kevin42's questions

I have a small Ubuntu 9.04 router setup as a NAT box and a PPTP server. After a power failure everything except the PPTP server still works. A windows client gets to "registering your computer on the network" but then says

Error 742: The remote computer does not support the required data encryption type.

I did some research and I think the problem is with the ppp_mppe module. When I try to run 'modprobe ppp_mppe' it hangs indefinitely.

What would cause this hang? Any ideas how I can troubleshoot this further?

Thanks for the help!

UPDATE: I am still having the problem, however I have found some more information.

When the first user tries to connect to pptp, the process list shows modprobe sha1 running, and one instance of modprobe ppp_mppe for each connection attempt. If I killall modprobe at this point the next connection attempt works, and everything is fine until the next reboot. I'm planning to do a clean install at some point in the future but I'd really like to get to the real cause of this.

I'm thinking of building a 24 1TB disk NAS box, but I'm not sure what the best drive configuration is. I'm looking at using the areca ARC-1280ML-2G controller, and hanging all 24 drives off of it.

I'd like it all to be mounted as one volume, due to the type of data we're storing on it. One crazy idea we had was to configure 6 4-disk RAID 5 volumes, then do software RAID 5 over those 6 volumes. That would mean any one volume could die on us and we'd still not lose data.

I should note that this is an R&D project, we've got an upcoming application where we'll be needing tens of terabytes of storage to be fast and highly available. But for the initial R&D phase we can accept some risk.

What is the best solution to this type of configuration? With 24 1 TB disks, it's likely that more than one will fail at the same time (or within the time it takes to rebuild the volume after a first failure), so I'm having trouble finding a good solution.

I have some Windows 2008 servers I setup for development purposes, that fall under my MSDN subscription.

It's been a while, but I thought I properly activated them using the command line and the volume license keys I got through my MSDN account. However, now when I try to login I get an activation error message, but no choices on how to fix it. I click close and it logs me out.

How can I go about fixing this? I can't get a command line, so I can't see how to enter a new activation server or key, or anything. The whole volume license thing is making 2008 server a total pain.

Update:

When I click on "more information" this is what I get. Clicking on the 'you can also contact Microsoft" link just brings up a help screen.

Any idea what service it's talking about with error 0x80070426? I can remotely connect from computer management to start the service. :

alt text http://kevlar.net/activation_error.png