netnerds.net

I'm kinda late on this but arstechnica reports that "Microsoft has opened the source code to the .NET Framework libraries under a read-only reference license. Developers who want to check out the source code need only upgrade to the newly released Visual Studio 2008 to gain access to it."

This is something I've always dreamed about -- learning by a large software firm's example. I can remember how disappointed I was during the first dotcom when companies would go down and take their source code and website designs with them. Woudln't it have been amazing if they would have donated their site templates to OSWD.org? As for the code, I realized the other year after looking at my own dotcom code, that the styles were probably pretty bad and not so good to learn from.

Check out Scott Gu's blog entry for more information on the libraries that are being opened.

Today I attacked my 2008 technical to do list and setup a subversion server for backups/source control. It was actually pretty darn easy in SUSE 10.3. After I got it going, I wondered if I could have it automatically authenticate against my HOME domain. So, using SuSE's menu driven interface YaST, I easily added my Linux machine to my Windows domain.

Initially, YaST wasn't able to find or join the domain. This happens sometimes in Windows clients too when:
1. In TCP/IP, the DNS settings are pointed to servers outside of the domain
2. The fully qualified domain name (ex. corp.windomain.com) is not given when joining the domain
3. The FQDN is not listed as a DNS search suffix

After adjuting /etc/resolv.conf to reflect my fully qualified domain name, YaST made it surprisingly easy to find and join the domain. But right as it was finishing up, it ran into the error "cannot write pam settings." I looked around the web and saw about 2 other people had the same problem but no solution was offered. After poking around, I noticed that "pam-smb" was not installed. Generally, SuSE will automatically detect when rpms need to be added but in this case it didn't.

In order to get it all working, I added pam-smb, samba-winbind and krb5-client then I easily plugged into my Windows 2003 domain. Years ago, I tried to do something similar and it seemed to work but I was never able to login via SSH. I'm pretty sure I didn't prefix the domain (in proper case, at that) when attempting to login. Knowing that, I was successfully able to login to my Linux machine using a Windows domain login this time around.

Awesome! This is much easier than doing user mapping with NIS.

For those of you who dropped out of college and want to finish your undergrad degree, you may want to consider the online university, Western Governors University. I'm sharing this on my blog because I actually shared the URL with many of my tech friends who dropped out. I found an ad for WGU in some tech magazine (maybe TechNet?) and it made me curious. Here's what I found:

• Its accredited by the same org that accredits traditional universities (such as BYU), Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. It also earned some other national accreditation and was the first online and first non-traditional program to do so.
• Members of Sun and HP are on the board of trustees and a ton of big companies are listed as corporate collaborators including AT&T, Cisco, Dell, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Qwest, Sun and HP.
• It's only about $5,000 or $6000 a year
• The CEO of Google said: "Google has pioneered the idea of access to information. The reason Google thinks WGU is such a good idea is because WGU has pioneered the concept of competency- based education whenever you want it."
• You get a bunch of certifications while you are at it.

WGU offers undergrad and graduate degrees in IS, teaching, nursing and business.

Another alternative for those wanting a Masters in IS is Carnegie Mellon's Distance Learning program. It seems pretty awesome.

I'm currently playing with Windows Server 2008 Core and I'm really at a loss trying to figure out why Microsoft seems to go out of its way not to adopt SSH. SSH seems like such an easy and straightforward answer to remote administration. Unix administrators have long used SSH but Windows administrators are given WinRS, a command line tool that requires that you run it each time you need to execute a command on a remote system. So instead of arriving at a remote prompt as you would with SSH and simply typing "ipconfig", you must type "winrs -r:myserver ipconfig"

winrs -r:myserver every time!

I'm hoping things have changed in Windows 2008, but so far, I can't find any way for WinRS to be interactive. A blog post on TechNet back in 2006 suggests that interactivity is going to be a feature at some point:

Currently any commands you execute can't be interactive or prompt for input. WinRS just executes what you specify and returns the results.

Unfortunately, it's nearly a year and a half later and no progress seems obvious. I hope I'm wrong and someone can show me the light or, even better, perhaps we'll see PowerShell+SSH hit the final version of Windows 2008. Many admins already have an SSH client as part of their toolkit and sure, WinRS runs over HTTP(S) and opening just one port is nice but the same goes for SSH. Port 22 or 80, I don't really care. WinRS seems to have its value, but not as a replacement for SSH. Give me SSH or give me both.

I don't know what on Earth AOL developers do in their AIM 6.x setup but they sure manage to mess things up in Vista. Once AIM is installed, my network detection no longer works and it gives an error that reads: "No network - server execution failed." The problem seems to be some kind of COM error and the fix which has worked for me twice is adding localservice to the Administrator group (Net localgroup Administrators localservice /add).

Today, when attempting to install SQL Server 2005 Express, I kept coming across the following error

The SQL Server System Configuration Checker cannot be executed due to WMI configuration on the machine [computername] Error:2147500034 (0x80004002)

After tons of reboots and WMI resets that didn't work, I found the solution on Chuck Boyer's blog. It was eerily close to the AOL fix: net localgroup Administrators "Network Service" /add.

My SQL install then worked properly right away. I was extremely relieved to find that fix because my experience with faulty SQL Server 2005 installs in the past have not been resolvable AND the reason I was reinstalling SQL and AIM is because I had to format my Vista laptop after a beta Citrix VPN client for Vista completely killed my ability to VPN to any network using any protocol. While I was uninstalling the client, I blue screened and when I came back and tried to establish a VPN connection using Vista's built in client, I was unable to register my computer on the network. It errored out with: "Error 720: No PPP control protocols configured." After a few hours of trying to fix it, I decided to just wipe Vista and start over. It felt kind of good actually. My computer, especially Firefox, runs a lot smoother now that I don't have so many extensions going. Ultimately, though, I was a bit tired and just wanted all of my installs to go well.

Anyway, it took a long time for me to find the solution on Chuck's blog so hopefully this post will help him get some positive PankRanking.

Edit: Already I see a few people have found my site while looking for a solution. Did the above work for you, too?

The web interface for VMware Server 2 Beta for Linux is garbage; it's both slow and unattractive. Even VMware Server 1 and ESX Server 2.5 from years ago had a faster/nicer web interface. VMware Server looks a bit like ESX and my experience with ESX taught me that it can be administered with both the web interface and Virtual Infrastructure Client (VIC). I wondered if perhaps Server 2 could be administered with VIC too and fortunately, my hunch was confirmed by the VMware forums.

VIC on VMware Server Beta 2 is much faster than the web interface and even provides a more information about the VMs resource histories. It can be assumed that pushing the slower web interface for the free product isn't so much tech driven as it is marketing/$$ driven but that's only a guess. VIC is a big part of the high end, high price ESX server but can be also be found hidden in the rpms and tarballs of VMware Server. I could not find it, however, in the Windows version of VMware Server 2, even after extracting contents of the executable using the /a option.

To find the VIC (Windows only client, Linux clients are out of luck) in an RPM, run the following commands:

The file can then be found at ./usr/lib/vmware/hostd/docroot/client/VMware-viclient.exe. As for the tarball, expand it (tar -xvzf or WinRAR in Windows) and the file can be found at ./vmware-server-distrib/lib/hostd/docroot/client/VMware-viclient.exe.

The thick client is so much nicer; I know it's unlikely that I'll ever use the resource intensive MUI so I uninstalled it by running:

Even though I ran the uninstaller, the MUI magically started up on the next reboot so I modified the permissions on /etc/init.d/vmware and then commented out the following line: $watchdog -s webAccess -u 30 -q 5 "$webAccess $webAccessOpts start" > /dev/null 2>&1 &. I then restarted the vmware service and it worked exactly as I hoped.

Aside from the bad web interface, I'm really impressed by this version of VMware server and I'm definitely recommending it at work once the final arrives. I honestly hope that Microsoft's new virtualization platform can impress me as much and even more once their product matures. As for xen, I successfully set it up in SuSE, it was eas as pie. However, my Opteron 270 doesn't appear to support hardware virtualization (even though AMD's docs say they do, perhaps I have to upgrade my BIOS) so I can't run Windows VMs. Totally unacceptable. xen is something I want to keep an eye on, though. Big companies like Citrix, Oracle and Sun are using it in their own virtualization platforms. Now to find a test server that supports hardware VT...

Update: You can also find the VMware-viclient.exe here on some .edu website. I haven't used it and can't vouch for its safety, but it's there (at least for now) in the event that you don't want to go through all of the above steps. The timestamp on it is December 2007 which is good for now, but I woudln't use it past June 2008.

I've been out of work for over two months, recovering from surgery to fix a severe repetitive stress injury. It started about two years ago when my workspace was setup poorly. I hyper extended my arm to mouse for about two months and it caused an inflammation that eventually lead to calcification. Somewhere along the way, that calcification lead to a tear in the rotator cuff and finally, a detached tendon. After the surgery and 20 staples across the shoulder, I was in an upper body brace for a month and now I'm in a sling. RSI doesn't play as you can see in the picture below:

I've mentioned this in several posts because it's extremely important to get the message out to all of you who spend 8+ hours a day on a computer to
1. Ask for a professional ergonomic evaluation of your workstation.
2. Keep your posture in mind when working and remind yourself to stretch in place or stand up and stretch hourly or half-hourly. If necessary, use schtasks in Windows:
schtasks /create /tn StretchReminder /tr "msg console Stretch!" /sc HOURLY
3. Reevaluate your workspace on a weekly basis to ensure you haven't accidentally slipped back into bad habits.

In other news.. while polishing up my resume for grad school, I read that accomplishments should be listed on a resume instead of (or in addition to) responsibilities. Keeping that in mind, there's a lot I'd like to add to my resume and thus, accomplish this year. Barring my shoulder doesn't impede my efforts to do so, here's my list of what I'd like to do and learn:

I hope to revisit this list at the end of 2008 and see how many goals I've reached. Don't fret -- I've got personal goals too, those are just kept in my personal analog assistant.

Oh and I'm currently reading a really useful O'reilly called "Time Management for System Administrators" and I recommend it to anyone reading this blog. It could have done without the Microsoft jabs, like most O'reilly books, but it's still really good overall. I'm finishing up that soon and it will be the first of the three or more technical books that I hope to read from cover to cover this year. Number two is Head First C# and I'm not sure about the third just yet. Any suggestions?