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

Linux

Apt-get Woes

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I had just done apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade when I saw something that made me cringe:

No apport report written because MaxReports is reached already
Errors were encountered while processing:
initramfs-tools
plymouth
linux-image-3.2.0-38-generic-pae
ubuntu-minimal
plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text
linux-image-generic-pae
linux-generic-pae
mountall
upstart
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Well that’s not the exact error – I ended up seeing “disk out of space” among other issues. Basically the /root filled up and it broke my apt-get upgrade right in the middle of updates. No good.
So I go to /boot and clean up the older kernel files – just make sure you delete the “abi”, the “config”, the “initrd”, the “System.map”, the “vmcoreinfo”, the “vmlinuz” etc all with the same version number.

Then I went about reinstalling the packages. Unfortunately since some of the packages were already installed prior to running out of space, the dependencies were a little off.

apt-get install -f was no help:

You might want to run ‘apt-get -f install’ to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
initramfs-tools : Depends: initramfs-tools-bin (< 0.99ubuntu13.1~) but 0.99ubuntu13.1 is installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f.

And I didn’t want to have to restore this beast since the last full backup was over 2 months ago. So I had to carry on.

First I noticed that initramfs-tools needed the bin installed, but the bin was too new for initramfs-tools to utilize and therefore could not update even via –configure. Chicken and egg?

So then I looked up what versions were available so that I could downgrade:
apt-cache showpkg initramfs-tools-bin

Versions:
0.99ubuntu13.1 (/var/lib/apt/lists/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise-updates_main_binary-i386_Packages) (/var/lib/dpkg/status)
Description Language:
File: /var/lib/apt/lists/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_main_binary-i386_Packages
MD5: 14e601bd8c0a0905d238d89be3036fa8
Description Language: en
File: /var/lib/apt/lists/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_main_i18n_Translation-en
MD5: 14e601bd8c0a0905d238d89be3036fa8

0.99ubuntu13 (/var/lib/apt/lists/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_main_binary-i386_Packages)
Description Language:
File: /var/lib/apt/lists/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_main_binary-i386_Packages
MD5: 14e601bd8c0a0905d238d89be3036fa8
Description Language: en
File: /var/lib/apt/lists/us.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_main_i18n_Translation-en
MD5: 14e601bd8c0a0905d238d89be3036fa8

Ok, so this was getting easier. All I have to do is install the older version. I had to look it up since it generally doesn’t happen too often:
apt-get install initramfs-tools-bin=0.99ubuntu13

The following packages will be DOWNGRADED:
initramfs-tools-bin
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 downgraded, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.

From there I run the following:
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get autoremove
apt-get autoclean
reboot

Profit.

Microsoft

Remove McAfee Agent

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I had a system with McAfee installed – originally it was pulling updates and rules from an EPO server on site, but the EPO server had been retired and most other systems were migrated to other antivirus suites (Nod32). Unfortunately a laptop was having issues and McAfee had not been removed.

The enterprise antivirus suite had been removed successfully using add remove programs, but the Agent was giving the following error:

McAfee Agent cannot be removed while it is in managed mode.

Since the EPO server was long gone, I attempted to remove the agent manually:
Start > Run > CMD (as administrator)
c:\program files (x86)\mcafee\common framework\frminst.exe /remove=agent
Success!

Networking

Cisco NTP Timezone

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I needed to set the NTP, change the time, and verify everything was all set on a few of the switches around the office. I also changed the timezone.

#show clock
18:36:39.993 UTC Mon Dec 10 2012

conf t
clock timezone CST -6
exit
clock set 18:36:39 CST 10 Dec 2012
#show clock
18:36:39.993 CST Mon Dec 10 2012

conf t
ntp server 0.north-america.pool.ntp.org
ntp server 1.north-america.pool.ntp.org
exit
show ntp associations
show ntp status

Networking

Enable SSH Cisco IOS

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So I wanted to disable telnet and enable SSH only on the switches – take my 2950 and 3560 switches and change the following:
Change the hostname and generate the crypto keys
conf t
hostname HOSTNAMEHERE
ip domain-name HOSTDOMAINHERE
crypto key generate rsa
If this command does not work then you need to update to a K9 or crytographic IOS!
end
show ip ssh
wr mem

Enable the AAA authentication
conf t
service password-encryption
aaa new-model
aaa authentication login default local
aaa authorization exec default local
aaa authorization network default local
exit

Create the User
conf t
username CISCO password PASSWORD
end

Create passwords
conf t
enable secret PASSWORD
line con 0
password PASSWORD
line vty 0 4
no password
transport input ssh
line vty 5 15
no password
transport input ssh
exit

Set SSH arguments
conf t
ip ssh version 2
ip ssh time-out 60
ip ssh authentication-retries 2

Ramblings Of An IT Person