Discobar Galaxie @ Leuven

As the re-opening of the Oude Markt (In Leuven ofcourse) is taking longer then expected the opening party has been postponed to June 26th, but do we care ? Hell no ! Discobar Galaxie is worth the wait..

Links:
Discobar Galaxie

PGR2 Paris Booster Pack

At last the ‘Paris Booster Pack’ as it’s now called is available for Project Gotham Racing 2 (and that’s an XBox game). The Paris tracks are pretty sweet and the extra cars are cool. Not that I’m one of the Cerbera addicts and I don’t really see why it needs a special color as most of the people racing it on XBox Live have copied it from Action Replay games anyway. The tracks often a mix from the tight Florence tracks mixed with the wide lanes of Mosow and the sharp corners of Madrid - Quite challenging and don’t forget the pretty nice view you have when racing around in the city. At the same time it seems that some bugfixes have been applied as well (sroll down on the page for a reply from ‘The Boy Chris’ btw) : the game goes a lot smoother from time to time and the names of the other players don’t show up untill the last moment. Before you could often have then entire screen full of player names and you didn’t see the corners coming - Good change. And for those that can’t wait for extra tracks adn cars, seems that another one is coming this summer.

Links:
Paris Booster Pack

Restoring The DataStore

What happened :
Going happy around in our Citrix farm all hell broke loose… One second everything is going around nicely and the next one all the licenses are vanished. Nothing more in the CMC, all users getting ‘you are using non licensed software’ popups and phones that start ringing.

Off we go to MyCitrix and re-add the licenses. Thank god they’re auto-activating so that should help a lot. Problem is that not all our licenses work… 50% of our client packs are non operative. This means we’re down to half our farm capacity… Not good !

As Licensing calls are free with Citrix (hurrah !) a call is opened but soon the guy on the phone (Euro tech support, USA tech makes you cry in agony) declared this was a database corruption and we could go and fu*k ourselves if we didnt pay.

Sweet

Now what ?
Talked a bit to our vendor who came up with a solution. They continued the call I logged with Citrix Euro support and they got a database with our faulty license entry removed. But then they also started asking for extra money.

Sweet

And ?
Off to the newsgroups, Citrix support sites and stuff like that. We decided to restore a backup from before our licensing problems so that was our procedure, at the same time we’d move from database server as we are consolidating those. Now it’s pretty hard to find much documentation on this issue except a small note in the Advanced Concepts Guide.

Now in the end it all boils down to this :

• See that you get a good copy of your Datastore on an SQL server.
• Open the mf20.dsn file on your citrix server.
• Change the database name to the one you configured.
• Change the server location to your server, preferebly you create a DNS CName for this.
• Open a command line and run the DSMaint application, use the Config argument and provide username, password and the location to the dsn file you just modified. Best practice is to drag & drop this onto your command line to prevent typo’s
• Restart your IMA service
• If you have some servers to do you can throw the DSMaint configuration and service stop and restart (net stop imaservice / net start imaservice) in a batchfile that you run on each server. The dsn file you’ll have to change on every server if it contains a client identifier.

Try this procedure first with a server you don’t really use that much - a live test machine or a management box. When those go smooth (open the CMC and connect to the local server to see if all is ok) you can do the rest.

Rebooting ?
This procedure goes smooth without rebooting a thing. To be safe I restarted the DataCollector in the end. You could also recreate the localhost cache (DSMaint RecreateLHC) to speed up things.

Citrix Issues

Whow.. A week of Citrix problems has passed.. Corruption of the DataStore is not nice, fixed it in the end tho with a little help from nice people at nice companies (you know who you are). As the documentation is pretty grey on that I banged this article together. Not that it provides much more info (if any) that the stuff already available but well, now you know the procedure actually works. So it might also for you ;-)

HP Blade Motherboards Are Nasty

Fuck it has been busy ! The Blade’s just keep acting up and as far as I know we have a motherboard up in Amsterdam / Houston where they have some kind of techsupport or design centre.. Not that I care, I just want working hardware.
So what else has been going on ? Breakpoint was great. Cool party, cool pictures, cool people - with on the way home a visit to Zeigeist / Civitas in Bochum.
After that I’ve just spend a week in Bergamo providing post-migration support in our Hub. With this our Citrix farm reaches over 400 concurrent users so thats nice.
Pfff.. And then I got a call that they want to postpone the installation of my kitchen with a month, I’ll have to look into that. To end postive, I’ve managed to finish the reservations page for Primary Star, the C64 party I’m organizing in august. Should you want to come over and say hi you can fill in the reservation sheet.