Archive for October, 2008
Time synchronization in Linux (Ubuntu Server)
As I have installed and administrated a bunch of Linux servers as virtual machines, I have had trouble keeping the time correctly. There is always a small drifting going on in virtual machines and a number of different ways to keep them synchronized with the host operating system.
Nowadays I have left that struggle behind letting the virtual guests keep themselves and their clocks correctly set.
“Saving changes not permitted” (SQL Server Management Studio)
Earlier I have written about the SQL Server 2008 and its tools and pointed out the best improvements in this new release. After a while I have on several occasions bumped into one very annoying thing, when designing databases using the Management Studio.
Suppose you have created a table using the designer. The table has a column ID, set as primary key, but you forgot to specify this column to be “Identity Specification = Yes”. Open the table in design view and set the ”Identity Specification = Yes” and try to save the changes… In my case it fails every time even though the table is empty and contain no data at all, giving the error message:
“Saving changes is not permitted. The changes you have made…. …. or enabled the option Prevent saving changes that require…“, [Cancel] [Save Text File].
Finally I found the option to be modified!!!
VMware Server 2.0 on Ubuntu Server 8.04
On September 23 VMware released a new version of the free edition of their virtualization product VMware Server, version 2.0 (build 116503).
I have used the old versions of VMware Server a lot when running web sites, developing and testing software and techniques so I was very keen on trying the installation of this new release. Since I run this site on a virtual Ubuntu Server, using Ubuntu Server as host, I wanted to install the new VMware Server on a freshly installed Ubuntu Server 8.04.
To install the old versions of VMware Server correctly a lot of extra packages were needed on the host machine, such as x-window-system-core and xspecs. I’m not sure what all these extra packages do, but I didn’t like the fact that they had names like x-this and x-that. The machine running VMware Server has the server edition of Ubuntu installed for the simple reason that it is a pretty old thing and therefore it felt good not to install any X Window system.