All systems related posts
There are few situations that can lead to a user account being locked out in an Active Directory environment. The following two situations are worth mentionning, because at first sight, it might have seemed like the user account was locked out “for no reason”.
Continue reading Active Directory : User account repeatedly locked for no reason ?
If you sometimes access a network share and check that “remember password” box, then you might have wondered how to delete that password as well.
James Geurts gives us the trick Continue reading Windows : Clear saved Windows networking passwords
If you try to make an SNMP request and get a time out like this :
% snmpwalk -v 1 -c public netapp-name
Timeout: No Response from netapp-name
Check that SNMP is enabled (options snmp.enable) and that your host is allowed to perform SNMP queries to the netapp (options snmp.access).
By the way, do use -v 1 ( protocol version 1) : I had timeouts while using -v 2c as well…
Network configuration, on a Debian System, is stored in /etc/network.
In this directory you’ll find :
You’ll mostly want to tweak with the interfaces file, and probably put some scripts in the various hook directories. For example the /etc/network/if-pre-up.d is great to put the script which will setup your firewall (with iptables commands and ruleset).
Be sure to read the Debian Reference, which covers this and much more in great details.
Cfengine is a tool which purpose is to describe what is a healthy system and how to bring it back to normal when something fails.
I won’t go into an explanation about how cfengine works, because the project webpage already has a neat tutorial and complete reference. Instead of that, I’ll explain how I used cfengine to build a fool proof Linux firewall.
Continue reading Keeping track of changes with cfengine and SubVersioN
Debian GNU/Linux systems come with a handy tool to manage packages : apt.
These are the commands I use the most.
Continue reading Debian GNU/Linux : apt
In an Active Directory Domain, there is a special Domain Controller which holds the FSMO Role “PDC Emulator”.
As its name suggests, it is there to ease migration from NT 4 domains to Active Directory 2000 and up domains by letting this PDC Emulator DC behave like a NT4 Primary Domain Controller. This allows to keep running NT4 BDC (Backup Domain Controllers) and NT4 Clients while you migrate core DCs to Windows 2000 and up.
However, if you think the PDC Emulator is useless if you have no NT4 component in your infrastructure… you’re wrong !
It serves many other different purposes :
To make it short, even in a full Windows 2000 and up Domain, the PDC Emulator role is one of the most important ones …
The “interface name” part of an ifconfig command can be a simple interface name, such as eri0, bge0 and such, or a logical unit such as eri0:1, eri0:2 and so on.
This makes it easy to setup more than 1 ip address on a network card, and hence to make virtual servers.
In Solaris 10, services are managed by SMF. The scripts in /etc/rcX.d are only there for legacy (and so is inetd).
To manage the services, you mainly use 2 commands : svcadm and svcs. Below are the most useful commands.
disable services :
# svcadm disable network/finger
enable services :
# svcadm enable network/finger
list all enabled services :
# svcs
list all services:
#svcs -a
list error conditions for services:
#svcs -x
These are the only options I’ve use so far … for the other ones, check the manual !
crle is the tool which lets you manage the way Solaris searches the shares libraries.
crle -l path1:path2:path3 will make Solaris lookup for shared libraries in path1, 2 and 3.
Beware that this replaces the previous settings !!! Easy to mess with your system…