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Showing posts from August, 2009

Scheduled Tasks on HA Pairs in Windows

Sometimes you might find yourself deciding that a Scheduled task is required for some report or file transfer on a production system. The production system, however, is part of a high availability (HA) pair. The particular method of dealing with HA in this particular ( hypothetical of course ) case works by moving an IP Address called a Virtual IP address between the servers of the HA Pair. Whichever server holds the VIP is the current node. Your application needs to know if it is executing on the current node before starting. Wrap your application in a very simple snippet of Comand Line script that: Looks for the VIP in ipconfig. If no errors found then jump to the section of your script that launches your application or another script to do the task. If an error is found then jump to the section of your script that notifies the log. @echo off REM #Testing FIND in IPCONFIG SET VIPTHATWORKS="192.168.122.1" SET VIPTHATFAILS="192.168.122.127" ipconfig /all | find %

Things to do with an iPod

I have had my iPod 8gb Nano ( Video ) for about 4 months now and I have been having heaps of fun with it. I know it's not cool like an iPod Touch or iPhone but it is still plenty powerful. I have tried using it with Linux and although it is supported in Amarok ( I am still on Amarok 1.4 due to lack of Fedora packages for the new version which actually has replay-gain for Xine included ) I have found that the support for pod casts is a little limited. For example: I like to download all the pod casts in a feed at once so that I can catch up to the current feed. So I stick with iTunes. This means sticking with a windows pc or if you are lucky to own one, a mac. Initially I spent heaps of time building the perfect play list on my iTunes and moving that over to the iPod. This was fun but only for a short while. The main problem being that no matter how many weeks of music you have on your iPod, you still end up with the feeling that you have heard it all before. I was struck by t