totalnetsolutions.net

So, any regular readers might have noticed that the posts have been slow coming the past few months.  Hopefully you don’t think that the depth in those few posts has been lacking.  I’ve been struggling with how to report that I took a new full-time job in April.  Obviously, it’s not stopping me from writing, but has slowed me down a bit.

As you may remember, back in January I was invited to speak at Directory Experts’ Conference, 2008. If you weren’t there, I spoke about integrating 30+ Linux servers with a 2000-user Active Directory forest at one of the U.S.’s biggest home improvement providers. At the time, we had used Centrify DirectControl 4.0 to accomplish this integration, and they were the ones who invited me to speak at DEC.

As part of my preparations, I reached out to Quest Software to ask about Vintella, now renamed “Authentication Services”, and to Likewise Software, who sent me software and support contacts (at my request), so that I could learn Likewise Enterprise as well as I knew Centrify DirectControl. That was a very tall order for Likewise Software to fill, as I had spent the past 6 months learning DirectControl inside out.

After 4 weeks of building demonstration machines (with both products), capturing video in case the demos crashed (which they didn’t), and building a presentation and practicing it, DEC was upon us.  I gave two presentations, one specifically for Centrify on Monday, and the primary one on Wednesday.  At the end of both presentations, we recieved a lot of great questions which Centrify’s Director of Product Development helped answer.

At the end of the conference, Likewise offered me a job. After many discussions with them, my friends and family, and my customers, I decided to take the opportunity. This is not a decision I made to slight Centrify, who’s support of me through my time as a customer was amazing, and who’s assistance through the presentation was fabulous. It’s just one of those opportunities that comes along that I couldn’t pass up.

So for the past 6 months I’ve been the Project Manager for Deployments for Likewise Software. I’ve been on the road about 80% of the time, working with customers to install our software in their environments. Many of the posts I’ve made in that time have been in response to an issue we’ve seen or avoided at a customer of Likewise. I will continue to write these, and I’ll work on doing so at my old (2007) pace of about 3-4 posts a month, since they have been (according to my stats) useful to many people, which is the point of writing this blog.

That means, no changes here compared to last year, but I will have a wider variety of topics, and I’ll likely start mentioning our software specifically. I want it to be clear it’s not advertising, but just the state of what I’m working with. Again, Centrify makes a great product, and I was very happy to have chosen it for my needs at my previous employer.  However, I’ve chosen to move forward with this open source company (Likewise Software) for the next stage of my career, and will continue to write about software and integration with a view towards open source software.

Thanks for continuing to read!

Robert Auch

More and more of my customers are (rightly) installing 64-bit versions of Windows for critical systems like Domain Controllers, File Servers, and Database Servers.  The increased memory access for user-mode programs (and increased file cache size for file servers) is a huge help for heavily used systems.

But there are are still a lot of tools only written for 32-bit systems.  That is to say, MMC consoles and VBScripts that just act… funny on 64-bit servers.  So, here’s some errors, and how to quickly fix them.

For VBScripts, you’ll often just get an error similar to:
scriptname.vbs(48, 1) Microsoft VBScript runtime error:
ActiveX component can't create object:
It doesn’t matter what the object is, and if you register the supporting DLL or reinstall the application that provides the function, it still won’t work. The fix? c:\windows\syswow64\cscript scriptname.vbs or c:\windows\syswow64\wscript scriptname.vbs, depending on if you want it run in a console (cscript) or popup windows (wscript). I personally write everything for cscript, cause I can redirect the output to a log file. This trick I found here, and reminded me to write this up with my next fix.

For MMC consoles, what often happens is you just don’t see the tab you’re looking for, or you can’t even find the console to add the snap-in to the MMC. No error messages, and nothing shows up that you’re looking for. Luckily, this is also an easy fix. Click the Start button, then “Run…” then type in “mmc /32″ or “mmc -32″ in the box and click “OK”. You’ll now be presented with an empty MMC, but you can now add the snap-ins you want, and the 32-bit programs (such as the “Additional Account Information” from acctinfo.dll from the Windows Resource Kit Tools) will have their tabs show up properly.

I drafted something on November 2nd about problems with Fedora 7 and SELinux. This still exists on Fedora 9, by the way. Just a quick “FYI” that there’s a big new technical fix posted, and your RSS reader probably didn’t pick it up (Google reader and Akregator didn’t).

I ran into a problem today where I couldn’t remember the native packet capture tool for Solaris and couldn’t install tcpdump, so i thought I’d put down as many as many native packet capture commands as I knew, by OS, in a single place.  I’ll update this as I find more, since there’s hundreds of Operating systems out there.

• AIX: iptrace: /usr/sbin/iptrace [ -a ] [ -b ][ -e ] [ -u ] [ -PProtocol_list ] [ -iInterface ] [ -pPort_list ] [ -sHost [ -b ] ] [ -dHost ] [ -L Log_size ] [ -B ] [ -T ] [ -S snap_length] LogFile
• FreeBSD: tcpdump (I think): tcpdump [ -adeflnNOpqRStuvxX ] [ -c count ] [ -C file_size ] [ -F file ] [ -i interface ] [ -m module ] [ -r file ] [ -s snaplen ] [ -T type ] [ -w file ] [ -E algo:secret ] [ expression ]
• HP-UX: nettl: nettl requires a daemon start, and other setup: /usr/sbin/nettl -traceon kind… -entity subsystem… [-card dev_name...] [-file tracename] [-m bytes] [-size portsize] [-tracemax maxsize] [-n num_files] [-mem init_mem [max_mem]] [-bind cpu_id] [-timer timer_value]
• Linux 2.4 and higher:
  • tcpdump (some distros): tcpdump [ -AdDefKlLnNOpqRStuUvxX ] [ -c count ] [ -C file_size ] [ -G rotate_seconds ] [ -F file ] [ -i interface ] [ -m module ] [ -M secret ] [ -r file ] [ -s snaplen ] [ -T type ] [ -w file ] [ -W filecount ] [ -E spi@ipaddr algo:secret,... ] [ -y datalinktype ] [ -z postrotate-command ] [ -Z user ] [ expression ]
  • wireshark (some distros, used to be called “ethereal”): GUI-config, no command-line, use tethereal (now tshark) for that
  • tshark: tshark [ -a <capture autostop condition> ] … [ -b <capture ring buffer option>] … [ -B <capture buffer size (Win32 only)> ]  [ -c <capture packet count> ] [ -C <configuration profile> ] [ -d <layer type>==<selector>,<decode-as protocol> ] [ -D ] [ -e <field> ] [ -E <field print option> ] [ -f <capture filter> ] [ -F <file format> ] [ -h ] [ -i <capture interface>|- ] [ -l ] [ -L ] [ -n ] [ -N <name resolving flags> ] [ -o <preference setting> ] … [ -p ] [ -q ] [ -r <infile> ] [ -R <read (display) filter> ] [ -s <capture snaplen> ] [ -S ] [ -t ad|a|r|d|e ] [ -T pdml|psml|ps|text|fields ] [ -v ] [ -V ] [ -w <outfile>|- ] [ -x ] [ -X <eXtension option>] [ -y <capture link type> ] [ -z <statistics> ] [ <capture filter> ]
• Mac OSX: tcpdump (among others): tcpdump [ -adeflnNOpqRStuvxX ] [ -c count ] [ -C file_size ] [ -F file ] [ -i interface ] [ -m module ] [ -r file ] [ -s snaplen ] [ -T type ] [ -w file ] [ -E algo:secret ] [ expression ]
• Solaris: snoop: snoop [ -aPDSvVNC ] [ -d device ] [ -s snaplen ] [ -c maxcount ] [ -i filename ] [ -o filename ] [ -n filename ] [ -t [ r | a | d ] ] [ -p first [ , last ] ] [ -x offset [ , length ] ] [ expression ]
• Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008 and beyond:
  • netmon (not installed by default): GUI config, filter creation info here
  • wireshark (available by download): GUI-config, no command-line

Any others anyone wants added (or corrected), just comment or email and I’ll update this.
(Edit 7/29/08 - change tcpdump link)
(Edit 10/13/08 - add tshark info, thanks Jefferson!, and wireshark on Windows)

Here’s a couple of quick extra helpers for administering Windows Server 2008 Server Core.

1. Guy Teverovsky (Microsoft MVP) has created the CoreConfigurator which gives a small GUI to many of the initial setup pieces of Server Core, so you don’t have to follow my detailed (cryptic) instructions.
2. Create Shadow Copies on your Server Core file server with
   vssadmin add shadowstorage /for=C: /on=D: /maxsize=900MB
vssadmin create shadow
at 7:00am /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su "vssadmin create shadow /for=c:"

   MaxSize can be bytes (/maxsize=10240), KB, MB, GB, TB, PB, or EB (/MaxSize=1EB), assuming your disk is that big.

I haven’t used CoreConfigurator myself, but I did create my shadow copies again finally on our main server today. There’s a backup that’s amazingly great to have.

Edit on July 8, 2008:  I forgot the”/for=c:” in my paste back to here -I was configuring another Windows Server 2008 Server Core file server and couldn’t figure out why the scheduled task wasn’t creating shadow copies properly.  Sorry to anyone who used this note and had issues.