GWT for C#

Found an interesting project the other day, basically GWT for c#. Except, the cool thing about it is that it does not generate javascript directly from the c#-code (as Script# does), instead it generates javascript the MSIL-bytecode, meaning you can theoretically write in any language that compiles to MSIL (VB.Net, IronPython, Boo). Also, the project states that is should be possible to debug the compiled code inside Visual Studio, something that afaik Script# cannot do.

Here you can find the initial announcement on the Alt.Net yahoo group.

Optimizing Tortoise SVN Cache (TSVNCache.exe) disk io

Since I got my new computer with an SSD inside, disk io of the TSVNCache.exe process hasn't really been much of a problem. However, I sometimes need to do some stuff on my old computer, as not everything have been moved as of yet, and TSVNCache.exe really makes it sluggish. Today I decided to try to do something about it, and I found this page on how to optimize disk io of Tortoise SVN Cache .

Pausing in a batch script

While debugging my hybrid dos/python invokation via psexec, I needed a way to pause the windows batch script for while (I tried to figure out the path of the file once psexec had copied it to the remote computer). I found this way of doing it, which seems to work on both Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

@ping -n 30 -w 1000 0.0.0.1 > NUL

Executing python script via psexec

Had to do some file copying on a couple of servers today, involving quite a few directories and files. It seemed like a really boring/repetitive task to do manually, begging to be automated. As usual when there are many steps to be executed and a human involved (or, atleast when I'm involved) it is quite easy to miss something and create a mess out of it.

The problem is that those servers are running Windows, so there is only one way that I know of to automate the file copying, by using psexec from the pstools suite to execute a script on the list of servers. A windows batch-script would probably have worked, however, as there was quite a few steps involved, and I'm not really confident in writing batch-scripts, I decided to try to use a python script for the file copying instead.

The problem with psexec is that it can only copy one file at a time to be executed remotely, and as python was not in the %PATH of the servers I had to find a way to make psexec copy the script, and run it, and then run the python script. One way would of course be to have the python script as a separate file, but that would mean I had to copy it separately from the psexec invocation.

Instead I decided to try to embed the python program inside the batch script, thereby creating a hybrid batch/python program, a file which is valid both for the batch script and for the python interpreter. A quick search revealed this post, which contained an embryo for the hybrid. Adapting it worked quite nicely while running locally.

rem = """-*-Python-*- script
@echo off
rem -------------------- DOS section --------------------
c:\python25\python %0 %*
goto exit

"""
# -------------------- Python section --------------------
print "hi from python"

DosExitLabel = """
:exit
rem """

I saved this as test.bat and tried to invoke it with the following command:

psexec \\computer -u <username> -s -c -f test.bat

Psexec runs the script fine, but python fails to find test.bat. After some debugging, it turned out that the test.bat file the psexec copies to the server ends up in c:\windows\system32 directory. However, I really could not get python to execute the script, and I have no idea why.

After some time banging my head against the wall, and littering the script with various attempts at invoking python in strange ways, was to pipe the script to the python-interpreter. This works like a charm. Full solution:

rem = """-*-Python-*- script
@echo off
rem -------------------- DOS section --------------------
type %~f0 | c:\python25\python - %*
goto exit

"""
# -------------------- Python section --------------------
print "hi from python"

DosExitLabel = """
:exit
rem """

Installing Windows 7 on Lenovo Thinkpad T500

Got a new laptop two weeks ago, a Lenovo Thinkpad T500 with P8400 processor running at 2.4 GHz, 15" non-led tft at 1600x1050 and switchable graphics (Intel 4500 integrated and Radeon HD3650). It seems really cool running, which was my number one complaint with my old laptop (3 year old HP nc8430/T7200@2GHz/Radeon X1600). Although, I should point out that I haven't used the radeon graphics of the Thinkpad yet. It could suffer from the same problems that plagues the HP, if you use an external monitor, the Radeon automatically kicks into "high performance mode", making it extremely hot and therefor very noisy. See this thread on HP's business support forums for more info.

Other than installing Windows 7 on it I haven't had much time to mess around with it (it's been alot of work the last couple of weeks). Anyway, two days ago I finally got the last missing pieces for the new setup (2 GB extra DDR3-memory) and decided to finally get around to installing the Intel X25-M G2 inside it.

Although I didn't have much installed on the harddrive, I had already figured out and installed the correct Win7 drivers on it. To spare me the boring job of doing this all over again, I opted to use Clonezilla to copy the contents of the harddrive to the new SSD.

Only problem was that the built-in drive was 320GB and the SSD only 160GB. Due to this, Clonezilla wouldn't let me clone the partition as it stood. Scratching my head for a while, I googled and found the ntfsresize utility. After issuing the command "ntfsresize -s 100G /dev/sda1" I started waiting. And waiting. I switched console and ran top, noticing ntfsresize drawing 100% cpu with nearly no IO. A good 30 minutes after starting it, I interrupted it and decided to re-install Windows all over again.

I powered off the computer, disassembled the "cage" for the harddrive and installed the ssd instead. Booted up and installed Windows 7, and the drivers (which was quite quick, now that I had sorted out which ones were necessary). Then I booted with clonezilla once again, to take a backup of the freshly installed system, in case I should screw something up during install of the necessary programs.

These are the Lenovo Thinkpad T500 Windows 7 drivers I wound up installing:

• ricoh multicard reader - got rid of 2 unknown devices
• system interface - needed for hotkeys I believe
• hotkey
• power management driver and power manager
• management engine and serial over lan - got rid of 1 or 2 unknown devices
  
• ultranav1 and ultranav utility
• switchable graphics
• easyeject driver/application - I haven't yet installed this one, not sure that I need it
  

Additionally, after trying out rmclock and a few other utilities which apparently do not work on Windows 7 (or atleast not with my setup), I tried a (non-free) utility called Cpugenie. I mostly use it for cpu-temperature readings, but can optionally also control the speedstep / downclocking of the cpu for you. All in all, the P8400 processor inside my Thinkpad T500 seems really, really cool-running compard to my T7200 from my old HP nc8430.

Setting up rdiff-backup 1.2.5 on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04

I wanted to backup a server running Debian Lenny 5.0, to a slightly older box running Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 using rdiff-backup. As rdiff-backup complains if the version-numbers on both sides are not the same I had to upgrade the older box to version 1.2.5 of rdiff-backup.

aptitude install librsync-dev python-dev
tar xzvf tar xzvf rdiff-backup-1.2.6.tar.gz
cd rdiff-backup-1.2.6
python setup.py install --prefix=/usr/local

I have previously used standard rsync for efficiently mirror the contents of a server to the backup server. This meant that I also had to change my backupscript slightly, to accomodate rdiff-backup usage.

#!/bin/sh

EXCLUDE="/var/lib/mysql/ /tmp/ /proc/ /sys/ /dev/ /bin/ /sbin/ /lib/ /usr/"
INCLUDE="/usr/local/"

exclude=""
for i in $EXCLUDE; do
   exclude="$exclude --exclude $i"
done

include=""
for i in $INCLUDE; do
   include="$include --include $i"
done

# rsync  --archive --delete --sparse $exclude $include --rsh=ssh / backupuser@backupserver:root
rdiff-backup $include $exclude / backupuser@backupserver::/home/backupuser/rdiff-backup/

How to recycle an Application Pool on Windows Server 2008 from command line

For a client I wanted to implement automatic recycling of an Application Pool on Windows Server 2008, to be called from an event handler in nagios. I scorched the net for possible solutions, and found many suggestions, including iisreset.exe, iisapp.vbs and various wmi-based scripting techniques, none of which worked out.

After a while, nearly giving up, I stumbled upon this page which showed the correct technique:

c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe recycle apppool "website.com"