Friday, December 10, 2010

Network Scan

Need to scan your network to find available ipaddress? If you are using a linux distro, then you have nmap at your service. One simple command is all it takes.

nmap –s 192.168.1.0/24

nmap has many other command switches available. Check our their website for more information.

http://nmap.org

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Motherboard failure today

We have a Zimbra mail server at work running on top of a 64bit Ubuntu 8.0.4 OS. The computer is a Dell Precision 380 and after a power outage last night, (yes it is connected to a UPS) the motherboard got fried. Luckly, I have another Precision 380 I could swap all the drives, memory and network interfaces to. When I booted up, all went as planned until I realized that my internal network card eth0 was not found. Eth0 is an on-board card, so I new it was working but Ubuntu was not finding it. I ifconfig’ed to check for eth1, eth2, eth3…etc…finally I found it…it was not eth4…weird, I thought. So then I went to /etc/network/interfaces to change eth0 to eth4 and all would be well. Correct? Not so fast. I could not get eth4 to come up with the static ipaddress that is listed in /etc/network/interfaces. What the heck…..did some more digging and found a udev rule that ties the mac address to the network card. So I had to edit the udev rule to reflect the new mac address of eth0 and then restart the udev service and what do you know…eth0 came up again. Awesome!

Rule to edit:
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

eth0 was the first defined rule and all thast was needed was to modify the mac address to reflect the onboard nic in the new computer.

Friday, September 10, 2010

32bit ODBC Dialog In Windows 7

Ever wonder how to get the 32bit ODBC dialog box from within Windows 7?

Yea me to…..Well I found it today….Run the command below to get the 32bit ODBC dialog.

C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ODBCAD32.EXE

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Watch errors in linux maillog fly by…

Whether you are using Postfix or Sendmail with Spamassassin, you can watch your maillogs within an ssh session by using the following code:

tail -f /var/log/maillog | egrep '(reject|error|warning|fatal|panic)'

This will help to troubleshoot rejected emails or emails rejected due to Spamassassin blocking the email as Spam.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

VMWare ESXi 4 increase IDE drive size

I was trying to increase the size of an ide drive I have associated with a VM and the option was greyed out. See image below.

 

I found this option to change the ide device to a scsi on the VMWare knowledgebase.
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1016192

But the problem is, how do I get a text editor to let me change the vmdk file? Well, that is where you need to access the server from a console or ssh into the box. See website below for more information.

Allowing ssh access to your esxi server.
http://www.techhead.co.uk/vmware-esxi-how-to-enable-ssh-connectivity

Now that we have access to the esxi server via ssh, Below are the steps needed to increase the virtual drive size.

  1. find the vmdk you are trying to increase and the “ide” option to lsilogic, per the knowledge base article above.
  2. Remove and reload the vmdk in the vSphere Client settings for the particular virtual machine you want to make the adjustment on.
  3. Now the drive shows up as an scsi device and you can increase the size of the drive. Now if you are using windows XP, you will probably get the blue screen of death when you try and boot the VM.
  4. So go back to the ssh prompt and edit the vmdk file again and change “lsilogic” back to “ide”.
  5. Go back into the vSphere Client and remove and reload the drive. Now it reads as an IDE device in the vSphere Client.
  6. When you reboot the VM, you will only see the old harddrive size, you need to expand the virtual drive.
  7. I use Gparted, go here and download the iso file.
    http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
  8. Mount the gparted iso file under the vm and reboot and make sure that the bios for the vm has the boot order set to boot from a cd-rom before a harddrive.
  9. After gparted loads, increase the size of the virtual disk and then reboot.
  10. Make sure to dismount the gparted iso image.
  11. Now you should have a newly expanded IDE virtual drive.

Good luck. Hope all that makes sense.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

AutoCAD Export To Previous Version

Ever need to export a newer AutoCAD file to a previous version? You will probably get a dialog box stating that certain objects will not show up or are not supported in the previous version and that you need to enable proxy graphics. If you try like I have to explode the proxy graphics or the AutoCAD objects, you will find that they do not explode.

autocad_error

Well I found across this solution today.

In the command window just type in AECTOACAD and this will explode the proxy objects and save the file as a new name. Then open the file you just saved and then resave it to the previous version say AutoCAD 2004 and you will not get the dialog warning box.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Compare all the hotel search engines at once…


Find a hotel


Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Free Car Rental Quotes

I am now able to offer free car rental quotes. We secure you the best rate that is available. The ability to search all the suppliers guarantees you will get the best rate possible.

Click the image below to secure your car rental needs.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Windows Uninstall Using the Command Line

I ran across this website while trying to figure out how to uninstall programs from windows computers without using the add/remove program feature in Control Panel.

I like the idea of using the WMIC Windows Management Instrumentation Command. It is clean and relative easy to work with.

I did have a few problems, one of which is that for me it worked best to run wmic as the local or domain administrator.

To be able to run wmic as administrator on a machine, I used psexec from the Microsoft PS Tools and loaded them on a share drive. More about PS Tools can be found here
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896649.aspx

I created a quick batch file that I ran.

#output a text file that lists currently installed software
\\server\share\pstools\psexec \\%computername% -u DOMAIN\administrator -p password -i -c -f wmic /output:c:\beforeuninstall.log product get name

#uninstall routine for AutoCad 2010
\\server\share\pstools\psexec \\%computername% -u DOMAIN\administrator -p password -i -c -f wmic product "AutoCAD 2010 - English" call uninstall /nointeractive

Unsure if this works with Windows Vista or Windows 7.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

vsftpd 426 “Failure writing network stream”

Ever come across this error when trying to download a file from a VSFTPD server? Me neither but the solution to this problem is to add

use_sendfile=NO

to your vsftpd.conf file.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Blackberry Service

Ever use a Blackberry for you PDA? If so you may know the crazy way you have to go about setting up an email account on the device. For ATT customers you need to navigate to this website:
Blackberry Internet Service
You will need to create an account and then register your PDA with the service.

If you ever lose you account information, like I did, the forgot password or pin reset part of their website does not work. You can enter whatever you like and it will tell you a text has been sent to you Blackberry. You will need to click the “Require Assistance” link just to find the following phone number you will need to call.
1-800-331-0500

I ended up spending 35 minutes on hold and another 10 minutes talking to a serviced representative to get my account reset so I could add another email account to my Blackberry.

Also, just for your knowledge, you can have 10 email accounts on you Blackberry. So if you are weird like I am you can load up your Gmail, Yahoo, Hot Mail and whatever email account you may have onto your PDA.

Good luck and don’t forget you account information, otherwise be prepared to hang onto to hold for awhile.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

VNC Access on Ubuntu or Redhat

I typically use shell access on all my linux servers but sometimes I need to load X and use GNOME or KDE in either Ubuntu or Redhat/Fedora/Cent OS. The problem is  that the vncserver file resides in different places depending upon the distribution you are using. I like to modify the vncserver file to increase the resolution of the virtual server to match my 20” monitor.

Ubuntu:
/etc/alternatives/vncserver

edit the global variable to tweak the vncserver resolution.
$geometry = "1280x1024";

Redhat/Fedora/Cent OS:
/etc/sysconfig/vncservers

Different variables to tweak how the vncserver daemon runs. Tweak the variable below to adjust the resolution.
VNCSERVERARGS[2]="-geometry 1280x1024"

Read the comments at the beginning of each distributions vncserver file for other settings and tweaks.

Want KDE or GNOME to load when your virtual terminal loads. Then you need to edit the .xstartup file for the user that the vncserver will run as.
For instance if you login to your linux box with “Fred” then you need to go to edit the xstartup file in the .vnc folder in your home directory. I like the joe editor but vi works also.

vi /home/fred/.vnc/xstartup

make sure this is at the end of the file for GNOME
exec gnome-session &

or
for KDE use the following
startkde &

If you see
twm &
you will need to either remove it or comment it out.
#twm &

Enjoy

Thursday, January 21, 2010

FreeNAS

I ran across FreeNAS in a Google search a couple of days ago and decided to give it a try on an old Dell Precision workstation 410. I booted off of the live CD I created from the ISO file I downloaded from SourceForge. I am need to move an aging FTP Server and thought that Freenas might do the trick. Install went fine and I was able to use the web gui to do further configuration of the Freebsd v7.1 OS. I used three additional drives to create a ZFS single parity raid drive. The old FTP server I use is running VSFTPD and FreeNAS uses ProFTPD by default. It took some command line hacking to find the proftpd.conf and modify my LDAP based accounts to get ProFTPD to allow the accounts access. After a quick rsync of data from the old server to the new FreeNAS, I am ready to put it thru the test. I will update as I can to verify performance and other issues that might arise.