It seems UK manufacturers end up paying tax on components, but if they get the [...]]]> The exciting Raspberry Pi project is nearing fruition but it seems their attempts to boost the UK economy by getting the boards made over here has been thwarted by lead times and an insane tax law.

It seems UK manufacturers end up paying tax on components, but if they get the boards made overseas and then shipped over then that’s ok because they’re completed products rather than raw materials. Bottom line is that this insanity means that foreign outsourcing of manufacturing gets even more attractive.

So in these times of austerity it would seem the sensible thing to do to support UK manufacturing by lobbying for a change in those tax laws. We have a lot of manufacturing talent in the UK and we should be supporting it.

If you want to support a lobby on this issue there’s an e-Petition been set up to register your support at http://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/27158

The domain had previously shown as ‘Ready’ in the control panel and I was able to set the server and mailserver for them using 1&1′s nameserver.

The gotcha is that [...]]]> In the process of moving a .co.uk domain over to 1&1 for someone this week, I encountered the undocumented status code of ‘Domain Update Done’.

The domain had previously shown as ‘Ready’ in the control panel and I was able to set the server and mailserver for them using 1&1′s nameserver.

The gotcha is that during the ‘Domain Update Done’ status you can’t swap the nameserver settings. You can still get to change the A and MX records with 1&1′s Nameserver but if you wanted to point it to an external nameserver you’ll have to wait until this status clears.

The official word I got from 1&1 support says : “Domain Update Done status means that a domain is already on its last phase of propagation and normally, this will take 24-48 hours.”

So just be warned that if you want to change your initial settings when transferring a domain, you might get locked out while the domain is being finalised on your account.

Select / Read operations seemed to work fine but when it attempted to use an UPDATE method in a transaction, it [...]]]> I’ve been chasing problems with MSDTC today. We were trying to get one machines on a different domain to use MSDTC through COM+ to talk to a remote SQL Server on a different domain.

Select / Read operations seemed to work fine but when it attempted to use an UPDATE method in a transaction, it failed with an exception saying

COM+ was unable to talk to the Microsoft Distributed
Transaction Coordinator (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8004E00F)

The following information describes my eventual journey to success.

The first thing to try is DTCPing. I found a Microsoft Knowledgebase article that takes you through checking firewall permissions and checking the MSDTC ports. Get this working from both client and server ends first.

The second utility to try from Microsoft is DTCTester. There’s another useful Microsoft Knowledgebase article which takes you through how to run it. One thing I had to do before running this was create an ODBC System DSN entry from the client computer to the server for DTCTester to use. This isn’t how I was connecting to the SQL Server but was necessary to test.

In the midst of all of this the Distributed Transaction Service decided to crash and uninstall itself on the client machine. If this happens try the following on a command line prompt:

• msdtc -uninstall
• msdtc -install
• msdtc -resetlog

Check that the DTC service has been reinstalled and has the Network Service permission.

Running DTCTester.exe resulted in

tablename= #dtc29131
Creating Temp Table for Testing: #dtc29131
Warning: No Columns in Result Set From Executing: 'create table #dtc29131 (ival
int)'
Initializing DTC
Beginning DTC Transaction
Enlisting Connection in Transaction
Error:
SQLSTATE=25S12,Native error=-2147168242,msg='[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]
Distributed transaction error'
Error:
SQLSTATE=24000,Native error=0,msg=[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Invalid cur
sor state
Typical Errors in DTC Output When
a.  Firewall Has Ports Closed
-OR-
b.  Bad WINS/DNS entries
-OR-
c.  Misconfigured network
-OR-
d.  Misconfigured SQL Server machine that has multiple netcards.
Aborting DTC Transaction
Releasing DTC Interface Pointers
Successfully Released pTransaction Pointer.

There were several other investigation paths which bore no fruit so I’ll just cut to the solution; one of which included creating a VPN tunnel from client to server.

I found a blog post after searching for the keywords “dtctester sqlstate=25S12″. One of the solutions was to turn the MSDTC security down to requring No Authentication instead of Mutual Authentication Required. This makes sense as the fact both client and server computers were on different domains, I suspect authentication requests from either end were failing because of this.

• Open Component Services (Administrative Tools -> Component Services)
• Expand the Component Services tree and the Computers tree to see ‘My Computer’
• Right click on My Computer and select Properties
• Select the MSDTC tab
• Click on ‘Security Configuration’ in the bottom left hand corner Transaction Configuration section.
• Change the Transaction Manager Communication from Mutual Authentication Required to No Authentication Required.
• Click OK out of all dialogs

Running DTCTester again now results in the following:

tablename= #dtc6875
Creating Temp Table for Testing: #dtc6875
Warning: No Columns in Result Set From Executing: 'create table #dtc6875 (ival i
nt)'
Initializing DTC
Beginning DTC Transaction
Enlisting Connection in Transaction
Executing SQL Statement in DTC Transaction
Inserting into Temp...insert into #dtc6875 values (1)
Warning: No Columns in Result Set From Executing: 'insert into #dtc6875 values (
1) '
Verifying Insert into Temp...select * from #dtc6875 (should be 1): 1
Press enter to commit transaction.
Commiting DTC Transaction
Releasing DTC Interface Pointers
Successfully Released pTransaction Pointer.
Disconnecting from Database and Cleaning up Handles

The application that had previously failed now works and happiness has returned to the land of MSDTC and COM+ (as much as the land of COM+ can be happy!)

Ignore all that, you can do it all with Disk Utility and your Mac without spending a dime/penny/whatever your local unit of currency is.

Initially I was trying to call the 7z.exe using the usual DOS [...]]]> The Powershell Invoke-Command  script is very powerful for automating the deployment of software built in a Continuous Integration process. However, I just ran into a bit of new syntax when trying to invoke an executable on the remote box when specifying arguments.

Initially I was trying to call the 7z.exe using the usual DOS syntax of

"C:\Program Files\7-zip\7z.exe" x -y $serverZipPath

This caused Powershell to error with:

Unexpected token 'x' in expression or statement.
At line:1 char:34
+ "C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" x <<<< -y d:\temp\release.zip
+ CategoryInfo : ParserError: (x:String) [], ParentContainsErrorRecordException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : UnexpectedToken 

Here’s the working Unzip Script example. It relies on 7-zip being installed on the remote machine:

# Purpose : Uncompresses the $zipFilename to $destinationPath on the target $server
# Returns : True for success

function InvokeUnzipScript($server, $cred, $serverZipPath, $serverReleasePath)
{
  Invoke-Command -ComputerName $server -Credential $cred 
    -ArgumentList $serverZipPath,$serverReleasePath -ScriptBlock
  {

    param($serverZipPath,$serverReleasePath)

    cd $serverReleasePath

    & 'C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe' x -y $serverZipPath

  }

  return $true

}

For completeness, the $cred variable is called with a Credentials object to save being prompted for a password if you only specify the username. Here’s a function to help generate this object:

# Purpose : Creates PSCredential object for server authentication
# Returns : PSCredential

function CreateCredentials($user, $password)
{
     $password = convertto-securestring $password -asplaintext -force
     New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential $user, $password
}