Goyuix's questions

I took sometime this long holiday weekend to install Hyper-V Server 2012 and Windows 8 Pro (on separate hardware, same LAN) to hopefully get a little more familiar with it. From the WIN8 client I am unable to connect to any VMs using the Virtual Machine Connection or the Hyper-V manager. I get the the following error:

You do not have the required permission to complete this task.

Basically, here are the steps I followed on the HYPERV server:

• Installed Hyper-V Server 2012 and ran all Windows Updates
• Disabled the firewall: Get-NetFirewallProfile | Set-NetFirewallProfile –Enabled False
• Added a local account Goyuix on HYPERV server
• Ran hvremote.wsf: cscript hvremote.wsf /add:HYPERV\Goyuix

And the WIN8 client:

• Installed Windows 8 Pro
• Disabled the firewall: Get-NetFirewallProfile | Set-NetFirewallProfile –Enabled False
• Added a local account Goyuix on WIN8 client
• Ran hvremote.wsf: cscript hvremote.wsf /anondcom:grant

When I run the cscript hvremote.wsf /show /target:HYPERV command from the WIN8 client, I get the following message as a failure:

Cannot connect to root\cimv2 on HYPERV

I would like to add a user for myself to login via SSH to a pfSense box. I don't want to just blindly go through the adduser command and inadvertently break something / open a vulnerability somewhere though. Looking at the config page in the WebUI:

I can't find where to add users or to specify their keys. What is the right way to add users that can use SSH? Can I also safely use the AllowUsers directive to keep tighter control of those allowed to login via SSH?

Bonus: I would also like to disable root from being able to login via SSH. I can see the option PermitRootLogin in the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file, though I don't necessarily want to modify it directly as I could potentially lose those changes with updates/patches or changes through the WebUI. Thoughts?

I have a saved .RDP file for a connection to another computer, if I check the box to "Remember my credentials" the connection attempt is immediately rejected and the authentication box pops back up immediately. I also can't save the credentials in Remote Desktop Connection "Edit" mode.

I had read that the credential saving is impacted by your computer being joined to a domain or not, as well as some group policy settings that control various aspects of stored credentials. I opened the Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> System -> Credentials Delegation policy and saw that all the policy elements were set as "Not configured". I changed all of them that had NTLM-only as well as the "Allow Delegating Saved Credentials" policies to enabled and added an entry to the servers list of TERMSRV/* for each.

Is there something else I may have missed? I did a gpudate /force after changing the policy, as well as a courtesy reboot to see if it made any difference. There is nothing in the domain group policy that is forcing these options (that I could find anyway).

Disclaimer: this computer has Sophos SafeGuard 5.5 installed which takes over / augments a lot of the default authentication prompts. It could very well be part of the Sophos virus that is ignoring the policy or has a separate configuration.

I have a Supermicro X9SCL+-F motherboard that I flashed a beta BIOS to, then the flash went bad when I tried to flash back to the latest stable. I am attempting to recover using their SUPER.ROM recovery from a flash drive without success.

I read in the manual that if I hold down Ctrl +Home  while powering on the server I can do a BIOS recovery from a flash drive.

I hold down those keys, hear the desired two beeps and I can see the activity LED on the flash drive activate. Unfortunately, instead of the monitor turning on and allowing a BIOS recovery as the manual indicates, I hear five beeps, followed shortly after by 3 beeps. I grabbed the latest BIOS from their site (x9scm2.508.zip) and extracted it to my flash drive and renamed it to SUPER.ROM. Their instructions are not clear if any ROM can serve as the SUPER.ROM file, or if I need a special SUPER.ROM file to initiate the recovery at which time I can supply a known good ROM.

Does anyone have any expertise in ROM recovery for Supermicro boards? Am I missing some key step? Can any known good ROM file function as the SUPER.ROM file for recovery?

I have a Supermicro X9SCM board with a Atheros AR5008 PCI Express card (D-LINK DWA-556, Device=0024&Vendor=168C). The card can successfully be marked for PCI passthrough in ESXi (I tried versions 4.1 and 5.0) though each time I start a VM with the Wifi card associated - the entire host freezes and requires a hard reset.

There is a good chance this card is just not compatible for some reason - though there seems to be at least one report I could find of it "working", or at least the guest being able to boot. I would really like to understand why it is failing though. I have tried digging into some log files and other resources to see if I can glean any knowledge on how to best troubleshoot this, though I am far from an expert with VMWare tools.

Here is what I have looked at so far:

• BIOS, tried latest version (1.1a) and one older version (1.0c).
• The BIOS has a log that reports "PCI ERR" or "PCI ERR - Asserted" whenever this freeze event happens.
• I grabbed the various logs from /var/log on the ESXi host, though I haven't really been able to see anything too useful from them just yet. Maybe I don't know where to look.
• I tried adding the PCI card to the passthru.map file to see if I could perhaps hint to ESXi how it should behave with no luck. (Note: I haven't tried all combinations of reset method / fpt shareable yet)
• I have read there may be a difference with "Active" PCI Express cards. I believe this might be referring to Active State Power Management though I am not sure how to even check this.
• I have contacted Supermicro support to see if there is a known issue with the BIOS / hardware though I haven't heard back. I also tried to get on the VMWare communities and post on their forums though I haven't been able to activate my account for some strange reason.

Again, my real question is: How do I go about understanding why this device is causing the hypervisor to lockup when it is assigned to a guest?

I am trying to get the Title property indexed as a crawled property, and then merged into the Title managed property - though I can't seem to find it as a choice in the crawled properties. I searched for all properties that contain title, and enabled all of them to be included in the search index, performed a full crawl, but none of them contain the title for the document I uploaded and gave a title to.

I can see the title being indexed for Web Pages, and if I embed a specific title in an office document, SharePoint will pull that into a different crawled property... but I can't seem to get the generic Title property from a generic document library to be included in the index.

Update: I have this partially working now. It turns out the document I was using to test with has something strange in the title (or some strange limitation on the Title property):

Title that doesn't work: System Engineering Life Extension (SELE) Engineering Operations Presentation Series -- A Whirlwind tour

Shorter title that does work: System Engineering Life Extension (SELE) -- A Whirlwind tour

Update 2: Some preliminary testing seems to indicate that the title property only indexes up to the first 64 characters.

There seems to be a subtle difference between a domain account that has the checkbox "force password change" and an account that merely has an expired password (say after 90 days).

Is there a way to simulate / force an account to "expire" other than changing the policy and impacting all accounts? Are there differences based on the functional level of the domain?

I have a floppy I need to read the contents from - unfortunately it was formatted and the data written on an OpenVMS server. I believe the floppy is formatted "Files-11" or similarly ODS2 and I can see parts of the MDT and file contents through a hex editor, however I would love to be able to mount this and actually read the files off in a sane, normal way.

Is there an ODS2/Files-11 FUSE module or other kernel module I can install to read this format? Any standalone utilities that can understand a floppy image taken with dd?

I have a server that died, though the drives appears fine. There are four of them, with a 10GB mirrored volume for the boot, and the rest as a RAID5 array spread across the four drives. When I connect them to my windows 7 box, I can import the foreign drives, and even browse/rebuild the mirrored volume, but it won't seem to touch the RAID5 volume.

Is this a limitation of Windows 7? Do I need to attach them to a box that has Windows Server installed to recover the data?

Update: The drives are software RAID managed by windows.

It seems most of the information regarding NT passwords on the internet is about how to crack them. There doesn't seem to be a list of characters that are specifically not-allowed like there is for usernames. As far as I can tell, there are no characters that are disallowed.

I am specifically looking at normal, printable ASCII characters though a dash of unicode would satisfy some curiosity as well.

We are planning to upgrade our application servers to a new version of JRun which is carrying with it an upgrade from Java 1.4 to Java 1.6. As part of that, we have been testing various pieces of our software stack and realized the need to look at our Oracle JDBC drivers as well.

Looking at the Oracle site and documentation, the different versions seem to be primarily targeting various versions of the JDBC API, which tend to correspond to the version of the JVM they were introduced in. With Java (generally) being backwards compatible, it seems like sticking with ojdbc14.jar might make the most sense, but I was hoping someone out there could clarify things a bit better.

The docs specifically call out a chart like this, which makes me wonder if ojdbc14.jar is officially supported under Java 6.

classes12.jar - for Java 1.2 and 1.3
ojdbc14.jar - for Java 1.4 and 1.5
ojdbc5.jar - for Java 1.5
ojdbc6.jar - for Java 1.6

Is there something I should be aware of from a systems perspective when mixing and matching drivers and virtual machines?

I needed to clear a bunch of messages out of the mail queue this morning, and thought it would be super nice to be able to query the queue(s) using Powershell. Any scripts out there?

Note: this is for SBS 2003, so no Exchange 2007 - but as an upgrade is near, a 2007-only answer will be just fine...