fistameeny's questions

I'm trying to write a Powershell script to get the status from a HP RAID controller (using hpssacli.exe ctrl slot=1 ld all show detail and piping it into a file.

I just need to check whether Status: OK appears in the output. The problem is there are multiple strings that contain Status: OK

output.txt

Smart Array P410 in Slot 1
    array A
      Logical Drive: 1
         Size: 10.9 TB
         Fault Tolerance: 5
         Heads: 255
         Sectors Per Track: 32
         Cylinders: 65535
         Strip Size: 256 KB
         Full Stripe Size: 1024 KB
         Status: Interim Recovery Mode
         Caching:  Enabled
         Parity Initialization Status: Initialization Completed
         Disk Name: /dev/sda
         Mount Points: /storage 10.9 TB Partition Number 2
         OS Status: LOCKED
         Drive Type: Data
         LD Acceleration Method: Controller Cache

I was trying to run the command sls "Status: " .\output.txt but I receive 3 matches:

output.txt:13:         Status: Interim Recovery Mode
output.txt:15:         Parity Initialization Status: Initialization Completed
output.txt:19:         OS Status: LOCKED

Is there a way with Powershell to do a regex style match to only match where the string is not a character, followed by Status:?

I have a web server that is running the Zabbix Agent (3.4.x), reporting the normal stuff back to a Zabbix Server. The web server runs a number of websites based on common software (Drupal, Magento etc). I'd like to track their update status and version number in Zabbix.

I've created a bash script that checks the numbers, then pushes it to Zabbix using zabbix_sender. However, I'm not sure of the best way to structure the host settings.

I was considering setting up each website as a "host" with a template with 2 items (version number, update status), then creating a bash script to push data into these keys.

The downside is I have to manually setup each new website as a host into Zabbix, then adjust my bash script to find the data on the webserver.

Is there a way to control the list of sites from Zabbix server, adding a new website, setting it's path somehow, then letting a script on the web server grab the data?

I need to monitor remote customer sites that are only Windows based, with no virtualisation. I'd like to run the Zabbix Proxy on the server so I can monitor the rest of the network.

As there's no Zabbix Proxy for Windows as far as I an tell, what other options are people using? I've thought of installing Docker or similar to run a bare Zabbix Proxy under a Linux environment, but wondered if there's a better way to do it.

I have the Agent on the Windows server running in Active mode, but obviously, this only handles one device and can't do SNMP etc.

I'm trying to roll out Zabbix to some remote Windows servers. As I can't run a Zabbix Proxy on Windows, I'm using the agent in Active mode and opening a port on my incoming connection to the Zabbix server.

The hosts are setup with the IP address of 0.0.0.0 in the Zabbix config (as there is no IP to contact them on). However, Zabbix continuously complains that the "Host is unreachable for x minutes" - it never will be reachable as I understand it.

I guess I could disable the Trigger that generates that warning, but I wanted to see if there was a "proper" way to do it with Active agents. (or is that the proper way?)

I have a custom Item in Zabbix to check the date of the newest file in a particular folder. This is setup in Zabbix to store the data as "Numeric (unsigned)" with Data type "Decimal". This bit works fine, as does a trigger to check the age of the file and alert if greater than 24 hours.

However, to check the date of the file, I have go to "Latest Data" then get the timestamp value, then manually convert it to a d/m/Y human readable format.

Is there a way in Zabbix to change it's display value from Unix timestamp to datetime? I can see the value mappings facility, but it doesn't seem possible to use a function there.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

I'm looking to find a way to protect PCs, without requiring locally installed software.

I thought about a device such as a Watchguard that has UTM facilities and make it a transparent proxy, in essence, something that can sit inline on a network cable and provide anti virus protection to the PC behind it , because I cannot install any software on the PC.

Is there a hardware device I can put on a network cable in front of a PC to provide basic antivirus protection but still allow file sharing onto the network?

Or is there another approach I'm unaware of that would let me protect a networked PC from viruses without installing any software on the PC?

I have a Windows 2012 server that is running a daily system state backup. My question(s) are:

1. Would the system state backup normally include c:\windows\winsxs?
2. Can I exclude this folder and still restore using the system state backup?

I'd like to exclude it if I can, as it's quite large in size.

I have a need in my PHP application (using Zend Framework for what it matters), to import a CSV file into a MySQL database.

I currently do this by using shell_exec() to run a myysqlimport command the imports the file successfully. To make this work, I had to add set-variable=local-infile=1 into my /etc/my.cnf. I have also granted File_priv within MySQL to the user that I run the script as.

However, I understand this may not be secure. What is the correct way to allow mysqlimport to run securely, for only one user?

I'm using MySQL version 5.0.77 on a CentOS Linux server, with PHP 5.2.12.

I've setup a Draytek 3510 IP PBX with 10 VigorPhone 350 handsets. It's all connected through an unmanaged 48port gigabit switch - all structured cabling except patch leads are Cat6. Dhcp is handed out by a Linux server. All PC's and phones are on the same LAN, in the same subnet. Outgoing calls are made through 4 channels of ISDN2e, using th Draytek FXO ISDN card.

I've not setup an IP PBX before. Probably due to inexperience, I'm getting a lot of echo and delay on the phone lines. So, a few questions:

1. Should the phones be running through a different switch to the PC's?
2. Which codec should I be using to avoid echo and delays? (spec here: http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/vigorippbx3510.html)
3. Are there any other best practices a novice IP PBX'er should follow?

Thanks for your help....

I have set up my Zabbix server to listen for the active agent which, after messing with my firewall and host names I got to appear green under the monitored status. I also configured the Agent on a Server which is across an Internet connection. I configured the Agent to become active and send data to my Zabbix Server on a static IP address.

My problem is that i cannot seem to get the data to appear even when cloning and changing a template from "windows agent" to "windows agent active" and I do not fully understand how the client (as in the Zabbix active agent, sending data to the server) will know what the template is asking for if I cannot send data from the Zabbix server to the client over the Internet due to firewall restrictions. The documentation about Active Agents on the Zabbix site is very limited and didn't help me much.

Does anyone have Zabbix active agents working properly across a WAN? If so, can you give me any pointers as to what might be going wrong and where to start trying to resolve the issue?

Unfortunately, it's not viable to run a Zabbix Proxy on the client side or use VPN connections, so the only option is to use active agents.

We have a Ubuntu 10.04 Server that has a bunch of Samba shares on it that Windows workstations connect to. Each Windows workstation has a valid username/password to access the shares, which have restricted access governed by Samba.

The problem we are experiencing is that Samba doesn't seem to be able to mimic the Windows way of handling "Read Only" attributes.

Say I have two users, UserA and UserB, both a group called Staff - UserA creates a file that is readable/writeable by the group (ie. chmod rwxrwx---). If UserA then sets the "Read Only" flag, this changes the permissions to r-xr-x--- (i.e. no write for anyone).

As UserB is in the same group as UserA, they should be able to remove the "Read Only" permission - however, they can't as Samba won't allow it.

Is there a way to force Samba to allow users within the same group to remove the "Read Only" from a file not created by them?

Edit:
The Samba smb.conf is as follows:

The share is defined in the smb.conf as:

[global]
    log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m  
    passwd chat = *Enter\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *Retype\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *password\supdated\ssuccessfully* .  
    obey pam restrictions = yes  
    map to guest = bad user  
    encrypt passwords = true  
    passwd program = /usr/bin/passwd %u  
    passdb backend = tdbsam  
    dns proxy = no  
    netbios name = ubsrv  
    server string = ubsrv  
    unix password sync = yes  
    os level = 20  
    syslog = 0  
    usershare allow guests = yes  
    panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d  
    max log size = 1000  
    pam password change = yes  
    workgroup = workgroup  

[Projects]  
    valid users = @Staff   
    writeable = yes  
    user = @Staff  
    create mode = 0777  
    path = /srv/samba/Projects  
    directory mode = 0777  
    store dos attributes = Yes  

The folder itself looks like this:

ls -l /srv/samba/
drwxrwxrwx 2 nobody Staff 4096 2010-11-04 10:09 Projects

Thanks in advance,
Matt

We look after a Fujitsu RX300 S4 server that has 6 x 500GB SATA drives in a RAID-6 array, running from an LSI MegaRAID card (built into the motherboard).

A couple of weeks ago, one hard drive flagged itself as being faulty (orange light on the drive bay, MegaRAIDcli software shows a firmware status of "Failed"). We ordered and replaced the drive, but after the rebuild started, a different drive flagged itself as faulty.

This has happened 3 times now - twice it flagged up different drives that had a fault, and once it has flagged up a drive that we have already replaced.

At the moment, two drives are showing faults - we don't know if the drives are actually failing, or whether the backplane or RAID card is at fault.

Has anyone experienced this before? Any tips on what to do next? We have a call into Fujitsu, but wondered if anyone out there had any pointers....

I work for an IT service provider - we support a range of Windows and Linux servers/PC's on our customer sites. I'm looking for a way to monitor basic stuff on these devices (e.g. disk space usage, CPU utilisation, uptime etc) and collect the data in a central interface.

I've looked at Zabbix and read up on Nagios. However, both seem to require that our customer's have a static external IP address, and that a particular port is opened on the customer's firewall to allow two way traffic. It isn't possible to do this for the majority of customers.

Is there a way to configure Zabbix or Nagios to send data from their Windows agents to our central server (with the relevant incoming port opened), without having the two way communication that would require a port opening on the customer's firewall? I tried out Pandora FMS and it was able to do this, but I didn't like the product overall. As far as I can tell, this would require the agents to be pre-configured with what data they should send, but I'm not 100% sure from reading the documentation.

Thanks in advance for any advice,
Matt

I am working on a virtual machine that runs SQL Server Express (as part of Sage Line 50 Manufacturing). The details are as follows:

Physical Server (host machine)
- Intel Xeon Quad Core 2.1GHz
- 4GB RAM
- VMDK image stored on RAID-5 500GB SATA drives (7200RPM)
- Running Ubuntu 10.04 Server 64 bit
- VMware Server 2

Virtual Machine
- Windows Small Business Server 2003
- Allocated 2 vCPU's and 2GB RAM
- Using 100GB pre-allocated flat VMDK file

The problem I have is that there is process that runs in SQL Server that is CPU intensive. On the old physical server that we migrated to the virtual machine from, this would utilise both CPU cores so the sqlserver.exe process would be running 100% on each of the CPU cores. On the virtual machine, it only seems to use one of the two CPU cores, meaning that the process is much slower to run.

Question
Is there a way to force SQL Server (sqlserver.exe process) to use both of the CPU cores, and distribute it's load between them? Is this a VMware setting that needs changing to allow processes to use both cores?

I am looking for a method to setup a Linux server (running Ubuntu Server) that uses Samba for file sharing, as well as hosting a Windows virtual machine (in this case, Windows Small Business Server 2003, which in turn hosts SQL Server Express - Exchange won't be used on this).

I would like to have the Linux server serving the files over Samba, and hosting the Virtual Machine. This obviously rules ESXi out as it couldn't do Samba at the same time. What would be the next best solution to give reasonable speed? Vmware Server 2.0, VirtualBox, Xen?

There will be 10-15 users accessing the Samba shares and the SQL Express virtual machine.

Matt

I have a HP DL185 G6 Server (12 disk model) with the following spec:

• Quad Core Xeon 2.27GHz
• 6GB RAM
• HP P212 RAID controller with battery backup
• 2 x 128GB 15K SAS 3.5" (RAID-1 for the operating system)
• 4 x 750GB 7.5K SAS 3.5" (RAID-5 for the data, 2TB usable space)

The operating system is Ubuntu Server 9.10. Both drives have been formatted as EXT4.

We are finding that read speed of the RAID-5 array is poor. Disk test results below:

sudo hdparm -tT /dev/cciss/c0d1p1
/dev/cciss/c0d1p1:
Timing cached reads:      15284 MB in  2.00 seconds = 7650.18 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:   74 MB in  3.02 seconds =  24.53 MB/sec

For info, the RAID-1 array performs as follows:

sudo hdparm -tT /dev/cciss/c0d0p1
/dev/cciss/c0d0p1:
Timing cached reads:      15652 MB in  2.00 seconds = 7834.26 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  492 MB in  3.01 seconds = 163.46 MB/sec

We thought this was because with no battery, read/write cache is disabled. We have bought and installed the battery backup and have used the HP bootable CD to change the cache settings to 50% read / 50% write and check cache is enabled on the drives and the controller.

Is there something I'm missing?

I am in the middle of trying to resolve a problem with Openfiler when it is linked to Active Directory.

I have a Server running Openfiler 2.3 x64 and another Server running Windows Small Business Server 2003. I have integrated Openfiler with Active Directory so that the shares are only accessible to users from Active Directory.

I have discovered a problem where if the Active Directory Server is unavailable for any reason, I cannot login to Openfiler in any way - this includes via SSH, directly into the console, via the Web portal, or access any of the shares. If I reconnect the link to Active Directory, everything works again straight away.

Is there a way of caching the Active Directory credentials in Openfiler somehow, so that if the domain controller is unavailable, users can still access the shares, and I can at least still login to Openfiler?

Cheers,
Matt