Pallet, Come Home!
I lost a pallet last week.
Well, actually, I didn’t lose it. It shipped out of the warehouse OK but got lost in the paperwork shuffle of our LTL carrier. The Bill of Lading listed two pallets, but the driver only signed for one. That caused a chain reaction throughout the carrier while the shipment was in transit. The paperwork shows it left here as two pallets but arrived as one pallet. At some point, someone noticed the driver only signed for one pallet and dropped the second off the end of the universe.
Needless to say, the customer (prepping a container for overseas shipment) was not amused. And because the driver signed for one pallet, everyone (and I mean everyone) at the carrier assumed I must be crazy to think there was a second pallet. It did turn up at the destination terminal — too late to avoid a reship to keep the customer happy but at least it wasn’t lost for all time.
So here’s the newest checklist for shipping:
- Check the order against the Bill
- Check the labels against the order
- Check the pallet count (and make sure they all get PRO stickers)
- Make sure the driver reads the Bill
- Make sure the driver signs the Bill (I have chased a few)
If a loss does occur, make sure you pull as much paperwork as you can find for the shipment. The more references you have the better. Then start calling and keep calling. Start with dispatch at source and destination terminal, then move to OS&D, then call the Rep and have him or her start checking into it. The main problem I encountered is most people look at the Bill of Lading and go no further.
Dropbox fixed!
I just found a new nautilus-dropbox in my update manager! They’ve fixed the segfault issue with cut/paste over SMB shares. Dropbox rules!
Also, the new lanshare feature made syncing my laptop back up insanely quick. It just pulled everything from my desktop dropbox. Very nice.
Crossover Office 9
I just upgraded to Crossover Office 9. It handles Irfanview 4.10 without any tweaks, and it runs Softshares EDI Notepad v5.1 and v6 much better. All the icons are visible now!
The only down side is it creates the menu items in the same folder. So EDI Notepad v6 (in a separate bottle) got put in the same menu as EDI Notepad v5.1. They’re both named EDI Notepad which is a little confusing. I tried renaming one of them, but it didn’t seem to take.
MSE Part 2
I captured some traffic with Wireshark. It looks like it does try using the current user credentials when poking around the network.
Session Setup AndX Request, NTLMSSP_NEGOTIATE Session Setup AndX Response, NTLMSSP_CHALLENGE, Error: STATUS_MORE_PROCESSING_REQUIRED Session Setup AndX Request, NTLMSSP_AUTH, User: FLUENCY\username Session Setup AndX Response Tree Connect AndX Request, Path: \\VECTRA1\HOMES Tree Connect AndX Response, Error: STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME
Once again, it tries every available share and combination of share + extension (COM, EXE, BAT, PIF).
I’ve set up an old XP SP3 laptop with Microsoft Security Essentials to see how well it works. It seems to run much faster then the default Symantec installs that we use. But an odd side effect is it does a network scan when you change it from “Quick” to “Full” (and enroll in the Spynet).
The last scan piled up 280 login attempts in my webserver:
192.168.1.168 - - [10/Mar/2010:03:26:22 -0500] "OPTIONS / HTTP/1.1" 401 465 "-" "Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/5.1.2600"
I do have WebDAV setup with Subversion, but I’ve never used that laptop to access it. That led me to check other logs. Sure enough, Samba had more login attempts using various combinations of the share name(in this case, a share named public):
stat of /var/lib/samba/usershares/public.exe failed. Permission denied stat of /var/lib/samba/usershares/public.ex failed. Permission denied stat of /var/lib/samba/usershares/public.com failed. Permission denied stat of /var/lib/samba/usershares/public.co failed. Permission denied stat of /var/lib/samba/usershares/public.pif failed. Permission denied
MSE hit every Samba server and tried to scan files. It didn’t try to use the current user credentials as far as I can tell. And it all happened towards the end of the scan.
I’m running another full scan now to see what happens.
Vmware – Change Boot Media
The VMWare boot screen flashes by pretty fast in VMWare Server. In fact, too fast to change the boot order (like to launch a rescue CD). Add this to the .vmx file:
bios.bootDelay = "15000"
That will show the boot screen for 15 seconds. And it’s <ESC> to open the boot menu.
Why didn’t I know about this before?
I’ve started making the extra content CDs that used to be handled by the office. They were doing disk copy using Roxio and constantly rebooting when the CDR drive died and took windows with it.
The first thing I did was try to rip the master CDs into ISO images using dd, but the MD5 values never matched and the size of the ISO would vary. Google turned up this site [troubleshooters.com] and an article by Steve Litt that explains the best way to handle failed dd copies. He wrote a script called rawread that I borrowed from to make my copies.
The first step is to call isoinfo:
isoinfo -d -i /dev/cdrom
Grab the Logical Block Size and the Volume size and feed it to dd. The Logical Block size is almost always 2048:
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=gold_master_disk1.iso bs=2048 count=[insert Volume Size here]
That way dd only tries to copy the ISO data, and not the whole CD. In my case each CD was only ~50MB so it cut down a lot of time. And no more “Input/Output error” from dd after running for several minutes.
Dropbox and Nautilus
I love Dropbox. I really do. But it does not play nicely with Nautilus, the default Gnome file manager.
Feb 11 11:25:03 vectra1 kernel: [274603.833487] nautilus[3992]: segfault at 0 ip b5319f90 sp bf81e5c0 error 4 in libnautilus-dropbox.so[b5317000+7000]
Every once in a while while writing to a network share Nautilus crashes and I have to log out and log in again to restart it. I thought it was related to symlinks, but this recent one was from pasting a file into my home directory on the file server.
It’s a known (but apparently unreproducible at Dropbox) bug that’s been listed on the forums. I hoped the recent release of v0.7.105 might fix it. It didn’t.
PCI vs Mac
I’ve been on a learning trend with Apple computers lately. I’ve stayed away from Macs as much as possible (mostly just to keep from having to to tech support for the Production department) but I rebuilt a Powerbook for Marketing and after all the Drobo stuff I’m getting a hang of how to work with them.
I had to fix one of the TimeMachine sparsebundles that got corrupted last week. This week, I’m learning the difference between 5v PCI and 3.3v PCI cards. Evidently, the G5 series decided to go with 3.3v which means the SCSI card for the scanner (once again, Production) won’t work in the computer they want to use as a scanning station. 5v PCI cards are long-short, 3.3v cards are short-long, and cards that can do both are short-long-short-medium. I’m guessing they’re going to get a new scanner after it’s all figured out.
Sound in webapps
I just finished added some audio feedback to the EDI scanning stations. We do everything through an intranet site, which makes scanning very portable (although moving the barcode printer takes some work). One of the main problems is getting audio feedback when scanning. The scanner chirps when it reads, but there’s no audio from the web app that the scan went through.
I’ve been playing around with Soundmanager2, and finally got it working the way I want. I ended up adding a hack to it so I don’t have to adjust my original code. I included sound.js:
/*
* Use soundManager to play a sound
* (like an error) without hitting race condition
* between document ready and soundmanager onload.
* Just eval(error_sound) whenever you want to play it
*
* Be sure to include soundmanager2.js from /js/ folder
*/
var error_sound = '';
var warning_sound = '';
soundManager.url = '/js/swf/';
soundManager.debugMode = false;
soundManager.onready(function(oStatus) {
if (oStatus.success) {
var mysound = soundManager.createSound ({
id: "ping",
url: "/js/swf/ping.mp3"
});
var mysound2 = soundManager.createSound ({
id: "warning",
url: "/js/swf/warn.mp3"
});
}
})
soundManager.onload = function() {
error_sound = 'soundManager.play("ping")';
warning_sound = 'soundManager.play("warning")';
}
I just added eval(error_sound); to my original code wherever I want to play an audio cue. If sound manager loaded OK it plays, otherwise it just fails silently.
