liggyman's blog

Below are the steps I take to join an Openfiler machine to an Active Directory domain. I hope this helps anyone who is having issues with their setup.

Assumptions:
domain is named: domain.tld
domain controller is dc.domain.tld

Use Windows domain controller and authentication [checked]
Security model: Active Directory
Domain / Workgroup: domain
Domain controllers: dc.domain.tld
ADS realm: DOMAIN.TLD
Join domain: [checked]
Administrator username: domain\Administrator
Administrator password: password

I submit the form once or twice to get the Openfiler server to showup in the Computers OU on the DC, waiting 2-3 minutes between attempts. After it appears I wait another 3 minutes to see if the groups populate on OF. If not I repeat the above again, and OF pulls the groups down.

It’s a little weird, but this behaviour has been consistent for me.

This is a note from awhile ago, and I’m not sure what the original source for this solution is.

The Problem: The Service Pack 3 installation would start, but was unable to complete successfully.

The Solution involved registering a bunch of .DLL files by running the below commands. A popup appears after running each line.


net stop wuauserv
regsvr32 wuapi.dll
regsvr32 wuweb.dll
regsvr32 atl.dll
regsvr32 wups2.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll
regsvr32 MSXML3.dll
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
net start wuauserv


I recently migrated an XP Virtual machine from VMWare to KVM. The process required doing a system repair using the XP install cd.

After doing this image attachments in Thunderbird were being opened by IE instead of the Windows Image Viewer. The image viewer wasn’t even an option to use.

I had to run the following from a command prompt to resolve the issue:

regsvr32 /i shimgvw.dll

If you do incremental or diff based backups, or if you compress your Windows Virtual Machine you will find that this tip will save you plenty of time, bandwidth, and disk space.

The Windows page file changes constantly and is large. It’s up to 4GB on some of my Virtualized workstations. It also doesn’t compress well and is really not needed in your backups.

By filling the pagefile with zeros when shutting the VM down to do a backup, that part of the image will be unchanged between increments/diffs. It will also compress down to almost nothing.

To achieve this we need to set one registry key to do this you can import the following from a .reg file or make the appropriate changes manually.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
“ClearPageFileAtShutdown”=dword:00000001

I recently assisted someone on IRC with a network issue they were having with pfSense related to bogon networks. The cause was a stale bogons file which didn’t take the latest assignment into account.

[removed bogons file contents]

On pfSense this file is located at:
/etc/bogons

Update:
I did some further research into this and discovered that the bogons file is actually updated on the first of every month using a cron job. The script that is run uses a random delay to prevent hammering of the pfSense server. The file that is retrieved is located at http://files.pfsense.org/bogon-bn-nonagg.txt. I have verified that this file is up to date.

The update bogons script is located at: /etc/rc.update_bogons.sh

Running the script at the end of the build process is a good idea if you don’t want to update the bogons file directly. For immediate results you will want to create a copy of the script and edit out the parts that create a delay run the script with the ‘now’ argument.

/etc/rc.update_bogons.sh now

Sometimes you need a quick and dirty way of resetting a MySQL root password. Typical scenario is when taking over Administrative duties on a server which has no documentation.

First we need stop MySQL and start it with the –skip-grant-tables option set:

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop
sudo mysqld --skip-grant-tables

Then we login to mysql as root:

mysql -u root mysql

Once logged in we can set the new password:

UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('NewPassword') WHERE User='root';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit;

Warning: This is not the most secure way of doing this. I disconnect the server from the network before doing this, and reconnect after.

I was deploying and testing an Outlook plugin for a client the other day. On one machine I came across an error message when launching Outlook 2003.
 

The message:

 
The Solution:

• Rename the extend.dat file to something like extend.dat.backup.
• The next time Outlook is launched the extend.dat file will be recreated.

I converted my main workstation at home to a virtual machine, and started connecting to it via RDP from a thin client machine. I found that images didn’t look quite right, and had banding instead of proper gradients. The color depth was set to 16-bit and couldn’t be raised, even when setting the depth higher using the RDP client.

Remote Desktop server on Windows XP, by default runs at a maximum 16-bit color depth. However up to 24-bit color is supported. Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then I will be multitasking and will move the Show Desktop icon off the Quick Launch toolbar.  Sometimes clients will delete this icon not realizing how much they actually use it.

To replace it open Notepad and enter the following text:

[Shell]
Command=2
IconFile=explorer.exe,3
[Taskbar]
Command=ToggleDesktop

Save the file as ‘Show Desktop.scf’ and place it in the ‘%userprofile%\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch’ folder.

I was unable to add x64 print drivers (for distribution to 64bit clients) on a 32bit Windows Server 2008 install.  This is the workaround:

1. On an x64 machine browse to \\servername, where servername is the x86 print server.  (Start -> Run…, type ‘\\servername’.
2. In the list of shares, open the Printers folder.
3. Right-click in the Printers folder and select Server Properties.
4. Go to the drivers tab and add a new x64 driver.