Monthly Archives: March 2013

Linux

Proxmox 2.x Installation Woes PE2950

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I had a Dell Poweredge 2950 that had been faithfully running proxmox 1.9 (upgraded from 1.7, to 1.8, finally to 1.9) for about a year now. I finally got enough time – and pestered other people about moving their virtual machines to other servers – in order to redo the machine with additional RAM and Prox2.3

So I upgraded the server from 16GB to 32GB – DDR2FB so… – and attempted to boot off the ISO Prox 2.3 image.

As this is a 2950 and not say an R520, the DRAC (not idrac) is pretty much useless – even with the “enterprise” level, it’s bare bones at best. The newer idrac systems (drac6, 7+) are all much better for remote management. As such, I had a monitor and keyboard plugged into this server on my workbench.

Prox displays and says “hit enter to boot”. Hit enter. Screen gets all fuzzy – digitally – and I can’t actually see anything to proceed. Reboot. This time I put in some arguments:
debug vga=normal

Detecting network settings … done
\nInstallation aborted – unable to continue (type EXIT or CTRL-D to reboot)

Reboot
debug vga=normal noacpi
Same issue – unable to continue

Well this is going nowhere fast. Aha! I see the BIOS was 2.2.6 and the newest release is 2.7.0 – this may be the problem. Grab my trusty USB drive and format for DOS/win98 bootable, put the BIOS flashing executable on the drive, boot off the USB and update the BIOS.

Same issue. Argh.

I attempted the debug vga=normal again, only this time instead of rebooting I decided to check out the /var/log area and see if anything was posted.

There was an Xorg log file – it was the only log file in there – and I found some interesting stuff:

XF86OpenConsole setsidfailed operation not permitted
open ACPI failed – file not found

Great. Just on a whim, since I’ve seen the digitally Xorg screens from my past experience with FBSD, I decide to try a different monitor.

Eureka! The problem was my 19″ LCD was being read by Xorg as something not compatible with the currently loaded drivers. I ended up using a spare 15″ LCD and it booted right up.

TL:DR Keep a small LCD around for certain linux experiments.

Microsoft

Dell OpenManage 7.x on 2950

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Brand-new (used) PE2950 server redone with Windows 2008 R2 SP1. I wanted OpenManage on there – for obvious reasons – so I attempted to install version 7.1.xish but was hitting a small snag with the installer.

I was receiving the following error:

The installer has detected that the HTTPS listener is not configured for Windows Remote Management. You can either configure the HTTPS listener before installing Remote Enablement, or install Remote Enablement now by selecting the “Custom” installation screen and configure the HTTPS listener later. See the “Remote Enablement Requirements” section in the “Dell OpenManage Installation and Security User’s Guide” for information on configuring the HTTPS listener. Note: Remote Enablement is required to manage this system from a remote Server Administrator Web Server and is applicable only for those systems that support Server Instrumentation. Click here to configure HTTPS Listener for Windows Remote Management.

Generally the Dell installers will help you with the dependencies and all will be solved by the end. Unfortunately, clicking on the “configure HTTPS Listener for WRM” wasn’t exactly doing anything correctly – rescanning dependencies resulted in the exact same error.

Brief check found that it’s because of an SSL/Certificate issue. This system is on a domain, and there is a certificate authority authorized with AD – the CA is running on a 2003 R2 server (with hopes to upgrade once we get rid of all the pesky 2003/XP systems).

To fix:
Open MMC
Add the Certificates (Computer Account) and connect to the Local Computer
Drill down to Certificates, Personal
Right-click on Personal and select All Tasks, then Request New Certificate
Follow along on the wizard - this will create a computer authorized certificate for use in the Domain environment
Rescan the dependencies
Profit

Unfortunately I continued to receive another warning – something about “all is well, but I want to warn you anyway”. The installation worked anyway even with Typical selected.

Linux, Microsoft

Nas4Free Samba Home Directories Active Directory

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Wow that title is a mouthful. So I installed Nas4free (9.1.0.1-636) on a server with ample storage and wanted to give my end users access to this storage. Why Nas4free? Because it’s freakin easy to administer, fast, and ZFS snapshots are pretty damn nice. And free.

So, nas4free on a server. I also had active directory with about 120 windows users. Hell if I’m going to setup 120 “local” users on nas4free AND have to manage 120 “local” users passwords when they forget. No way. So I could either use LDAP or Active Directory – in my case I chose AD.

Under Access, choose Active Directory (This actually joins the server to your domain, so I assume your network and other settings are already correct)
Domain Controller name: MYDC1
domain name (DNS): MYDOMAIN.LOCAL
Domain name (NetBIOS): MYDOMAIN
Administrator name: ADMINISTRATOR
Administration password: ******

Save. Then verify that it joined your domain by clicking on Diagnostics, then Information. Click on MS Domain.
You should see the line “Join to ‘MYDOMAIN’ is OK” and “checking the trust secret for domain MYDOMAIN via RPC calls succeeded” as well as a list of all of your domain user accounts imported.

But then I needed to change CIFS/SMB to allow my users:
Click on Services then CIFS/SMB
Authentication should already be set to Active Directory. I had issues with protocol, so I changed it to NT1. I also changed the workgroup to be the netBIOS name from above.

Then, on shares, I created a HOmeDirs with the following path
/mnt/zfs/zfsdataset/homedirs/%U
Made it browseable and with Guest Access enabled
Then enabled Shadow Copy
In AUX parameters I entered:
valid users = %U
force user = %U

Then, all you have to do manually is create each directory:
SSH to your nas4free
mkdir /mnt/zfs/zfsdataset/homedirs/USERNAME1 etc

I ended up chmod -R 777 /mnt/zfs/zfsdataset/homedirs

Microsoft

Pidgin Spellcheck Support

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Installing pidgin on a new system and it is failing at installing (downloading) the spellcheck installation files from the openoffice site. So here’s the “fake” way of doing the same stuff:

Install Pidgin
Download http://it.thelibrarie.com/utilities/en_US.zip
Create the directory structure C:\program files (x86)\pidgin\spellcheck\share\enchant\myspell
Unzip the en_US.zip file and grab all of the files – copy to the newly created myspell directory from the previous step
Open pidgin – you now have spellcheck support