Daniel Schneller's Blog

We have repeatedly run into problems with our JBoss application servers not being able to start after a Windows system reboot, because their configured network ports (e. g. 1099) had already been claimed by some other process.It took quite a while to find the reason, because often just trying again several times without stopping or starting any other programs, it would suddenly succeed.What turned out to be the reason is the dynamic port allocation for ports above 1024 (so called ephemeral ports). If any process requests a random port, it may get one of those you would like to use for your own applications.On Windows 2000/2003 Server installations as well as on Windows XP Pro you can reserve port ranges (even if they only cover a single port) for your applications. Effectively they are not reserved for anything specific, but just excluded from the dynamic allocation. To do so, create or edit the following registry value (type REG_MULTI_SZ/Multi-String Value): HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM…

Today I was suprised to see a video in Totem with very strange colors. It almost looks as if one color component is missing. I was alredy looking for problems with Totem on the net, when I noticed that on the second screen of my dual head setup everything was fine. Moving the window half-way between the two screens gives me one half with the right and one half with wrong colors.It seems to affect different players (Xine and Mplayer, too) and all sorts of video material (tried DVD, mpg and xvid).Though I do not know for sure, I suspect the latest upgrade package that also upgraded the nvidia driver. If I do not find another solution I will try downgrading to the previous version again.

Over on the MySQL Index Analyzer site I have just released version 0.04 as a downloadable package.This is the first GUI version that allows real analysis and has more features than the command line version.A quick overview of what is new:Swing GUIAnalysis features as on the command lineCopying of generated ALTER TABLE statements to the clipboardInformation on data and index size distributionRudimentary analysis of possible disk space savingsSo go have a look :)

"The Register" has an interesting article called Dumb customers and dumber software standards that I recommend reading.It is about interoperability between companies and their software products and that much innovation could be gained on all sides should they aim to work closer together. A core sentence is Customers should not be deterred from participating in standards groups for fear of giving away business plans or valuable competitive information, Snow added. [...] "We have stuff we do in the financial services business - I don't speak about that stuff at places like this or in standards organizations because there's a potential loss of competitive advantage. On the other hand, we have a lot of other stuff that isn't core to our business that we'd be better served to commodify [sic]," he said..I definitely recommend having a look.

Over on my MySQL Index Analyzer blog I just posted two screenshots of the first working GUI drafts. If you are interested, you will have to check this version out from the SVN repository, I will prepare a new distribution package soon.

Yesterday I installed an Ubuntu (Dapper Drake) kernel upgrade through the system upgrade mechanism. The new version is 2.6.15-27-686. Today, when I tried to boot, I just got a console logon, X11 refused to start because of problems with the configuration.The following log was output to /var/log/Xorg.0.log, but from what I could see, the messages were contradictory. First the NVIDIA GPU is found and several messages from the module are displayed, but at the end of the log it says Failed to load the NVIDIA kernel module!. (II) NVIDIA X Driver 1.0-8762 Mon May 15 13:09:21 PDT 2006 (II) NVIDIA Unified Driver for all Supported NVIDIA GPUs (II) Primary Device is: PCI 01:00:0 (--) Chipset NVIDIA GPU found (--) Chipset NVIDIA GPU found ... (II) Setting vga for screen 0. (II) Setting vga for screen 1. (**) NVIDIA(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32 (==) NVIDIA(0): RGB weight 888 (==) NVIDIA(0): Default visual is TrueColor (==) NVIDIA(0): Using gamma correction (1.0, 1.0, 1.0) (**) NVIDIA(0…

Another one of those reminder posts: How to prevent the reboot triggered by the Windows automatic update feature.Disable automatic updates completely. Not recommended.Change the policy. Recommended.Start - Run - gpedit.mscLocal Group Policy - Computer Configuration - Administrative Templates - Windows - Components - Windows UpdatesIf you do not see the last element, use the context menu on Administrative Templates to add a new template. Pick the wuau.adm template and close the dialogs. Windows Updates should now show up.Activatge "No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates Installations" and/or use a different warning interval.On XP Home go to or create the following registry key/value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \Software\Policies \Microsoft\Windows \WindowsUpdate\AU\NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers (Dword) and set it to either 0 (allow reboots) or 1 (disallow reboots).

As did last week's Craig Mullins of dbazine.com I wrote a short post about the LogBuffer recently when I found it in my Blog's referrer list and was promptly asked if I would like to compile one myself. So here am I am, welcoming all of you to the the 9th issue of the Log Buffer, a Carnival of the Vanities for the DBA community. Once again you will find a plethora of links to all sorts of information on the one thing that keeps many of us both fed and sometimes close to blank despair. Myself being some sort of a mixture between a software developer and database admin I have had a fair amount of time over the last years to get experience especially with MySQL. I did some work with the MS SQL server, too, so I am happy to have at least one item to cover for this faction: Joseph Sack made sort of a mental note about SQL Server 2005 Instant File Initialization on his SQL Server blog. If you have been unnerved by waiting for your SQL Server to physically fill up its data files bef…