Installer Service is not Accessible
I have run into a strange condition on some Windows XP boxes before(imagine that). When I try to install or uninstall anything (including windows updates), I get this error message:
The Windows Installer Service could not be accessed.
This can occur if you are running Windows in safe
mode, or if the Windows Installer is not correctly
installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance.
I don’t have a clue what is causing the Windows Installer Service to not be accessible any longer. However, I have found that the fix is quite easy.
Essentially, you need to be logged in with Administrative privileges and run these two commands from the command line:
msiexec.exe /unregister
msiexec.exe /regserver
This link is the official MS KB article I found this in:
Script to display OpenVPN status
Well, I won’t claim it’s pretty or the most efficiently written script ever made….
However, I had a problem. OpenVPN, when it is run in daemon mode, do not give you any easy was to check who is currently logged into the VPN or what the internal routes are, etc. I learned from reading the man page, that you can cause the daemon to output status if you send a SIGUSR2 to the process. Now, if OpenVPN is not running as a daemon, it will send the status to stdout; if it IS running as a daemon, it is sent to syslog.
So, you can tail your /var/log/messages and read the stats. But that’s kinda clunky and certainly not easy for people with weak shell skills. Some people who help admin my OpenVPN server are not shell savvy, so I wanted to make a utility you could use to easy display the current stats.
Axelilly's Ponderings 