Jaspersoft iReport and MS SQL

Posted on July 27, 2011

I’m in the process of creating reports for FrontRange ITSM, here at work.  To this point, I’ve been developing charts with PHP/GD.  I found a very good PHP charting class out there ( http://www.pchart.net ) but am going to try something more suited to reports.  I’m giving Jaspersoft iReport a try.   One problem – by default, iReport doesn’t ship with a driver that allows me to connect to the Microsoft SQL (MS SQL) server that I need to connect to.  In addition, the documentation that I could find sucked.

It actually turned out to be pretty simple to add support for MS SQL.  I went out to the JTDS site (http://jtds.sourceforge.net/ and downloaded the zip file with the necessary jar file in it.  I then copied jtds-xxx.jar in the the libs folder in iReport.  On my machine, that folder was C:\Program Files\Jaspersoft\iReport-4.0.2\ireport\libs.  At that point, I had the jar file in the right place, but iReport didn’t know about it.  Once you’ve copied the jar file to the correct place, you need to start iReport and go to Tools > Options > iReport > Classpath and click on “Add JAR”.  Navigate to the jar file that you just added and click “Open”.  OK out of all of that and restart iReport.  At that point, when you go in to add a connection, that driver should show up.

The Eskes get their 15 minutes of fame

Posted on July 21, 2011

We made the local news here in Omaha.  WOWT Channel 6 did a piece on us, regarding foster care.  We were foster parents for a little over 3 years before adopting.  Nebraska has had an upheaval in the way it handles foster care, and I think that has soured some people on being foster parents so there’s a greater need for families to step up.  My wife and I never really encountered the problems that others did.  I guess we were lucky.

Anyway, the article is available at: http://www.wowt.com/home/headlines/A_Growing_Need_For_Fostering_Families_125790209.html

Jeff

 

 

 

Viewing ITSM Incidents and Tasks

Posted on July 20, 2011

I’ve started creating a web page that will give you a list of the ITSM Incidents/Tasks that you own or that are assigned to you.  It gives you a “read-only” view of the Incidents and Tasks and allows you to view them and navigate amongst them.  I envision it being useful mainly for techs out in the field.  This will allow them to be able to view their ticket information using only their phone.   It’s been tried on various smartphones, including Blackberry, iPhone, and various Android phones.  It also works on all of the other iDevices.   It displays in REALLY basic HTML, so it should work on virtually anything with a browser.

ITSM Team Incident and Task Viewing

Posted on July 20, 2011

I’ve started creating a web page that will give you a list of all of the ITSM Incidents/Tasks that are assigned to a team within ITSM.  It gives you a “read-only” view of the Incidents and Tasks for each team  member and allows you to view them in a new window.  It’s been tried on various smartphones, including Blackberry, iPhone, and various Android phones.  It also works on all of the other iDevices.   It’s displays REALLY basic HTML, so it should work on virtually anything with a browser.  I’m using PHP and directly querying the DB server to pull the appropriate information.  It may not be perfect, or the preferred method, but it’s quick and I understand it.

Learning Web Services

Posted on June 18, 2011

I’m in the process of bringing up a new version of ITSM (Version 7), and we have an outsourced call center that needs to be interfaced with it.   ITSM has old-school web services (SOAP) available, but they’re not terribly well documented.   Consequently, it’s given me a lot of reason to spend time pounding away learning how to implement web services.  It’s pretty interesting.  I’d like to dive in and learn more about REST APIs, but don’t know when I”ll have time.

Resetting Winsock LSP on Win Vista and Win 7

Posted on September 3, 2010

1. Type in cmd, then CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER, to open the command prompt with elevated privileges

2. At the command prompt, type: netsh winsock reset.  This resets Windows’ Winsock to the default settings.

3. Restart to complete the reset.

Adding 32-bit Print Drivers to a 64-bit Windows 2008 R2 Server

Posted on September 3, 2010

I have a new server that’s serving as a quasi-printer server and it’s running Windows 2008 R2.  The problem is that the server is 64-bit, so when I setup the printers on there and share them, it only has the 64-bit drivers to offer to the client machines.  I need it to be able to have the 32-bit drivers available for the client machines.   I did some searching and found a few different methods for adding the 32-bit drivers, but what’s described below worked for me.  The most important thing to realize, no matter what method you use, the driver names need to match exactly or it won’t work. Did you catch that? The names have to match exactly. I tried a couple of times, without success, before I realized that the names weren’t EXACT.  The 32-bit name had an extra space in it.  Anyway, to add the drivers:

1. Download and extract the 32-bit drivers on your local desktop machine.  Mine were HP printers, so I went out to HP and found the appropriate drivers and downloaded them.

2. Connect to the Printers and Faxes share on the server, using admin-level credentials.  I’m on XP, so I used the RUN command and typed in: \\servername to bring up the server’s shares, then double-clicked on the Printers and Faxes folder.

3. Look through the list of shared printers and note the exact name that it shows for the 64-bit printer drivers that it’s using.  You’ll need to double-check your 32-bit drivers to make sure that they end up with the exact same name.

4. On your local machine, go in to the individual .inf files for each driver and verify that the driver name listed in the file matches exactly with the 64-bit name on the server.  On mine, both were off slightly.  The 64-bit version was “HP LaserJet 4250 PCL6″ and the 32-bit was “HP LaserJet 4250 PCL 6″.  They’re the same, except for the space between the L and the 6.  The first couple of times I tried using it, it didn’t work.  It still said that the driver wasn’t available.  After I looked closer and saw that space and removed it, it worked perfectly.

5.  After you’ve ensured that your 32-bit printer driver names are correct in the .inf files, go back to your server’s Printer and Faxes share window.

6. While on that window, click on File > Server Properties.  This should bring up a popup.   Click on the third tab, the Drivers tab.  This should give you a list of the currently installed drivers, along with a row of buttons below that.

7.  Click on the Add button, and it will start the Add Printer Wizard.  Since you’ve already modified the .inf files to be correct, you should be good-to-go.  After you walk through the wizard, you should have the 32-bit drivers listed, along with the 64-bit drivers.  They should have exactly the same name.

8. To test it, try adding one of the shared printers to a client machine.  If it errors out and says that the driver isn’t available, then the names probably aren’t an exact match.

Oracle VirtualBox from the Commandline

Posted on August 31, 2010

Running Apache and PHP on OS X 10.6.4

Posted on August 31, 2010

Apache and PHP are there, but not started.   To enable it:

1> Fire up terminal.app and cd /etc/apache2
2> sudo pico httpd.conf
3> Within httpd.conf, use ctrl-w and find LoadModule php
4> Uncomment LoadModule php5_module and LoadModule fastcgi_module lines
5> Right below that, add the following 2 lines:

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

6> Save httpd.conf and close pico.

7> Goto System Preferences > Sharing and check the box for “Web Sharing”.

8> At this point, there should be a main machine website (http://localhost) and user(s) sites (http://localhost/~user)

9> Create a simple php file, containing the phpinfo() function, to see what is available within php.

Overcoming Terminal Server “Terminal server has exceeded maximum number of allowed connection” problem

Posted on June 26, 2009

Since Windows server only gives you 2 remote connections, it’s easy to end up “locked out” of the server.  To overcome that, you can actually use a third remote connection that allows you to get in and kill the other offending connections.

On Linux type:

rdesktop -0 1.2.3.4

where 1.2.3.4 is the ip address of the server that you want to connect to.  Obviously, you need to have rdesktop installed and it should be a fairly recent version.

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