Archive for the Category ◊ Admin's scene ◊

Some more Openfiler
Thursday, May 30th, 2013 | Author: Ozzik

Heeeey….
It’s been almost two years since I wrote the last time. I guess I had nothing to say until now;)
No, that’s not true, just didn’t have the time or the energy.
But the last couple of days pushed me towards posting some more about Openfiler.

This project is quite controversial. On one hand, it’s good. It combines most of the features, stability and quality you want for the storage without paying a cent.
On the other hand, the dev team is odd. To say the least. Their thing is that they don’t talk to the users. They used to, but they don’t anymore.
They had promissed to release the version 3.0 about 3 years ago, since then they keep it silent.
Now, I totally understand the “it’ll be released when it’s ready” attitude, a lot of open source (and only) projects do that. But at least talk to your community, tell them approximately what’s going on, something.
A lot of people just said goodbye to the project because of this. But it doesn’t seem to effect the principle - to disregard the community.

Anyway, personally, when choosing the storage for the mid-size company I’m still choosing the OF, because I know it pretty well, it proved to be stable enough and it has all the features a company may need.
more…

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pfSense 2.0 is finally here!
Saturday, September 17th, 2011 | Author: Ozzik

I’ve been waiting for this release for a very long time. It took about 3 years of development.
Now, the other thing I’m waiting for from the team is the mysterious pfCenter, which is a centralized system for managing multiple pfSense installations. Scott does tweet about it here and there, mostly with some screenshots, but it seems like this project is being kept secret. Hope it will be out real soon.

Anyway, congrats to the team and to all the happy admins/users!
Download full version here or an update here.

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DNS resolving in Openfiler
Thursday, August 04th, 2011 | Author: Ozzik

Just a small issue I had today.
Since I run rsync scripts at night and get email about their execution, I noticed that email came with:

ssh: Could not resolve hostname SERVERNAME: Name or service not known
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [receiver]
rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at io.c(635) [receiver=3.0.3]

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Make firefox faster
Wednesday, July 27th, 2011 | Author: Ozzik

While I understand the importance of the whole IPv6 thing, I think we’re not quite there yet and we’re definitely not supposed to suffer browsing the web!

So if you’re a firefox user, do yourself a favour:
about:config 

network.dns.disableIPv6

double click it to enable
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Organize your IT equipment with RackTables
Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 | Author: Ozzik

Hey,
So I found a new toy to play around with: RackTables.
The purpose of this software is to help you organize your IT equipment, including servers, switches, routers, patch panels into visual racks.
more…

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Expand RAID6 with 3ware and Openfiler
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011 | Author: Ozzik

Hey,
Had some problems last week with expanding the RAID6 I have on a storage with Openfiler. This is what was needed to be done:
I have a storage with 16 hard drives for storage+2 for the OS. When I built it almost 3 years ago the idea was to have 1 RAID6 with 14 drives and 1 RAID1 with 2 drives obviously. Don’t ask me why - it was stupid to begin with and thus was never really used (the RAID1 that is). But came the time when we needed that additional space of 2 drives and the decision was to cancel the RAID1 and add the spare drives to the main RAID6, expanding the existing space.

The RAID controller is 3ware 9650se and after reading the manual it seemed pretty simple: delete the RAID1, have the spare drives and do the RAID6 migration to include them. After the initialization(is this the right word?) I was supposed to have the 25-26TB of space instead of the existing 22.
more…

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Remotely enable RDP on WinXP
Friday, April 09th, 2010 | Author: Ozzik

Although most versions of Windows operating system such as Windows 2000, 2003, 2008, XP and Vista do come packaged with Remote Desktop, however it’s disabled by default. Turning on and enabling the Remote Desktop via local console is easy, where Microsoft provides similar GUI (graphical user interface) in all editions of Windows.

However, if an off-site server needs to be access via Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) client immediately, yet the Remote Desktop is not enabled on the server, then it will be a headache. Luckily it’s possible to remotely enable the Remote Desktop service on a remote PC or server by remotely editing its registry.

To remotely enable Remote Desktop on another computer, follow these steps:

1. Login to the workstation with administrator credentials.
2. Run Registry Editor (regedit).
3. Click on File menu.
4. Select the Connect Network Registry in the pull down menu.
5. A “Select Computer” dialog search box is opened. Type the host name of the remote computer in the text box, or browse Active Directory to locate the remote server, or click on “Advanced” button to search for the remote computer.
6. Click OK after the remote computer is selected. A node for the remote computer network registry will be displayed in the Registry Editor with HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (HKLM) and HKEY_USERS (HKU) hives.
7. Navigate to the following registry key for the remote computer:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server
8. In the right pane, locate a REG_DWORD value named fDenyTSConnection. Double-click on fDenyTSConnection and change the value data from 1 (Remote Desktop disabled) to 0 (Remote Desktop enabled).

That’s it.

Taken from here

Ozzik.

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IIS: dealing with 2 IPs
Monday, January 25th, 2010 | Author: Ozzik

Hey,
I had a problem today, when I had to assign 1 particular IP to a website on IIS 6, Windows 2003 SP2. The server itself had 2 addresses. On this website 1 of the IPs worked, the other one gave errors like “the network location cannot be reached” and wouldn’t let start the website.

The solution consists of 2 steps:
1. Open regedit and go to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\LSA, then add a new DWORD named DisableLoopBackCheck with value 1.
2. In Win2003 you already have that and in WinXP you have to install it additionally - support tools. Go to start-programs-support tools-cmd (not the regular cmd), alternatively you can just add the path to the system environment.
The tool you need is called httpcfg.exe and this is how you use it in this scenario:

httpcfg query iplisten

this gives you the current IPs IIS is listening to.

httpcfg set iplisten -i xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

this adds the IP (instead of the x’s of course)
3. The secret step - reboot the server. A lot of people had problems before they realized they MUST reboot first.

Good luck!

Ozzik.

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Windows 2008 on IBM x335 - no-go!
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

Hey,
well, here’s one for you:
I had to set up a server last week. It had to be win2008 on an IBM x335. Now, most of you will just say: so? Let me tell you. The chances you can get it to work are pretty much 50/50. In my case it was a big fat 0.

There are two things you’ll be struck by: optical drive and SCSI controller. The first one was not that much of a problem for me, but it sure can be for you. You see, the Redmond guys decided that in 2008 (and later) there’s no chance you have a CD-ROM drive in you server. Because all new servers come with DVD now. Which is true. But what about the older ones? As far as M$ is concerned: it’s your problem - deal with it. The only format win2008 comes in is DVD.
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M$ 7 and VirtualBox
Sunday, October 04th, 2009 | Author: Ozzik

Forgot to tell you. I have the need to run the M$ OS at home for work purposes sometimes, so I used to have the XP on VMWare server 2.0, and it was sooo annoying, especially the slow awakening. I tried the VirtualBox once in the past and it didn’t have the bridged networking out of the box, so I blew it off.

But now I decided to give it another shot. Plus they finally added the bridged network. And since I had to do the fresh install anyway, I decided to give the M$ 7 a shot. Well, I can sum up with this: I’m really happy with the speed - it simply flies. The so called OS from Redmond still sucks. It’s the same crappy thing that gave them the “great” reviews last year, but a bit faster. I’m using the final release from July or something.

So before you run buying this piece of shit with a brand new PC or a laptop - think twice. It’s the same, just a bit faster than the previous one. Why am I not returning to XP? Because clearly they decided to move in this direction (look at win 2008 server - it’s pure vista) and I gotta keep up.

Ozzik.

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