Network interfaces can be bonded to provide fault-tolerant operation. Here’s how to do it in Ubuntu. I will assume the interfaces to be bonded are eth0 and eth1.
Windows Server Time with NTP
Here’s how to configure a Windows domain controller to act as an NTP client and server for your network. You may then sync all your hosts, Windows or other, to that server. To achieve this, configure one (or more) of your domain controllers to retrieve time from the atomic clocks of the Internet. Rest of you servers should follow suit and sync their time to this domain controller after a little while.
Adding the First Windows 2008 DC into Active Directory
Make a backup copy of your AD before you go any further.
Install your new server, and join it to the domain as a member server. Before you can run dcpromo on the new 2008 server, you must run adprep on your schema master, to prepare the Active Directory schema to support Windows 2008 domain controllers. The installation DVD contains a directory called sourcesadprep. Go there and run:
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Fetching information from Active Directory using Python
Here are two simple scripts written in Python to fetch information about users from Active Directory. The AD schema has been augmented with the Microsoft Services For Unix schema, which will allow to map Unix uids to Windows user accounts.
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Apache HTTP authentication to Active Directory with Kerberos
First, create a user account for your Apache in the Active Directory. Let’s assume the AD Kerberos realm is KOO.FI, and the user name we have created is “apache”. Also create a computer account, let’s call that “apachesrv”.
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HP Array Configuration and Diagnostic Utilities on Linux
Getting the HP Array Configuration Utility (ACU) and the Array Diagnostic Utility (ADU) for Linux to work was non-trivial. It does not seem to be supported anymore, but I managed to get it working on CentOS 5 running on an HP ProLiant DL185 G5.
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Lenovo ThinkPad X300 Ubuntu 8.04 Installation Notes
First, let me tell you some first impressions about the machine. The keyboard is very good. It feels even a bit better than the one in my old T60. The display is very bright and sharp, but viewing angles could be better. WLAN worked right out of the box, as did the webcam.
The solid state drive is incredibly fast. I will never switch back to a hard disk after experiencing an SSD. Everything loads up in an instance. OpenOffice starts in about 5 seconds, which is very good compared to my T60. And the machine boots up and shuts down really fast (I haven’t timed those operations, though).
There are also a couple of annoyances which I hope will soon be fixed. Continue reading Lenovo ThinkPad X300 Ubuntu 8.04 Installation Notes
Limiting the bandwidth of incoming traffic
A backup server was saturating the DSL links of remote offices every time the backups were running. To prevent this, I had to limit the incoming bandwidth of the TCP-connections that were used to back up the remote hosts, but not touch the ones that were used to connect to the servers in the local network. Here’s how to do it.
MediaWiki Image Links
Here’s a description how to do it without any extensions:
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2008/01/21/how-to-make-image-links-in-mediawiki
This extension will allow you to use more comfortable markup:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ImageLink
Mounting Windows filesystems from AIX 5.3
First, you must install fileset bos.cifs_fs.rte, and optionally bos.cifs_fs.smit for the Smitty interface, from the installation DVD.
To invoke the Smitty interface, run:
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root# smitty cifs_fs |
The Smitty interface will enable you to do almost anything you need with the CIFS filesystem.
Sqlite3 for ARMEL
Here’s a statically compiled version of Sqlite 3.5.6 command line interface on ARMEL with Readline support. It runs nicely on Nokia Internet Tablets with the OS 2008 (libreadline4 must be installed):
MS Exchange 2007 upgrade memo
This short list should apply to a situation where an organization with one domain and a simple Exchange environment wants to upgrade from Exchange 2003 to 2007. It assumes everything will be installed on a single server with a fresh installation of Windows 2003 R2, joined as a member server into the domain.
Scratchbox installation under 32-bit chroot on 64-bit Ubuntu
I wanted to try out the Maemo SDK for Nokia 770, N800 and N810 devices (for some reason I happen to own one of every generation), but found out that there are no prebuilt packages for the 64-bit environment. The quick (?) remedy for this is the chroot jail, because a guest i386 environment can pretty easily be bootstrapped inside a 64-bit one. Here are the step-by-step instructions for doing it.
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SUID script requirements on AIX 5L and ksh93
Requirements for a suid script include:
- #! directing the KornShell be used
- Executable by user, group, and other
- No read permission
- Add suid permission by chmod u+s on the file
Add a -p option to #! to increase security to force a separate process if one is not normally done.
Example:
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#! /usr/bin/ksh -p |
Source of this information:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-kornshell93.html#n
Enabling security on an HP ProCurve 4200 series switch
I had a chance to configure an HP ProCurve 4208vl switch the other day. The first impression was that the command line interface is heavily influenced by, if not directly copied from, the Cisco IOS command line interface. So if you have experience with IOS, you will probably feel almost at home on an HP switch. There are some differences, though.
The first thing I wanted to do was to enable ssh access and authentication, and disable telnet. Here’s a quick howto.
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