Torsten Curdt’s weblog

So backing up a Window system is unfortunately not as easy as one would hope. A low level backup from within the operating system itself wasn’t even possible until Microsoft introduced the “Volume Shadow Service“. Before that you had to boot into a different system or use a boot disk to do the backup. This is no longer required as programs like “ntbackup” or “DriveImage XML” can use this system service to do the backup …if it is working properly. Essentially you need to make sure that these two services are up and running

• MS Software Shadow Copy Provider
• Volume Shadow Service

Too bad though if they refuse to start. There is a good chance you’ve run into the same problem where the COM+ service (a dependency of the two above services) fails to start. Check the EventViewer for

English: The COM+ System Application service terminated unexpectedly.

German: Dienst COM+-Systemanwendung konnte nicht gestartet werden.

Turns out that (for whatever strange reason) the “ole32.dll” might have gotten un-registered. So what you want to do is to re-register it and then reboot the machine.

regsvr32 ole32.dll

If the following two commands work without giving an error you are good to go for the backup.

vssadmin list shadows
vssadmin list writers

Whenever I have to go back to help out some friends that are still on Windows I find myself saying “Boy, this is so annoying – get a Mac!” …and I am not even an Apple fan boy.

Flights booked, ticket activated. This year I am going to WWDC – for the first time! I am really exciting to see how it really turns out to be. As I am getting more and more interested in Mac development I am especially looking forward to the “bring your code” labs. Man, will I have a lot of questions :) Thanks to Marcus to give me the final nudge. It has been on both our “TOGO” lists for a while. So I will be in San Francisco from 9.6. – 14.6. Looking forward to it. Haven’t been to SFO for quite a while.

As usual last week in Amsterdam was great. Meeting old friends, making new ones. A few faces have been missed though. But attendance was good and I’ve see many rooms quite packed. WiFi sucked as usual. But well …shouldn’t you listen and meet people? For me the most interesting part surely was to get together with the hadoop team. It was really interesting to hear how others are using hadoop and then compare it to how we are using it at joost. It’s always re-assuring when you realize completely different people came to the same conclusions …or have the same problems. Same goes with the Mail 2.0 discussion that I had with Robert. Unfortunately I didn’t catch any of the Ivy guys. So still no Ivy support for minijar.

For those who couldn’t make it. You can find a bunch of slides on slideshare. Unfortunately I did only take very few pictures this time. The few ones are (as usual) on flickr. The Linux Magazin did even record sessions that are available on their website. Not free as in beer though. I wish I could at least watch the keynote that missed because I had to leave early …to catch a train that was canceled and then… but let’s not go there. Let’s just put it that way: the trip back could have been (much) better.

I am currently on the train to get there and are really looking forward to it. This year I am going on my own time and expense. This should give the time for sessions, socializing and fun I (and all the other folks from Joost) probably didn’t have last year. It was right after we were going public and had to work hard to keep up with the amount of users.

So what am I looking forward to this time?

• Meeting some old friends and making some new (this might also involve some beers)
• The BarCamp event on Monday night
• Hoping to get someone from the Ivy community help me with the minijar integration
• Talking about the simplified version of Cocoon called “Corona” that just arrived in the Cocoon sandbox
• Meeting some of the hadoop people IRL and hopefully have some good discussions
• Catch up with Robert on the mail 2.0 ideas
• Checking out the news around projects that I am not involved in but get me interested

Hope to see you there!

If you are have more than one client cert installed – hold back the Apple Safari update to 3.1. Otherwise all you will get when you try to access a secured resource is

Safari can’t open the page “https://someserver.com/page†because it couldn’t establish a secure connection to the server “someserver.comâ€

For some reason Safari 3.1 does no longer show the dialog box where you can select which client cert to present to the web site. While you can manually create an identity preference (right click in My Certificates in Keychain on Leopard) it seems like you can only specify exact resources – which is not really manageable. So if you (just as me) have been a little to quick with the upgrade you might want to try these instructions to downgrade to 3.0.4.

Update: this bug is still present in 3.1.1 (5525.18)