Dave's Site

Nothing to exciting here, but its the 3rd or 4th time in recent history I’ve had to go looking for this, so I figured I would write it down finally. There are times when a domain attached PC has RDP disabled for some reason. The following snippet, which I adapted from http://oreilly.com/windows/archive/server-hacks-remote-desktop.html makes it a little quicker. Run this from a cmd prompt as a user with admin rights on the remote host. [Read More]

A while back a co-worker told me about Chocolately. I had taken a quick look and it seemed interesting, but I kind of forgot about it after that. Well today, I was setting up a new machine and I had a handful of things I wanted to install. I was thinking to myself what a bummer it was going to be to have fire up Google and search for each of the package’s download sites. [Read More]

I’ve recently been tasked with migrating a Windows 2003 Small Business Server to Windows 2013 Standard. Without getting into too much of the back story, the client purchased Windows 2003 SBS many moons ago, however they never leveraged anything except Active Directory and File Sharing. They use their hosting provider’s web mail, and don’t have an appetite to change that. Here are we many moons later and they are ready to upgrade. [Read More]

I recently got the opportunity to play with a new Dell T420, and I decided I would run ESXi 5 on it. Background My day job does not really allow me much hands on access to hardware any more so its been a while since I’ve gotten to build a new server, but I recently got the chance to work on this as a side project. The server came pre-installed with Windows 2012 Standard. [Read More]

I finally got around to picking up a Chromecast. I had read some reviews so I didn’t have any high expectations, but I couldn’t resist the urge to tinker with it given its price point. Boy was I disappointed…. The instructions it came with made it look like it was going to be the easiest thing I ever hooked up. The physical hookup was simple enough, but then it came time to get it hooked up to my wireless. [Read More]

Recently I kicked off an effort to perform a long over due upgrade of the version of Django I am using on a project. Without getting into all the gory details of why, I need to upgrade from Django 1.2 to 1.5. Technically I don’t really have to go to 1.5, but I figure since I’m going to be messing with it anyway I should probably just get current. This post will journal my adventure down this road for better or worse. [Read More]

So today I was trying to clean up some of my Sphinx build warnings when rendering this site. I got everything fixed so I had no errors or warnings except for this little guy right here (truncated for easier reading): ~/dpetzel.info.tinkerer/2011/12/16/developing_a_command_parser_based_zenpack.rst:328: WARNING: nonlocal image URI found: https://external.domain/image.png I know I’m linking to an external image. I don’t want to store my binary images in my Github repo . I search google for a bit and couldn’t find anything. [Read More]

For anyone that might have been following along I’ve been trying out different solutions for static site generation of this site. I’d been running Pelican for a bit, but I was getting annoyed a bit with the limited directives. I’ve gotten used to Sphinx at work for some project documentation and I wanted to see if I could leverage some of that. A little googling later and I found Tinkerer which is based on Sphinx but adds some workflow around the process to make blogging with Sphinx easier. [Read More]

Nothing to eye opening here but I wanted to collect some thoughts and insights I had this week. While I’m more of an operations guy, a while back I hacked up a Django based web application which uses Celery and RabbitMQ. I have recent set out to do some performance analysis on it.

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As I have started to become proficient with Chef I’ve also gotten used to using the minitest-chef-handler for writing integration tests for my cookbooks. This quick post is to capture an approach I’ve grown to like for doing HTTP tests of slow starting web applications. I’ve noticed that many services will return from an /sbin/service mysapp start well before the application has fully started and is accepting HTTP connections.

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