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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.

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.

Ahh! One of my servers had a bad stick of RAM and caused all sorts of problems with VMWare ESX Server. At first, I thought ESX was too sensitive but later realized the stick was just super bad. Meanwhile, my evaluation version expired and so I decided to use VMware Server 1.0 (free) on top of SuSE 10.2 (also free).

Thankfully, this dude setup a really nice guide to get around some kernel issues in SuSE. It's pretty simple; before installing the VMware Server RPM, I ran the following:

# cd /usr/src/linux
# make mrproper; make cloneconfig; make modules_prepare

After installing the RPM, I ran vmware-config.pl and VMWare complained that a few files were missing. As it turns out, I needed the x86 version of a few packages. I loaded up
Yast -> Software -> Software Management -> Search -> [X] Provides -> [Missing Filename here]. I believe I ended up installing the following packages:

Several.. (many auto-selected themselves)

Next, used YaST to open up my firewall's port 902. Everything seemed to go well until I ran into PAM issues while attempting to remotely manage it using the VMWare Server Console (Windows). I received the error Permission denied: Login (username/password) incorrect. So I took a look at /var/log/messages and found this crappy news:

After searching the web for a solution (thanks web!), I edited /etc/vmware/pam.d/vmware-authd and now it looks like the following:

Once that was done, I created a symbolic link to make restarting VMWare more comfy (ln -s /etc/init.d/vmware /usr/sbin/rcvmware), then I restarted the vmware service (rcvmware restart) and connected successfully from my remote machine. Now I'm happily installing Windows Server 2008 RC0. Hooray!

And my procrastination paid off -- while I was waiting for the motivation to troubleshoot the RAM issue, the price of my server's RAM dropped drastically -- from $160 to $99. Niiiice! I'm buying 5 for a total of 8 Gigs

A friend showed me this and I've used it a few times since. Here's the easiest way to make a service auto start or stop after reboot:

chkconfig servicename on to auto-start and chkconfig servicename off to stop auto-startup.

Thanks, Lenny! Also, can anyone remind me what command I use to add regular user bins to root's path? (ie. add /usr/bin)

Earlier today, I pasted some code into a Linux-based vi via putty/ssh, saved it, zipped it, and downloaded it to a Windows machine. The result was pooh; the code ran but was garbled in notepad. I wondered if I could somehow run a command in Linux to clean/convert all the carriage returns. One of my friends at Microsoft, Lee, suggested unix2dos (and its nemesis dos2unix).. just what I was looking for! However, if I didn't want to run unix2dos each time I saved the file, I could set vi's file format to dos at startup by adding the following alias to my .bashrc file

alias vi='vi -c "set ff=dos"'

Not such a great idea for unix-centric folk but a great thing for me As for a Windows equivalent of unix2dos... Lee, a developer on the Powershell team, just told me that you can run the following in Powershell to accomplish the conversion: Get-Content unixfile.txt | Set-Content dosfile.txt. I really need to get around to scripting in Powershell; it will no doubt save me a ton of time in the long-run. Until then, though, I'll continue to cater to old school VBScript-loving Windows Admins.

I recently used "tar" improperly and inadvertently created a file which seemed near impossible to delete. The file started with two dashes; it was named --exclude.tgz. I issued each of the following commands with no luck:

I was just about fed up so I messaged my friend Larry, a Unix administrator, to ask for help. He initially recommended some of the above techniques but, as you can see, each of them failed. He then gave me this magical command which instantly worked

Perfect!

I'm setting up Gallery2 for my other blog and I had the hardest time finding the binary directory for ImageMagick. a 'whereis ImageMagic' returned nothing useful. Then I ran

and saw the following:

/usr/bin/animate
/usr/bin/compare
/usr/bin/composite
/usr/bin/conjure
/usr/bin/convert
/usr/bin/display
/usr/bin/identify
/usr/bin/import
/usr/bin/mogrify
/usr/bin/montage
/usr/bin/xtp

I entered /usr/bin in the Gallery2 ImageMagick configure settings and everything worked

I recently loaded up one of my servers and out of nowhere, I ran into this error:

Server Configuration Error
The server has encountered a configuration error attempting to process your request. The configuration parameter MD_CUSTOM_ERROR (6008) has an invalid value. Please contact the server administrator for assistance.

I searched the web but couldn't find anything useful. I then started exploring the website's configuration under IIS Properties and I received a similar error when loading up the tab "Custom Errors." I saw a malformed error (401;3 was pointing to C:\windows\help for some reason), set it to default and the site worked again.

Awhile back I tried out FreeBSD for a couple months. I was used to SuSE (which I'm back to) so I ran a few commands to make my environment a bit more familiar. If you are a recent convert, you can use this code too.