Monthly Archives: January 2010

Solve uninitialized constant ApplicationController in Rails 2.3

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So I am casually writing my Ruby on Rails application, like I have a million times before on the newest version of Rails (which at time of writing, was version 2.3).  So I open up an blank project with some code I use in all my Rails apps, and copy over the relevant files, and replace the application_crontroller.rb with application.rb.

But as it turns out, there were some major changes with 2.3, not the least being that the application controller is no longer called application.rb Now it’s referred to as application_controller.rb.

So it’s easy to fix, just rename the file or, it you’re into scripty goodness, run:

rake rails:update

Be sure to update your server stack before deploying. Obviously if you rename the file to get it working on Rails 2.3 and upload to a Rails 2.2 server you’ll be in trouble. Don’t forget that Rails 2.3 also requires a new version of Phusion Passenger!

How to recover from Windows Server 2003 Event IDs 1168 and 1003

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Recently at the office we had a brown-out with devastating consequences.  All our servers are managed by UPSes and on this particular occasion, at the precise moment of this brownout the UPS failed and server lost power abruptly.  This caused some error in Directory Services, becasue after the boot the Windows Server 2003 (and primary domain controller) showed a message during bootup (but after logon) saying “The Active Directory is rebuilding indices”, just before network connection preparations. It hadn’t done this before.

After several hours waiting for this to go away (the server seemed responsive during the process so we left it) nothing changed.  We forcibly reboot the machine and it booted into Safe Mode automatically.

After several reboots and a scheduled CHKDSK /f on bootup, nothing changed, so we booted into Directory Services Repare mode to investigate further.  Now, looking through the event log showed that even more things were going wrong including the computer name being missing the domain being all messed up and an array of other issues, the most worring being several Event Id’s 1168 and 1003.

After a bit of googling I found this page, and based on my own knowledge condensed and modified the solution to work in my case:

  • First, boot the machine into Directory Services Repair Mode
  • Next, open a command window.
  • Then, type the command: cd %SystemRoot%\Ntds
  • Execute the command: Esentutl.exe /p Ntds.dit for me this took 8.3 seconds to execute.

Basically, the esentutl.exe is a utility used to perform various administrative actions on any databases using  Microsoft Proprietary Database format.  The Directory Services Database uses this format.  The ‘/p’ argument tells the utility to perform a “repair” on the second argument, which obviously is the database file.

Warning: The Ntds.dit file is the heart and soul of Active Directory on your domain.  Take extreme care with this file because if you don’t have an adequate backup of the system state on the domain controller, you may irrecoverably corrupt your domain.  This would be bad.

In my case, everything went smoothly, and the domain was back up after a reboot back into “normal” mode.  Obviously, we changed the UPS with a working one.  Who says network admins never get a happy ending?

Apple’s Magic Mouse Now Running Properly Under Windows

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As I’ve indicated earlier, I am a massive fan of Apple’s Magic Mouse.  While it does carry a heavy price tag, I thought it was completely worth it.  But a sad draw-back was that under Windows (pecicially Boot Camp), the mouse only works as a standard 2 button mouse.

But thanks to a little hackery from Apple’s Bluetooth Update (located here) the Magic Mouses driver was extracted via WinRar resulting in a 32bit version and a 64bit version that you can install on any ordinary Windows PC that will enable all the scrolling ‘magic’ of the Magic Mouse.
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