Christian's questions

I want to download the whole set of printer drivers that Microsoft does not distribute anymore since Windows 7 and install/deploy them without windows update or internet access.

I am aware that I can use the windows update catalogue. But then I need to find the exact right driver.

If I install Windows fresh and click on add printer, there is a button which does a one time download of additional drivers that have not been included in the ISO image. After clicking it, the list will be much bigger.

What exactly happens when I click that button? Which package is downloaded by Windows Update and how can I automate exactly this (not knowing which exact printer driver I will need)

I have a Linux server where I only store new files or rename directories and never edit files. It contains backups from other Linux servers.

Due to certain circumstances there are quite some duplicate files, often with different names.

Is there any free Linux tool which periodically scans the filesystem and has a database with filenames, sizes and maybe sha1sums and then identifies duplicates and replaces them with hardlinks?

I want to stop apache2 from querying the dns name at every start and to make it faster. There is absolutely no reason for apache to do any DNS-queries at all. For redirects it has to use the name passed in by the client in the host header. (See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#usecanonicalname )

This is for an embedded device btw and if I expose the hostname setting in the gui I better have a good reason to do so and can explain 100% what is affected by it!

So far I only see that the hostname is used by apache for nothing and it is but into the syslog.

I don't use http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#hostnamelookups or dns name based access rules. For more background about my problem, see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/dns-caveats.html . There it says:

To get this address it uses either the global ServerName (if present) or calls the C function gethostname (which should return the same as typing "hostname" at the command prompt). Then it performs a DNS lookup on this address. At present there is no way to avoid this lookup.

I want to secure our centrally managed computers better and it is very difficult to automatically deploy the java runtime, but how to do that is another question.

I find the security of Java catastrophic, even if it is fully patched: It looks like if the user says yes to the innocent question "Do you trust this certificate", java can do whatever it wants. Java webstart also seems to be an universal entry point for malware authors.

In general, I don't care for my users playing browser games, etc. Java applets seem to be extinct anyway.

But there is one page left (Ingramm Micro shopping system) which relies on Java.

Does anybody know an easy way to configure IE or java via group policy to only ever allow java plugins on certain preconfigured sites?

Thanks!

Dell doesn't "officially" support QLogic HBAs in their cheaper servers like R210 or R310. They support it with R410 upwards. But "official support" is a dubious concept anyway, at least for real men running Debian etc. ;-)

The qlogic HBA worked absolutely fine on the R210 hardware and we have certified it ourselfes. But with the successor, the R210 II, it doesn't: The system just doesn't boot. The BMC log states:

Severitiy: Cirtical
Date and Time: System Boot
Description:
POST Err: Post sensor, Timer refresh failed.

The LED diagnostics show 2 and 3, but LED 1 and 4 are not lit. An error led blinks.

Taking the qlogic hba out makes the system boot again. All firmware updates have been tried, also different HBAs from different manufacturing times.

This question is not really about what Dell officially support etc., but I'd rather love to hear from people who know how to diagnose this: What can be done if a PCI Express cards stops a server from booting? Is there any diagnostics port where one can see what's happening besides the BMC log? Did anybody successfully resolve such an issue with e.g. a poweredge server?

Are there any other experiences with the R210 II where it is more picky about extension cards?

Any guy from Dell knowing how to bypass Dells product policy?

Thanks!

It's quite easy to backup a real drive to VHD, e.g. with Sysinternal's Disk2VHD on XP or with Windows Image Backup on Windows 7. But how do I copy that file back?

It's possible by booting a recovery CD or the Windows installation DVD. But can it also be done from a running operation system? Can it be scripted?

We want to clone a drive to another drive daily using this.

I have several servers where rsyncd is running. I don't use an ssh tunnel, but the native rsync protocol. One folder of the synchronized files contains the files that should form an iso image. Whenever a file in that folder is uploaded (pushed from remote to this server), it shall recreate the iso file automatically. Ideally only file content or size changes should trigger this because I want to show the date of the last change of the iso inside a webpage where the users can download and burn it.

Because the iso is large I want to create it on each server if just one file changes. I don't want to sync the iso itself

Does someone know a way of showing custom text there?

Using the omconfig script from Dell does not work for me for some reason, but I don't want to install 80MB of Java and webserver and whatever anyway. Ideally some small tool should be able to do this.

Did anybody reverse engineer anything yet?

I'm currently trying to solve this on a R410 server

Does anybody know a way of setting the BIOS password on a Dell Poweredge R210 or R410 via a script? Ideally on Debian Linux, but any pointers are nice!

There's a tool called DCU which most likely only works for Dell laptops.

Also there is "libsmbios", but it had no clear option to do so and seems to be unmaintained for 1-2 years now: http://linux.dell.com/libsmbios/main/

I need to generate a few thousand mails in Lotus Notes (with attachment) in order to test an extension to the Domino router I wrote.

How can I do that? It may not be mails that are send into Domino via SMTP because I need to test Notes routing and real notes mails.

Does someone have a guide or macro or agent etc. that goes in a Lotus Notes intallation and autoamtes the process of creating tons of mails?

I don't use or have Siteminder, but have to support a customer of our product who wants to use it and therefore want to ask around here how Sitemidner works with IIS.

I have a Linux system that is not to be changed. It can forward the user towards an IIS-page. The URL contains a nounce. That IIS-page then uses e.g. Kerberos based authentication with single sign on. It is very simple and just learns the name of the user (asp.net provides that) and then creates a ticket containing nonce and username and redirects back towards the closed Linux system that is not to be changed.

This works fine using Kerberos or NTLM and Windows integrated authentication.

How would this work with Siteminder? Would they also provide the username of the currently logged in user towards an asp.net application? Would they support redirects?

I'd like them to just have written an ISAPI extension or so that parses their cookies and then lets my simple asp.net page run.

Is there a macro or little appliaction that allows our secretary to print a new phone list, but the data should come from active directory?

I currently use this simple batch-file to deploy an image to our workstations:

ECHO HALLO
y:
cd \
diskpart /s diskpartcmds.txt
imagex.exe /apply y:\image.wim 1 c:
bootsect /nt52 c:

(Y: is a mounted network share, dispkatcmds.txt is

select disk 0
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format quick
assign letter=c
exit

)

This works absolutely well, it runs in a console window after WinPE booted via PXE and shows progress. I would only like to have a nice GUI (just showing tasks and progress, no interaction!) that is shown instead of the console while the image is deployed with a progress bar.

Does someone have something already? Is there a complete .NET wrapper (I can use mono installed on Y:!) for ImageX?

Unfortunately there is only one article to be found about imagex.dll http://www.codeproject.com/KB/vista/wimgapi.aspx

Sorry for posting such a selfish lazy question about something purely cosmetic that I would probably be able to write if I had a lot of time), but I can try and maybe someone learns from this question about imagex?

We are using a rsync based backup for our Lonux servers which is fantastic. We rsync all our Linux server onto our large Linux base samba fileserver. Unfortunately that server is completely outdated and migrated over to Active Directory.

Now I'm stuck with the problem to make incremental backups from the Linux server. I especially liked how rsync can copy away modified or deleted files.

Now I want to do Linux backups onto Windows server.

I looked at backup solution, but almost all were based on rsync. I looked for rsync for Windows (Cygwin or Microsofts SFU (services for Unix)). But it seems like it won't do the trick.

In order to correctly rsync owner and rights one really needs two integers and some flags in the filesystem. While NTFS theoretically provides that, SFU and Cygwin really try to map it to existng users.

Also rsync for SFU seems to be unreliable etc.

On our current servers we just don't care about any mapping: As you know Linux servers just store two integers in the filesystem (in simple cases), no machine specific long SIDs like Windows. What they mean is defined by /etc/passwd. And if that is missing, it's just integers. But if it gets back on the server, it works again.

Has anyone found a good soluton for this?

I even looked up UMSDOS, where Linux used to be able to be stored on FAT16!!! It used textfiles with long filename mappings and unix rights and attributes. Unfortunately it has been removed form the kernel. Otherwise I could have mounted a share on the new windows fileserver using CIFS-mount and layer umsdos on top of it. Unfortunately something like that does not exist.

Why don't I want to use tar? Because I really like how our DPM-server would incementally backup our windows file server and I don't want to completely backup a whole tar-file of enverything!