Agentless Bandwidth Testing on Windows

I needed BWping and HTTPing running on Windows for bandwidth and latency testing of some 3G WAN tails so I compiled them using Cygwin. They can be found here and here respectively.

I find QCheck to be a nice tool for bandwidth testing on Windows systems, but it does require a Windows system either side of the link you’re testing.

Telstra Mobile Network - Network Time Problem and 2008 DST Changes

Today's been a weird day due to the fact that both my Nokia N95 and my wife's Nokia E51 rolled back from AEDT to AEST. I'm the only one that noticed it though.

In the past us Tasmanians would go to daylight savings times about 3 weeks ahead of our mainland counterparts that participated in daylight savings (South Australia, Victoria, ACT, New South Wales) and then change back at the same time.

Last year an agreement was reached for the states that participated in daylight savings (except Western Australia, who've introduced a DST trial for 3 years) to change to daylight savings on the last Sunday in October and change back on the first Sunday in April. The appropriate State departments promulgated their DST changes around March/April last year.

Thankfully organisations like Microsoft responded promptly with DST patches. Unfortunately, organisations like Nokia and Telstra ignored the changes and made no provision to cater for these changes.

I've just spent half an hour on the phone with Telstra explaining what the problem is and possible remediation steps to get the problem resolved. Apparently their mobile phone helpdesk has had an incredible spike in calls today, with the bulk of them about the DST change.

So the point of this post is if you're responsible for devices that require accurate time, or have their time synchronised, make yourself aware of local DST changes and plan for changes and also have contingency plans for when providers/suppliers are slack. If you're responsible for systems that span multiple timezones and/or countries, then you need to keep an eye on resources such as Microsoft's Hot Topics for Daylight Saving Time changes, which helps aggregate these changes into one resource.

I wonder how many people are going to be an hour late to work tomorrow?

AutoCAD and that Awful Network License Manager (FLEXlm)

I recently had a problem with AutoCAD 2006, the Network License Server (aka FLEXnet 10.1.5) and a borrowed network license.

The problem was that a laptop had borrowed a license and the hard drive died several days after.

A support call lodged with Autodesk resulted in a "wait for the borrowed license to expire", even after escalating the request to a supervisor. Sorry, not good enough. The annual maintenance fee paid to Autodesk should more than make up for either an immediate remedial action (ie an administrative return process that actually works), or a temporary key re-issue.

So I started Googling. I Googled some more and became thoroughly depressed. Yet another one of those well-known, but not one of those well-documented, products. I'll save my rant about large software companies who don't care about their customers for another day.

There was one useful poster on the Autodesk forums, who was careful with his information in a bid to retain his posting privileges to the Autodesk forums. Based on some of his information, I was able to finally come up with a solution.

The FLEXnet licensing "solution" under Windows provides a GUI front end (called LMTOOLS) to the lmutil command line utility that is used to manage FLEXnet license manager under Unix.

The last tab of the LMTOOLS utility is called borrowing and it's supposed to be used to be able to manage licenses that support borrowing. However it doesn't work out of the box and furthermore Autodesk do not recommend nor support the use of this tab for their licenses.

For anyone that wants to get it working, you need to go to the Utilities tab, leave Vendor Name blank and enter the path to the license file containing the floating licenses. Click Override Path. This will set the default path to the license file. In Vendor Name, enter 'adskflex' and use the same path as the previous step, then click Add Vendor Path. This will enter the vendor path for Autodesk products to point to the license file. You shold now be able to go to the Borrowing tab and click List Currently Borrowed Features to see the borrowed licenses and to also use the Return Borrowed Licenses Early button.

In my case, the Perform Status Enquiry on the Server Status tab was showing the AutoCAD license as being borrowed (by the presence of a 'linger' value), but the List Currently Borrowed Features command on the Borrowed tab indicated that no licenses are borrowed. This was most likely due to the fact that I had consolidated several different vendors' FLEXnet licenses under the one FLEXnet license server to improve license server reliability (which it actually did - a whole heap of ongoing random license server crashes disappeared once consolidated)

So, it appears that the Network License server + utilities are half-baked and the only resolution I had according to Autodesk was to wait the 2-odd months for the license to expire.

In a final act of desperation I started up the Network License service and watched its progress using Sysinternals' Process Monitor and found the location of the stored borrowed license. The borrowed license was stored at:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Macrovision\FLEXlm\adskflexborrow

I would expect to find an 'adskflexborrow' file on a Unix system that hosts a FLEXnet license server, for those people running on Unix.

After backing up this file and stopping and starting the Network License Service I was able to reissue the license.

Why the Autodesk Help Desk weren't able to tell me this is beyond me...

Windows XP Netlogon 5719 Errors

Had a new PC to remotely install at a client site. The site is running Windows Server 2003 Domain Controllers and makes use of GPOs to manage the settings and software installation. I added the PC to the domain and placed it in the correct OU for the necessary software installation and rebooted. I was very surprised to not see any files being shifted from the server to the PC. Logged in remotely as Administrator and found that the User policies had been applied, but not the Computer policies.
A look through the Event Log found the dreaded Netlogon 5719 error - "no domain controller could be found". Tried locking down the network card to use 100Mbps/Full Duplex. No joy. Tried setting ExpectedDialupDelay in HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Netlogon\Parameters. Still no joy.

The network card was an SiS 900 integrated NIC and an old driver was being used. Upgraded to the latest version of the driver. Still no joy. Right. Let off some steam by vigorously chopping some wood that really, really needed it. Still didn't help my GPO problem, but made a big difference to my mood.

I then decided to see what drivers were available to me for this network card. Found that there was a signed Microsoft driver for the SiS 900, so I decided to try this before having to go onsite with a new network card. Installed the driver, rebooted the system and noticed a flurry of file transfers from the server to the PC. Yay!

I shall now make sure that if I see the problem in the future to see if there's a signed Microsoft driver for the network card before getting hot under the collar (especially as the amount of wood to chop up is getting lower!).