmontool, and fortunatly, these tools are also available for Windows!

Getting and Installing smartmontool

  1. Just download the latest Windows-Installer from sourceforge, which will install all needed binaries.
  2. Edit the smartd.conf to meet your needs
  3. Either run smartd in daemon-mode, or as a Windows Service

Configuration

The DEVICESCAN option allows to detect all available devices and add them to the monitoring list; but I like to tailor my config-files a little. So I comment-out the DEVICESCAN and add some options of my own:

   hda -a -o on -S on -I 194 -I 231 -I 9 -m sysmsgbox

This will monitor my 1st disk, and ignore some measures (-I 194 -I 231 -I 9) like thermal stuff. Besides that I would like to carry out all of the typical tests (-a), do selftests (-o on) and collect statical data (-S on). Finally I would like to get a popup (‘-m sysmsgbox’; this is just available in the windows version) if something is going wrong

C# with PSPad

By Henning Eiben in Others 0 Comment

PSPad offers a lot of syntax highlighters, but out of the box there is no highlighting for C#.

To get highlighting for C# you need to open settings, highlighter settings, select a not assigned set and choose from list of custom highlighter “C#”.

Watch 'em disks!

By Henning Eiben in Software 0 Comment

Has ever a hard-disk failed on you? That is the moment when your whole life re-runs in front of you. You try to remember: what did you save on that disk, is there some other copy? But what if this was your disk containing the backup of your workstation? This was the disk that should never-ever fail!

Well, I had to mourn such an incident, so I looked what could be done; read more at my article SMART monitoring on Windows