Up to Something

You have to give Microsoft credit. They were 66% correct. That’s about 150% better than normal. Seriously. Todays fun is imported from the land of broken-wmi-crap.

The Bug

After the super-exciting side affect of an asshat package manager, a Microsoft standard-issue-busted-software problem has cropped up:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: MSExchangeSA
Event Category: Monitoring
Event ID: 9097
Description:
The MAD Monitoring thread was unable to connect to 
WMI, error '0x8004100e'.

The Microsoft Article purported to fix this is 33% wrong. They list the major components, and the MSExchangeSA error does indeed subside. Side-note: I found that I had to re-do the steps listed in the TID - AFTER a reboot. ???

The Tragedy

However, I discovered a new pain after my joy: the Message Tracking Center returns WBEM error 0x80041010. Translate this, “missing wmi class”. I did a number of searches (lots of hits from mis-informed TID-spouting ‘do-holes) and finally located this article in Google Groups. He walks through re-creating WMI, and other neat things. I skipped ahead, as I had done all of this before.

I followed his testing advice - I couldn’t get the remote testing to work - local testing showed that root\microsoftExchangeV2 only had 73 out of 74 classes. Frustrated I briefly considered a by-hand comparison with a functioning server. I chose to plow ahead, based on this guys informative nature and clear expertise - and it paid off:

The Missing Command

mofcomp.exe -n:root\cimv2\applications\exchange “c:\winnt\system32\wbem\msgtrk.mof”

In my case the command was actually:

mofcomp.exe -n:root\cimv2\applications\exchange msgtrk.mof

The Apathy

This worked when Microsoft Failed. I feel semi-indifferent. I think this is Microsofts chief tactic for dealing with “haters who want stuff that works”. Entropy from the titanic marketing efforts makes the efforts get them to change them almost worthless.

As a side note, I did submit feedback at the support site. Maybe someone will see it?

Why is it that normal people don’t run more successful projects? See this ticket regarding Paludis. Paludis is a C++ replacement for Portage. Portage is a squirrels nest and even though the ebuild system is pretty nice, portage itself is pretty lame.

Disclosure

In the interest of fairness, I would point out: The Paludis site flatly refuses to say anything about the project. Therefore being run by a complete asshole isn’t contradictory to any previous statements.

Summary

The gist of the ticket is that Paludis doesn’t support certain types of parallelism and the developer(s) refuse to do anything sane in order to prevent, notify or clearly document the danger of it. This danger is apparently readily realized by users.

Examples of sanity might be:

• Warn people it’s not supported.
• Make some sort of method for restricting parallel execution.
• ADD A NOTE TO A FAQ

Evidence

What does the Paludis think of a notice about the dangers of parallel runs of the software they publish:

chaoflow: “What about preventing parallel paludis runs or at least a FAQ or some other way of explicitly telling people, that parallel paludis operations are not supported?”
ciaranm: “Preventing parallel runs is a security hole. And an FAQ entry is pointless – parallel executions are fine so long as they stick to certain operations.”
chaoflow: “Wouldn’t it be nice to have documented, which operations are fine for parallel execution?”
ciaranm: “Not really. If you don’t already know, you shouldn’t be doing it at all.”

Very Dense

This is clearly beyond the scope of Paludis. See this conversation:

chaoflow: “What about preventing parallel paludis runs?”
ciaranm: “Preventing parallel runs is a security hole.”
chaoflow: “Could you elaborate on that?”
ciaranm: “It’s an inversion. A non-root user can obtain the locks and prevent root from being able to do anything for an arbitrarily long time.”

This stunning display of logic and intellect is what passes for success over at Paludis. Even I can think of a few methods to help prevent this:

• Make an override mechanism. Easy enough, right?
• Enable super-users to kill the offending process.
• Put the lockfile in a secured-location.
• Use shared memory, and make use of ipcrm to kill rogue locks.
• Observe that a security /hole/ involves some sort of exploitation of a system. A DoS involves prevention of normal operation. This doesn’t even make a legitimate DoS.

Blackhole

The stupidity doesn’t end there:

chaoflow: “And way way better would be some simple locking inside of paludis preventing bad things from happening.”
ciaranm: Paludis is not there to protect you from yourself.

ciaranm must see this as an incredibly clever way of saying “go f* yourself.”. ciaranm seems to be an incredibly dense idiot. Why is an f’d up system preferable to some logic which may lead to the inconvenience of cleaning up a rogue lock?

Paludis IS a security hole - It just might fuck up your system, if you run it in parallel with itself, but it certainly won’t try to tell you that. I am guilty too.

Typo is a Rails app. Rails is a Ghetto. While I’m not sure what it has to do with torturing the Jewish people, I think that Zed might be a Jew. I digress.

Rails is clearly caught in a ghetto. It’s strange and suffers from strange documentation. One example of something well-known only to Rails people are the DB Migration steps:

• 1. backup your db
• 2. Install your update / new instance / whatever
• 3. issue “rake db:migrate”

It wasn’t known to me. Apparently it wasn’t known to most of the Internet. How did I find the magical command “db:migrate”? I found it with the same steps I used to find almost all things about Typo: I crawled through blogs and groups and everything else. I have never found a single site that had concise documentation. Everything is simply people blogging about how a particular problem was solved. I have never found any upgrade guides. This search also found me another goodie: purge your sessions table before the 5.0.3 startup.

I think that the entire Rails documentation process is based on hype. Either you pay attention to the hype, or you’re doomed. The way to understand it is to use it. The way to use it is either bloody or all-consuming. The hype is how the word is spread. Once I knew how to use the secret db:migrate, I found TONS about it.

Typo is the child of Rails. I couldn’t find an upgrade guide, but I did find an upgrade guy. David, the Nihilist, Gibbons. He is my Typo/Rails upgrade guy. He has worked with Rails and for a while was the best sysadmin that PlanetArgon ever had. David has helped me with more simple problems than I can count.

The last problem which I had was errant notifiers in Typo. I tried (and failed) to post comments. I tried to see what was failing. I turned on debug mode. Nothing. Not a damn thing. I went into settings attempted to disable notification. It didn’t work, but I didn’t notice. Still no debug messages.

Well, at length David did a little SQL magic.

update users set notify_via_jabber='f';
update users set notify_via_email='f';

Wow. Well, his history with Typo gave him something that I didn’t have: a mistrust for the admin interface. I don’t blame the Typo people for this crap, but I do blame the lack of docs for everything else. I guess it’s time to get out of the ghetto.

Show up to work on Wednesday, say December 7th, for instance. Notice that everything in the office is gone. What do you think next?

• a. Gee, I think that we were robbed. (Wait, the two expensive client-computers are still here).
• b. Gee, I think that the powers that be are firing us all today.

If you guessed ‘b.’, then you were right. Let me tell you, since then some really exciting alternative truths have been circulated about me.

In the near future, please look for my new blog…

Task: Upgrade Symantec Antivirus for Microsoft Exchange.
Diffculty: Symantec Continues to Suck.

Despite a clear desire to escape from these things it can be difficult. Todays installment brought a new error: “Please Insert Disk 1”. Despite all my best attempts, I could not divine what disk ‘1’ was/is.

After much searching, I finally found a link reporting that this bug was fixed - ??? - and it was related to “Installing MSE gateway from removable media”. Since I couldn’t find a download link, or other way to update, I copied the entire install directory to my c:\ drive, and viola! It works. Yay!

Microsoft Exchange, the pithy "message server of the masses". Running atop the 'venerable' Windows 2003 Small Business Server. It calmly neglects everything except it's beloved Outlook. Which in turn neglects everything except it's cancerous host: Windows.

Microsoft Assist (paid) phone support, separated by distance, culture, and of course, source code, fails to be able to address most Exchange issues which don't already have a fix in the Microsoft Support site.

When you call support, it's reasonable to expect that if an existing TID could fix it, you would have found it rather than piss away two bucks and change ($250 - $500) on a support ticket. Despite that, every IT man worth his salt would never contest the right and desire of support to see to the basics before proceeding to the difficult.

Today's incident began in June of '05, and continues today. Microsoft Exchange 2003, running on Small Business Server 2003. Service Pack 0, Service Pack 1 and now, improved with Service Pack 2. We have a lingering Information Store crash. Now we need evidence that Exchange Sucks. (Or, is my issue with Microsoft, Support, Closed Source software.....)
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