AMD 6950 - No Signal

So I bought myself a new Asus AMD 6950 DirectCU II card this past week. After plugging it in and hooking up my LCD, I got greeted with a "No Signal" messaged on the screen. After hours of troubleshooting and testing DVI ports, power, cables, other hardware etc, I decided I would return to the shop where I bought it. After them troubleshooting, it turned out that the DVI ports were faulty on the card. Odd thing is that the DVI ports worked using a DVI-to-D-Sub converter. Anyway, I see a lot of posts on the net regarding "No Signal" on tech forums and hopefully this post will save you some time troubleshooting.

Failtards Ep.1

I love looking back on IT articles that "predict" the future. Some how these experts have had enough foresight to accurately predict events in one of the most unpredictable industries known to man. This beauty found in InfoWorld from Brian Livingston, who couldn't help but throw his credentials around like they actually meant something, predicted that Symbian would be a leading OS. Microsoft would obviously dwindle into the Ether as most freetards would have you know. And here we are, Microsoft owns Nokia and the other cellphone manufacturers named in the article are somewhat irrelevant today. Sigh. Freetards. Read the full article by following this link:

http://books.google.co.za/books?id=PzkEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA1&dq=infoworld%202002&pg=PA30#v=onepage&q&f=false

C0000034 & Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1: How NOT To Install It.

It's tuesday morning. The shit storm that is a Monday is gone. Yay! Sort of... Anyway, a collegue of mine decided to take it upon himself to install Server 2008 R2 SP1. Anyway, upon arriving at work I am greeted with a rather paniced co-worker. After installing SP1 the server refused to boot up. Instead, all you see is a a lovely black screen with an error code C0000034. Nice!

After about 5 minutes of Googling, I discovered the cause and resolution to the error. My questioning of my co-worker confirmed the causes outlined in the article.

Turns out that one should not install SP1 and Windows updates at the same time. Complete one set of updates before continuing with the other.

The fix is rather easy to apply. The solution provides you with a VB script which will remove the pending Windows updates and allow the SP1 to finish installing.

The complete fix can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975484

Anonymous Missed Call/Voicemail Messages from ExUM

Had an issue recently with our Exchange Unified Messaging deployment which integrated to our Avaya SES. All notifications originating from calls within our branch would appear to come from Anonymous, whereas calls from external PSTN's would show some Caller ID information.

After running a SIP trace using Microsoft Network Monitor, I managed to so see in the SIP INVITE portion of the call that the SIP address was "FROM sip:anonymous@anonymous.invalid". This indicated that the problem lay on the Avaya CM as no Caller ID info was being passed to the SES.

After some digging on the Avaya CM it turned out to be a simple issue of adding the internal dialing numbers format to the public-unknown-numbering section of the Avaya CM and associating the new table entry to the SIP trunk going to the ExUM server.

Why oh why?

Our Linux dept. has had a brain-fart and decided that all their Linux servers should use single sign-on. Funny I thought to myself. All my ebil M$ monopoly servers do that shit straight out of the box. Oh well, I thought to myself lets hear the guy out. So after listening about how Kerberos and LDAP are the same thing and that there is Active Directory and Active Directory Lite (Lite was LDAP only and AD was Kerberos only) I started to wonder. How in the hell would they ever get it to work if they lost the plot already.

So I left it at that because as you probably already know, Microsoft engineers dont really know much except click OK and restart blue-screened servers. Then I got thinking, OMG this will become my problem. Shit on a donkey I don't have time for that. I have like malware and Sasser to eradicate. So being the proactive moron I usually am I decided I will investigate this myself.

In goes the openSUSE ISO, installed it via VM and now I watching paint dry as it attempts to install 355MB of package updates. Anyway I'm now on hour 3 of having done nothing but watch it struggle to get an IP and to attempt to install updates. I dont have much hope of it booting after updating but thats what snapshots are for.

FML

Edit:
OMF. Running the YAST Software Manager to install 5 updates results in the windows spewing out complicated error messages. So after closing the package manager and opening it again now indicates that 4 of the 5 updates were installed even though YAST complained that they FAILED. Guess which app complains about installing. Yep, you guessed it... Flash.

Edit:
I have a solution to the issue. I right-cliked the VM profile for the Linux install and selected delete. Problem solved. They can figure out thier own SSO. My shit just works with zero hassle. Stupid fucking Linux shit.