US Unemployment: Jan 1948 through Sep 2018

The "annual" US unemployment chart - after an 8 year hiatus 

...during which time it dropped from nearly to an all-time high to the lowest rate in a generation (chart courtesy the US Bureau of Labor Statistics)

How do you think political affiliations affect personal interpretation of employment trends over the past 10 years?  Do strongly held political beliefs prevent personal interpretations at all (Conformity and Group Mentality: Why We Comply)?

Do you like to attribute these numbers to presidents?  congressional make-up?  business-cycle?  trade balances? world events?

I find it interesting to see this pop up in the news cycle occasionally and entertaining to see how different news outlets and their guests interpret it for their consumers.

US Unemployment: Jan 1948 through August 2010

Time for the annual US unemployment update.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pedM7zXzGFh2GIQR96oJzcA

Configure Service Recovery from CMD Prompt

When a windows service unexpectedly exits, it can be nice to have it try to restart itself. You can do this from the CMD prompt instead of wading through the computer management applet with the following command:

sc \\<server_name> failure <service_name> actions= restart/60000/restart/60000/restart/60000 reset= 0

This configures the failure action for the <service_name> service on <server_name> server to restart when it unexpectedly fails on the first failure, the second failure, and all subsequent failures after a 60 second wait (the restart/60000 pairs represent the three recovery stages). It sets the failure counter so it does not reset.

Windows Server 2008 R2 as a Workstation

I'm about to move from XP Professional to Server 2008 R2 for a development workstation. It looks like Hyper-V will be a huge improvement over VirtualPC…

Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V as a Developer Workstation

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V is a great platform for developers who need to work across a wide variety of platforms.   Many developers are already using Microsoft Virtual PC for their development environments but soon this will not be a viable option.  Why?  All future Microsoft server products will only be offered in 64bit versions and Virtual PC only supports 32bit guest operating systems. Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V can solve this issue since it can host both 32bit and 64bit guest operating systems.

I have been running Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta with Hyper-V for a while now and have to say that I am really impressed with the performance and capabilities

Hopefully, I'll realize all the same benefits!

Data Loss

It looks like we're not the only ones whose SAN issues affect production databases…

Microsoft irrecoverably lost customer owned data it was holding for as many as 800,000 of its customers:

"Microsoft said a server failure impacted the main and back-up databases. One theory is that the problems cropped up as Hitachi was doing work on the storage network that manages the Sidekick data."

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10372921-56.html?tag=mncol;txt

OUCH!!!

US Unemployment: Jan 1948 through June 2009

Eight months since my last US unemployment update

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pedM7zXzGFh2GIQR96oJzcA

Team Deploy failure with PSExec

Our automated build recently stopped remotely installing our services from the build server to the system test application server.  It was able to stop and restart the service, and it thought it was installing the services, but the install was not actually running.

Here is a sample of one of our command lines: 

TeamDeploy.exe /CONFIG:EODService.xml

Because the services installed properly when running the MSI from the application server itself, and because TeamDeploy depends on PSTools for remote deployments, I started looking at thePSTools: specifically PSKill and PSExec.

First I verified that pskill was working remotely by opening notepad on the application server and killing it from the build server:

pskill \\applicationServer notepad.exe

 

PsKill v1.03 - local and remote process killer

Copyright (C) 2000 Mark Russinovich

http://www.sysinternals.com

 

Process notepad.exe killed on applicationServer.

 

Next, I tried to verify that psexec was working properly:

 

psexec \\applicationServer "c:\windows\system32\ipconfig.exe"

 

PsExec v1.31 - execute processes remotely

Copyright (C) 2001-2002 Mark Russinovich

www.sysinternals.com

 

Error communicating with PsExec service on applicationServer:

No process is on the other end of the pipe.

 

It returned an error indicating there was no process on the other end of the pipe.  This seemed to indicate a problem with psexesvc.

Since psexesvc installs automatically when running psexec, I removed psexesvc from the application server [1]:

sc \\applicationServer stop psexesvc

SERVICE_NAME: psexesvc

        TYPE               : 10  WIN32_OWN_PROCESS

        STATE              : 3  STOP_PENDING

                                (STOPPABLE, NOT_PAUSABLE, IGNORES_SHUTDOWN))

        WIN32_EXIT_CODE    : 0  (0x0)

        SERVICE_EXIT_CODE  : 0  (0x0)

        CHECKPOINT         : 0x2

        WAIT_HINT          : 0x0

 

sc \\applicationServer delete psexesvc

[SC] DeleteService SUCCESS

 

After cleaning up the psexesvc, I verified that psexec was working properly:

 

psexec \\applicationServer ipconfig

 

PsExec v1.31 - execute processes remotely

Copyright (C) 2001-2002 Mark Russinovich

www.sysinternals.com

 

 

 

Windows IP Configuration

 

 

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

 

   Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . :

   Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::b5eb:e3

   IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 10.2.15.171

   Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.254.0

   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 10.2.15.251

 

Tunnel adapter Local Area Connection* 8:

 

   Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconn

   Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . :

 

Tunnel adapter Local Area Connection* 9:

 

   Media State . . . . . . . . . . . : Media disconn

   Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . :

ipconfig exited on applicationServer with error code 0.

 

The final test of course was to run TeamDeploy.exe /CONFIG:EODService.xml from the build server, and it successfully installed our service remotely.  Our build is back in business!

 

 

[1]  http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=3935&PN=1&TPN=2#32755