Active Directory domain time settings (an unintended consequence of VMW - Hyper-V migration)

Over time my network had slipped a few minutes, but everything was synchronised, so there were no authentication problems.  However it was becoming more annoying (especially when email replies appeared to land a minute or two before the original was sent!).

 

So eventually I was persuaded to put time in to fix it, in the past I just fixed the clock on the master DC, and all was well.  However this time…

 

Everything I did had no effect, DC’s were changed to point to external NTP sources, but even with manual time changes at the command line they snapped back to the wrong time almost instantly.

 

Then something twigged.  My master time source DC was one of the last servers I moved off the old VMWare cluster into a new Hyper-V setup.  And of course Time Synchronisation from host to guest was on by default.  As soon as the DC changed time, Hyper-V tools snapped it right back.  And as the host took it’s time from AD, it was always out.  Before, when on vCentre, the host was synchronised to NTP servers, and the time sync worked.

 

This morning I unchecked time sync as below, reset the DC’s clock, and all was well.  I should have thought of this much earlier in the diagnostics.  But I guess having moved away from infrastructure and back to dev, my mindset has changed a bit!  These days I’m just a consumer of the network infrastructure (although I do have to be the admin too!).  I suppose I could have just changed the time on the Hyper-V host, but this is a better answer, as the NTP usage means the network should remain on the correct time.

 

TTFN

 

 

 

The case of the Nokia 8 and the missing fingerprint data...

A funny thing happened the other day.  I finally (and accidentally) let the phone fully run down to 0% battery.  But it when it was charged again, something odd – I couldn’t use the fingerprint reader to unlock the phone or for anything else.  On opening settings to investigate it even prompted me to register fingerprints.  It appeared to have lost all fingerprint data.

 

So I went to re-register the fingerprints I used before and was told to try another digit.  A quick BING search confirmed that this can happen, but curiously there wasn’t much I could find on sorting it out.

 

So, having tried all the digits I had previously registered I finally tried a new digit.  It worked and was registered correctly.  But I still couldn’t register or use the originals.

 

Ten minutes later, thinking laterally, I deleted the new print.  At which point the phone decided it didn’t know about of any of my prints and I could re-register the ones I normally use.

 

I don’t know if this is an Android 9 issue, a Nokia 8 issue, or the combination.  But as a heads up – leave at least one digit unregistered on your phone for when this happens to you!

 

Telling the time

I remember being almost unable to breathe when this was first broadcast.  It’s still hilarious now.

 

“The first hand is the hour hand, the second hand is the minute hand, and the third hand is the second hand”

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QVPUIRGthI&feature=youtu.be

 

Desperate Remedies - a return to Victorian literature

A couple of weeks ago I resolved to return to the novels of Thomas Hardy.  As a Eng. Lit. ‘O’-Level student in the 70’s we’d covered a couple of his novels, and some poems; and I read most of them two or three decades ago.  A friend of mine (thanks Timbo!) posted The Darkling Thrush (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkling_Thrush) on Facebook for the second time in a few years, and it seemed like time to move away from the diet of modern spy/crime/historical/fantasy fiction I’ve been reading for the past few years (e.g. CJ Sansom, Mick Herron, Robin Hobb, Ian Rankin, Stephen Donaldson, Peter James) and return to something from a different era.

I went for a kindle collection of all novels in publication date order.   So have started with Desperate Remedies from 1872 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desperate_Remedies), although his second novel, the first was never published, so this is the correct starting point.

Hardy is noted for his lengthy, complex, punctuated sentence structure – and quite frankly it took a few chapters to get back into that style.  But after a few late night reading sessions (a hot bath for my spine is always a good place!!) I’m there and really enjoying it again.   The sentences just fall into place and the added bonus of reading on a kindle is the ability to highlight a word and get the dictionary definition (useful for writing that is nearly 200 years old).

The one thing I didn’t expect?  After all the excitement today of the New Horizons fly by of Ultima Thule (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46729898) I didn’t expect to read those words in the novel.  I’ll let you read the novel to find out where and why.