Matt Delves's questions

The environment at the moment is a selection of windows and Linux (RHEL 4/5 and SLES 10/11) whereby VNC access to the windows boxes works using ultravnc and providing a username/password combination to authenticate.

What is desirable is to use VNC to gain access to the Linux servers with authentication (before the console is displayed) being handled via a username/password combination.

I know that using VNC it is possible to handle this with a generic password or no password at all.

What is the best solution in this case? Is it possible to configure VNC access as desired?

Also beneficial would be having authentication done via pam so that pam_access and other restrictions are used.

Thanks,

Matt.

We have a combination of RHEL5 and SLES11 servers that integrate with Active Directory via LikewiseOpen. What I'm wondering is in what place should I put the pam rule to allow pam_access to be correctly used as part of the authentication of users.

The current vmware infrastructure is a mix of ESX and ESXi at 3, 3.5 and 4.1 releases. What I would like to achieve is being able to monitore the free space of the datastores through zabbix which is our current monitoring solution.

Is there a way of achieving this?

I'm currently experiencing a problem whereby load on one guest is adversely affecting load on other guests located on the same host. What I'm curious about is what best practices are there for optimizing a Linux guest.

Typically, the guests are either RHEL 4/5 or SLES 10/11. If they are RHEL, there is a good chance they are part of some oracle monolith such as peoplesoft and filling the role of webserver, appserver or database.

Thanks, Matt

Just a quick question, how can I create a substitute for a router in a vmware esxi environment containing several windows and linux servers on two seperate subnets?

I would like to use redhat as the server doing the routing between the subnets and I don't want to do any NAT or masquerading.

Thanks, Matt.

Here's the scenario. I have a test environment configured with 2 windows 2k3 domain controllers. One of the two is handling DHCP. I've set up 2 scopes in DHCP to handle two separate subnets. On a Linux (RHEL 5) server I have dhcrelay running that is listening on Subnet 192.168.2.0 and forwarding to the DHCP server on 192.168.1.10. I have setup a windows xp machine on the 192.168.2.0 subnet that is requesting DHCP. The dhcrelay on the linux server picks up the request and forwards it to the windows dhcp server. Unfortunately though the windows DHCP server receives the packet (have done packet captures and verified this), it doesn't respond to the DHCP request from the relay.

Is anyone familiar with why the windows dhcp server wouldn't be responding to dhcp requests from the relay agent?

The configuration with the scopes is as basic as it can get due to being a test environment and I'm wanting to verify if windows would be able to work as a dhcp server in the production environment rather than a simple test environment.

Thanks, Matt.

Currently there are a lot of directories (user home directories that may no longer exist) on a netware volume. As this number is significant, I'm in need of an easy way of determining if there are any trustee's (existing users who have permissions to the directory) on the directories in question.

So, several things I'm after.

1) Are there any applications, that take the input of a list of directories and output the same list with the trustee's attached?

2) Is there an easy way to determine the trustee's without looking at Console One?

I'm modifying an existing samba config that it works fine for authenticating AD users on linux servers to also handle Kerberos and SSO.

I've successfully got pam_winbind to use kerberos and it is handing out tickets, as well as having configured SSH to allow GSSAPI and Kerberos.

Unfortunately though, when attempting to login via PuTTY using SSO, it fails.

Is anyone who is familiar with configuring this able to point me in the right direction?

Thanks,

Matt.

I'm curious as to the level of support Novell OES 2 has for mac os x. Particularly filesharing and also groupwise.

What resources are there that address the issue?

Thanks,

Matt Delves

I currently have collectd running on several servers, though the size of the stored statistics is getting a bit unmanageable. I'm relatively new to collectd, though having looked through the documentation I'm uncertain of a way to rotate or limit the amount of stored statistics.

Is it possible to do such a thing? How to people manage the amount of stored statistics?

Thanks, Matt Delves

I seem to be having a problem whereby a server running postgresql is experiencing rather high load with the average being above 30.

This server is running as a vm on vmware.

What I'm wondering is what is the best way to configure postgresql so that it doesn't overload the box.

If I were to throw more resources at the VM, would that solve the issue or would it just gobble up that as well. It is only the CPU that is getting hammered, the memory (2GB) is sufficient.

Having just moved my server from apache to nginx, I'm wondering how I can go about gauging the performance of the server.

Are there any scripts available to run against the server?

Also, any good blog posts, documentation on performing performance tests against servers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Matt

Several of the websites that require nagios (or icinga) monitoring have form based authentication. Is there a check_ script available that does form based authentication for nagios (or icinga).

Thanks, Matt

Is there a way to programmatically (that is write a small c app or better yet a ruby or perl script) to obtain a list of all of the guests (and also details about the guests) from a VMWare Infrastructure?

Thanks, Matt Delves