سمعت بالصحافة الصفراء

والآن أشاهدها

You might think it’s better to use the latest standards. Well, in this case it’s not.

Windows 7 x64 (64-bit) with HP Laser Jet 3600n is a nice combination when using the HP Universal driver for Windows 7

Most of things works fine except when it comes to pure pictures or graphics, then you may face the following symptom

A blank paper, followed by another paper with these lines on it:

PCL XL error

Subsystem: KERNEL

Error: IlleagalTag

Operator: 0x??     or      Operator: VendorUnique

Position: 3 or 5 or 15 or may be something else (I think this depends on the application you’re printing from and the document content)

However, the solution for me was simply downloading the Vista x64 driver and use it.

Well, the case is as follow:

Old vCenter server is Windows 2003 32-bit, with SQL 2005 Standard, and VMware vCenter 4.0

New vCenter server is Windows 2008 R2 64-bit, with SQL 2008 Standard, and VMware vCenter 4.1

Both are kept running, so they have different server names, and IP addresses. Which means there are NOTHING common between the two systems, but the client still want to migrate the configuration so they don’t have to re-configure everything on the new environment.

Ok, after reading too many documents and websites and other people experiences, it turned out very simple process.

On old server:

1. Stop the VMware vCenter services.

2. Backup the database using the Management Studio (make full backup)

On the new server:

1. Install SQL server (if you’ll have on the same server) and configure it for both Windows and SQL authentication

2. Create the database “VMware vCenter” (just like the old server database name)

3. Create vmware SQL user, and grant it dbo on the database created in step 2

4. Create the System DSN (64-bit) and make sure to use the account created in step 3

5. Import the backed up database from the old server, then fix the permissions on it

6. Start the vCenter setup and during the setup it will discover the exiting database, and give you an option to upgrade it (it’s version 4.0 after all)

It will take a while, the database can be easily more than 1.5GB, so don’t worry about that.

There is nothing as much annoying as having useless error message. And when you combine this to the poor log entries I’ve found on both Event Log and the Connector text-based log file, you end up so upset and have no clue what the f**k is going on?

The mail system works fine except with sending & receiving from outside (over the internet). At the first, we thought it’s a firewall issue, so we’ve reviewed all the rules, and even we restarted the firewall. But when digging some more, the SMTP service is responding fine to connection from outside. I’ve connected from out of the corporate network (a remote server) and used the simplest method, “telnet ourmailservername 25”.

The command opened normally, and I’ve got the welcome message from the Exchange ESMTP service. OK!!! Let’s continue, helo / ehlo, mail, rcpt commands all works just fine till you start the data. What happened? after accepting data and once I send the <cr>.<cr> command to end the message and instead of getting message ID ********* have been queued for delivery, I got the above stupid message “451 Transaction failed”!!!!!

Three hours of investigation and monitoring went for zero value. Until the networking team decided to accept part of the responsibility and rebooted the internet router ( something between the firewall and the ISP link). Yep, that solved the problem on spot.