Virtual PC for Windows 7 does not support 64 bit guests

Virtual PC for Windows 7 does not support 64 bit guests. Wow.

Windows Update Windows Server 2008 800B0100 error

Fresh installation of Windows Server 2008 x64
Error 800B0100 upon running Windows Update
Rebooted for good measure
After reboot, new windows update error -> Error 8024001B
Decided to relax and do other things
Server notified of pending reboot -> rebooted
Logged in, windows updates were ready...

Solution -> Reboots and patience, not a bad philosophy. Be careful, some posts will send you down a bunch of different rabbit holes

Helpful URL:
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/4fdf8e8c-bdf5-417e-a465-dab62fe182391033.mspx

Windows server 2008 0x8007232B error on activation

Windows server 2008 0x8007232B error on activation

To fix:
Choose 'Change product key' -> re-enter same product key -> activate

COISUG Meeting Wednesday January 14 COISUG is 2 years old

COISUG is 2 years old!!! Can you believe it? Lets celebrate! Limited edition COISUG shirts will be available to the first 30 members that show up, so don’t miss out!

Topic: Metro Ethernet and Fiber Technologies
When: Wednesday, January 14 1:00PM
Where: McMenamins Old St. Francais School - Rambler Room Bend, OR

How to enable Microsoft Windows DNS TTL for Caching

How to enable Microsoft Windows DNS TTL for Caching:

Regedit
HKLM\System\Current Control Set\Services\DNS\Parameters
New -> DWORD -> MaxCacheTtl
Decimal Value in Seconds: 1-?

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=813964

WSUS 3.0 SP1 Clients not reporting and Admin Console Broken

Give the 'Network Service' account write access to c:\WINDOWS\TEMP

Fedora 8 and VMware Server

To get Fedora 8 and VMware working in a stable fashion there are a couple of things to keep in mind. VMware is not stable on Fedora 8 if VMware is installed on a base Fedora 8 install that includes the Virtualization packages (Virtual Machine Manager, XEN, etc). This becomes quite evident when you "play" a virtual machine and you lose all console access (mouse, keyboard etc). Keep in mind that when this occurs I have booted off of the Fedora 8 kernel NOT the XEN kernel. Could this be caused by onflicting kernel modules loaded into the default non XEN kernel? Perhaps. I am not sure nor have I spent any additional time diagnosing the issue.

To get Fedora Core 8 and WMware working in a stable fashion, follow these quick steps:

• Install Fedora Core 8
• Customize Packages: Include Development Libraries (gcc etc), xinetd (super server)
• Complete Install
  
• Download and Install the VMware Server .rpm from vmware.com
• Install the vmware-any-any-update found here http://knihovny.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/vmware-any-any-update115.tar.gz or google if missing
• Execute the an-any-update and it will patch your vmware install and re-compile the modules
• Updated Fedora
• Reboot
• Install and run your virtual machines

Enjoy!

COISUG Meeting Today

COISUG Meeting: This Wednesday 1:00p at the Deschutes Mountain Room, sponsored by Microsoft and Cinetix

Seattle/Portland events in Bend? You bet! Microsoft, and COISUG member Cinetix, is sponsoring the COISUG event this Wednesday (1:00p) at the Deschutes Mountain Room. This event will be a deep dive into Sharepoint, Exchange and Unified Communications. This is the perfect event to learn more about the technologies and also get an inside look into infrastructure design and deployment. Microsoft and Cinetix has assembled a great team for this event so don't miss out. Checkout http://coisug.info to learn more.

OSCON - Portland, 2007

The 2007 OSCON conference was great fun, and what a breath of fresh air. The energy was thick and the knowledge pool deep. The keynote by Tim O'Reilly was insightful and his interview of Shutleworth interesting. Shuttleworth has a good grip on the focus of Ubuntu and is ultimately a good voice for the Ubuntu (if not Debian) community.

I was able to attend a few tutorials (Linux Performance Monitoring and Time Management for SA's) and many sessions (including nagios, puppet, XEN,etc) all of which were very well received.

A few take aways: XEN is coming on strong in the virtualization arena (check out XEN Image Manager), Puppet is a great tool for managing large *nix environments, Nagios is still on top (Check out the projects from Groundwork - Fruity config manager), Asterisk is everywhere, Intel released Threading Building Blocks, OpenSolaris is making a big push, and wow lots of vendors selling "support/maintenance" on re-wrapped projects.

Cool conference, well worth it.

AD Account Lockout on Single User Object - 1085,1099 and 675 Failure Audit

Interesting issue where a user was getting locked out ~4 hours after changing their password. Two events were logged in the directory every 7 or so hours (1085,1099), and not much else. After reviewing dcdiags, nediags, repadmin, and replmon we decided that it must be either cached credentials, profile corruption, or a node logged into the domain with bad credentials. Downloaded and installed the Account Lockout and Management tools and ran the Account Lockout Status utility against the user and the Eventcomb utility against the domain for Account Lockout events. After monitoring the user lockout status, the user rebooted and was immediately locked out; bad password count. Upon review of the associated logs from eventcomb ( and a quick 'grep') event 675 was revealed with said username and node ip. User was logged out of conflicting node and issue was resolved.

Account Lockout and Management Tools
Microsoft Account Passords and Policies

Asterisk - Trixbox - VOIP

A few of us have installed a barebones Asterisk environment, setup a few sip extensions and made an intra pbx call, maybe even left a voicemail; but few of us ever got past that. Not too long ago a friend turned me on to Trixbox (this guy lives @ Trixboxpro). Trixbox is a full Asterisk PBX distribution with a seemless web frontend based upon CentOS (a Red Hat derivitive.) Download the ISO, boot a box off the iso and run the automated install, and roll with it. Once installed login to your new Trixbox with username: maint and password: admin and start populating your config. At this point you will want to setup a couple extensions for testing, enable voicemail, and download a couple of sip clients. (xLite for windows or twinkle for linux.) Login the sip clients and make a call between the two, maybe try *43 or *98 for voicemail, a little to easy. To accept calls via a firewall you will need to forward the following ports: SIP (5060-5061 UDP) IAX (5036 UDP) IAX2 (4569 - 4560? UDP) RTP (not sure about these) (10000-20000 UDP)

To make your setup official find a VOIP provider that will provide service to your Asterisk PBX. I am using Viatalk , others are around, but some will not support customers using a VOIP pbx. Your VOIP provider will setup an account, secure a phone number and notify you when the line is active. You will essentially setup a SIP trunk between your PBX and your provider - similar to a pap setup.

Troubleshooting: SSH is your friend so login to your box, type asterisk -rvvvvvv and you will land on the asterisk command line - learn it and use it - type help.

Config Help

Traffic Shaping - OpenBSD and PF

We recently had an issue where 80% of a T1 was being utilized for non-business related traffic; affecting the ability of other users to complete their daily tasks. We needed a solution that could queue traffic based upon desitnation; internal or external. To accomplish this task I placed an OpenBSD box at HQ acting as a transparent bridge on the fast ethernet segment going to the remote office: Internet <---> HQ {PF/ALTQ} <---> Remote Office.

I kept the config simple, queuing on one interface and passing on the other. I setup 2 queues based upon the RFC1918 address space; one queue bound internally and allocated 1Mb (+ borrow ) and the other not bound for an RFC1918 address space with an allocated 450Kb. After a little tweaking this config accomplished everything that I was after. (review the 'allow-opts' flag) Below is an output from pfctl 'pfctl -vv -squeue. Post if you are interested in the config.


Checkout OpenBSD and PF to learn more about the power of PF.

Environmental Monitoring - RoomAlert

Keeping a close eye on your data center environment (temperatures, humididty) can be quite tough but is a must. I recently implemented a unit from Room Alet (http://www.roomalert.com/) to do just that. Power up the unit, plugin data and you immediately have a bead on temperature and humidity.

I married the device to a few external probes (that connect back to the unit via rj11); these included one external temp/humidity sensor, three other temp probes, and a door probe. The management interface (java) is very intuitive and setup of external probes is simple. One of the most important requirements that I had for a device was SNMP access; the 24e reports all data via SNMP. MIBs can be downloaded from their website and after a few quick walks you will find the OID's of interest.

Below is an example of one of the custom graphs that I created via snmp, Cacti, and rrdtool. The following graph reports individual HVAC unit air temperature (3), humidity in 2 seperate places in room, rack temperatures, and door status.


By trending this data we are able to better understand both the health of our HVAC environment and how the environment reacts to external and internal events.

A call for all Systems Administrators in Central Oregon

Welcome all to the first Central Oregon Systems Administrators usergroup meeting. This is the place where Sys Admins can come together to exchange information, explore new technologies and network. The goal of this first meeting is to meet and greet. Those that will be interested are Systems/Network Administrators and Engineers that manage and maintain data centers and closets ;), storage area networks, directory services, mail, DNS, networks, security, and anything in between (OS and hardware agnostic).

Date: TBD - Mid February in the Evening
Where: Edge Wireless Corporate HQ Bend, OR
Food: Pizza and Sodas

Please forward this post to anyone that might be interested. Please post questions or email lhowell@alivedata.com for more information. BTW; If anyone has a good kickoff topic please let me know.

Have a great one,
Lewis Howell

up2date requires kernel-lib error

Run up2date --configure

 

Choose option 20 - pkgSkipList and remove ['kernel*'} - This will allow for the dependency to be met and kernel related libs to be installed*

 

Visit the http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_58_8726.shtm