2008-02-22

Akismet on WordPress

Posted by Robert Auch under Open Source Software, Security
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As of today:

“Akismet has caught 347 spam for you since you first installed it.”

That’s since 11/29/2007. Akismet has YET to miscategorize a comment as spam, and it has missed a single spam comment. All I had to do was click “this is spam” and it’s cleaned up.

The only other anti-spam product I’ve seen to perform this well is the IronPort mail system at a client. 130,000 or so attempts / day, 1 spam / day in the entire company queue, and no users complaining about spam in 5 months.

Akismet, Ironport, my hat is off to you both.

 

2008-02-15

Windows Server 2008 Disk Problem

Posted by Robert Auch under VMWare, Windows
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Just as a quick note – Windows Server 2008 RC0 seems to have the same setup issue as Windows Vista, or at least the x64 RC0 does – I spent most of the evening last night editing settings, rebooting, plugging in the product key, and reading “This computer’s hardware may not support booting to this disk. Ensure that the disk’s controller is enabled in the BIOS.” The problem is detailed at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925481 for Vista. Windows Server 2008 RC1 fixes this issue.

I was having the problem on a Virtual system in VMWare ESX 3.5, so it was easy to disconnect a disk to get past the error, but downloading and installing the updated RC seemed like the better fix for the first DC in a new test lab.

What apparently is going on is if you have 2 hard drives that have never been partitioned or initialized, then the Setup.exe program gets confused. You can remove one of the disks temporarily, format them with another boot medium (BartPE, anyone?), or just not use Win2k8 RC0. According to the support note, the only fix for Vista is to format the drives.  I bet you can remove one of them and Vista will work, too, but haven’t tested.

 

2008-02-12

VMware ESX Server 3.5 on Dell 2900iii

Posted by Robert Auch under VMWare
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Building a new ESX host on new hardware with the PERC6/i RAID controller, we came across an error. ESX installs perfectly fine, but upon the initial boot, the server hangs showing:
Loading VMKernel megaraid_sas.o (options: '')
It turns out that this is caused by an IRQ routing issue in the 2.0.1 BIOS on the newest 2900 series (including 2950). You can get the update here, and the release notes here.

Note that the install I linked to is an “Update Package for Red Hat” – this requires RPM to install properly, I’m not sure if that’s to install the script in /etc/rc6.d/ to perform the actual update, or if there’s also a binary driver that needs to be updated as well. To perform this RPM update, rather than building a DOS floppy (or if you don’t have a floppy drive in the server):

  1. Download the update to a USB thumb drive or burn it to a CD.
  2. Reboot the ESX server.
  3. At the boot prompt, you have the choice of “VMware ESX Server”, “VMWare ESX Server (Debug)” or “ESX Troubleshooting mode”. Boot to Troubleshooting mode – this WILL bring you to a shell, eventually.
  4. Insert the thumb drive or CD media and mount it.
    For a thumb drive:
    mkdir /mnt/usb
    mount -t auto /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb
  5. Execute the fix:
    /mnt/usb/PE2900_BIOS_LX_2.1.1.BIN
  6. Read the notes and hit “q” to finish, then let the server reboot and apply the update.

Server should come up 100% fine after the reboot, and you’re good to go!

 

2008-01-28

DEC 2008 – Chicago

Posted by Robert Auch under Business, Domain Controllers
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I have been invited to present at the Directory Experts Conference in Chicago in March, hosted by NetPro Computing, Inc.. I’ll be discussing how we recently integrated dozens of Linux servers into our 300+ server Windows 2000 Native Mode forest. I’m excited, but it’s taking away from the time to update a few things here I have in “unpublished” state.

Of note is a response for T. Colin Dodd regaring his short and sweet post regarding Red Hat Flaws according to Secunia. In short, Mr. Dodd (please correct me if the address is wrong), yes, Red Hat should be proud of what they’ve accomplished, but…

Well, that’s 2 pages of text that’s not yet finished.

 

2008-01-12

Script: Check Webserver availability

Posted by Robert Auch under Networking, Open Source Software
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We’ve been having some server uptime/stability issues, and aren’t getting alerts from HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM) that the services are down (cause they’re not, they’re just not answering on HTTP).  So I took a copy of “responder.pl” and put it into something I wrote for totalnetsolutions.net.  What came out is actually pretty nice, easily configurable, and so far this week, very stable.

We haev this running ever 3 minutes from 3 systems: 1 Windows 2003, 1 Fedora Core 8, and 1 Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon.  Requires Net::SMTP, Config::INIFiles, LWP::UserAgent, and HTTP::Request.  The only one that I’ve needed to download and install is Config::INIFiles on any of those 3 systems.  But I do have LWP::Simple on all systems, so I’m not sure if you’ll need the last 2.  This is my first published code other than 3 line bash scripts, so be kind in comments.

Feel free to take and use / improve / update this – I’d just appreciate if you’d let me know so I can update this version here.  The parseIni() function checks that all “URL”s are in http://www.google.com format or http://64.233.167.99 format (it checks for http:// followed by text followed by what appears to be a valid TLD format, or it checks for http:// followed by an IP address).  I have yet to add in the regex to look for a valid full URI, because I didn’t need that yet.

This is upgraded over responser.pl in that:

  1. It will send to any number of SMTP recipients (comma-separated)
  2. It will silence its alerting if *all* checked addresses are down.  If the monitoring system gets unplugged from the network, it won’t attempt to send hundreds of alerts upon regaining access.  Or if you’re testing from a DSL line, you won’t get alerts because the DSL line went down, but the actual target was up.  The next version will have this as an option in the INI file.
  3. It uses standard INI file formatting, rather than a parsed text file.
  4. it runs out of the box (so to speak) on Windows (ActivePerl) or Linux (Fedora and Ubuntu both tested).
  5. It has better inline documentation.

The major problem is that a minimum of 2 URLs are needed in the INI file for the full logic to work.  You can get around this for small networks by adding in the DNS domain for one, and the IP address for the other. 

Thanks, and please share any concerns or problems.

chk-web.pl

 

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