colemanm's questions

I had to shutdown a server due to a power outage... The machine's been working just fine, an Ubuntu 12.04 box. Now when I boot back up, I get the GRUB 1.99 boot menu with several options, all of which result in a blinking cursor for ~15 seconds, then reboots. There's no sign that anything's wrong, and I'm not familiar enough with the common troubleshooting steps to take to identify the issue. I suspect it's some sort of GRUB update problem (an update to GRUB may have been installed, and pending a reboot, which I just did). For further info, this is the GRUB boot config for the standard boot option:

set params 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-32-generic'

recordfail
gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode
insmod gzio
insmod part_msdos
insmod ext2
set root='(hd0,msdos1)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root LONGUUID
linux /vmlinuz-3.2.0-32-generic root=/dev/mapper/k2-root ro quiet $vt_handoff
initrd /initrd.img-3.2.0-32-generic

Any ideas on what I can try would be great help!

I've got old backup tapes made with previous versions (v10 and v12) that I need to pull data from (related to this prior question).

I have a machine set up with Windows Server 2008 and a trial version of Backup Exec 2010. It appears to be able to access the tapes and such when I run Inventory/Catalog commands, but each "inventory" command spins up the drive for a moment then looks (and sounds) like it's doing nothing after a few minutes, and the Job Monitor just shows the job "running."

My main question is -- is there an easier way to read these tapes than going through the whole song and dance of inventory / catalog / scan / etc that BE wants you to do? It was previously suggested to me to try using NTBackup to restore files from tape, but it looks like tape drive support for that was removed in Server 2008 (naturally). All I really need to do is scan the contents of each tape individually and be able to restore data from each - but the typical BE process seems overly complicated to me...

UPDATE - 2011-Feb-09

I've now got a Windows Server 2003 set up with the LTO drive and I'm just trying to use NTbackup to restore. When I open ntbackup.exe, I can see the "LTO Ultrium" drive as a device, but the tape that's loaded is not cataloged. How do you catalog a tape with NTbackup? I see the option to "catalog a backup file", but that asks to browse to disk somewhere for a .bkf file...

I've got old backup tapes I need to pull data from that were created with Backup Exec some years ago, but unfortunately we no longer run Windows servers on our network. Our entire tape backup system is running on an Ubuntu Lucid server setup now with tar/dump/mtx to backup and control the tape library (we have a Dell PowerVault TL2000)

What's the easiest way for me to read in the data from the Backup Exec tapes? Is there a route to doing this with *nix servers or is it a completely proprietary format? I'd really prefer not to setup another machine with Windows Server and Backup Exec just to pull data off of these tapes, but if that's the only way, then so be it...

Anyone been in this situation before?

I currently use Xen in production to run a number of Ubuntu VMs (Intrepid/Jaunty). I've got another server which I'd like to set up as a VM host to run more guest OSes, and am looking for the best options for our requirements:

• Ability to run 64-bit "modern" guest operating systems (especially Ubuntu Lucid) - we currently have a problem in that we don't have support for Lucid in our existing Xen setup without some serious rebuilding / updating.
• "Bare-metal" / headless configuration - a low-resource host system upon which we can run a dozen or more guests
• Deploy VMs from a "master" image - we can do something like this with Xen now, and it's very convenient for provisioning new stuff

Would also like to have some kind of GUI management tools, if that option exists...

There are probably some other things we'd like to have that I can't think of at the moment, but those are the two most prominent, and most difficult things to accomplish.

I'm open to any other solutions: KVM, OpenVZ, etc... anything that can hopefully meet the requirements above. As far as the host OS goes, we're currently running Debian, but I have no attachment to that. We've been trying to get Xen running on CentOS or Debian Lenny to no avail, we just want something that works. Any suggestions / advice would be much appreciated.

We're having problems getting iPhones to sync properly with SBS 2003 Exchange.

When you add a new Exchange ActiveSync account on an iPhone and enter all the pertinent information, it shows a "Verifying Exchange account info" message for a minute or so, then says everything's verified and asks what you want to sync, Mail, Contacts, Calendars... so it looks like it's working.

However, when you go to the Mail app and select the Exchange email account, it just shows an "Inbox" folder with nothing in it. When you try refreshing, it attempts for a second, then says "Last Updated" with a timestamp, as if it worked, but there's no mail and no error message/feedback at all.

I think I've narrowed it down to some sort of certificate issue, but I'm having trouble finding out where to go from here... I ran MS's Exchange connectivity testing tool with these results:

Our cert was purchased from Network Solutions, and I'd already added it to the IIS Default Website for OWA purposes. But this report makes it look like the cert is somehow problematic. I don't know what to do now...

Here's a shot of the cert details, just in case:

Our corporate LDAP directory is housed on a Snow Leopard Server Open Directory setup. I'm trying to use the ldapsearch tool to export an .ldif file to import into another external LDAP server to authenticate with externally; basically trying to be able to use the same credentials internally and externally.

I've got ldapsearch working and giving me the contents and attributes of everything in the "Users" OU, and even filtering down to only the attributes I need:

ldapsearch -xLLL -H ldap://server.domain.net / 
 -b "cn=users,dc=server,dc=domain,dc=net" objectClass / 
 uid uidNumber cn userPassword > directorycontents.ldif

That gives me a list of users and properties that I can import to my remote OpenLDAP server.

dn: uid=username1,cn=users,dc=server,dc=domain,dc=net
objectClass: inetOrgPerson
objectClass: posixAccount
objectClass: organizationalPerson
uidNumber: 1000
uid: username1
userPassword:: (hashedpassword)
cn: username1

However, when I try the same query on an OD "group" instead of a "container," the results are something like this:

dn: cn=groupname,cn=groups,dc=server,dc=domain,dc=net
objectClass: posixGroup
objectClass: apple-group
objectClass: extensibleObject
objectClass: top
gidNumber: 1032
cn: groupname
memberUid: username1
memberUid: username2
memberUid: username3

What I really want is a list of users from the top example filtered based on their group memberships, but it looks like membership is set from the Group side, rather than the user account side. There must be a way to filter this down and only export what I need, right?

As a follow-up to my previous question, which I've resolved part of, what we're trying to do now is take an exported .ldif file of the "Users" container on our OS X Server and import it into a separate OpenLDAP server on an EC2 instance. This we'll use for LDAP user authentication of other apps without having to open our internal network to LDAP traffic.

The exported .ldif file thinks the DN of the "Users" container is cn=users,dc=server,dc=domain,dc=com. Is it easiest to configure the EC2 OpenLDAP server to think that it's domain is the same so the container is imported to the proper place? Or should we edit the text of the .ldif file to change the DN to match the external naming?

Hopefully that makes sense... but I'm confused as to the best way to accomplish this.

We're in the process of setting up a Jabber server on Amazon EC2 right now, and we'd like to have our internal users authenticate via LDAP so we don't have to create/manage a separate set of user accounts than the master directory in the office.

My question is: is there a way to copy, unidirectionally, a segment of our internal LDAP directory (the user accounts OU) to an external LDAP server and authenticate Jabber against that?

We're trying to work around having our externally hosted machines out in the cloud accessing our internal network directly... If we can replicate in one direction only a subset of the user accounts, then if that gets compromised we don't necessarily have a critical security breach into our internal network.

We've got an Xserve with Snow Leopard Server running our domain, with mostly Mac clients configured with "roaming" Home Sync directories. There are several Windows workstations that also use roaming profiles that sync to the Mac server, but they behave inconsistently; sometimes they synchronize on login/logout, sometimes they don't. But in any case, the Windows machines always take forever to log on and off, like there's some kind of problem copying data between.

On the server, each user has a home profile under /home/username. There's another subfolder where those users' Windows profiles are stored separately called /home/profiles/username.V2 (I think the V2 comes from Vista profiles?).

My question is, is there an alternative, fairly simple way to synchronize the profile data on those Windows machines back and forth from the server outside of letting Windows handle it? Like manually running a script at logon/logoff that copies the delta of the profile between server/client?

We're just looking for a smoother solution to the issue... We'd love to have every client machine backup the users' profiles on the Macs and PCs, but not if it causes such slowdown with login times.

We're having trouble getting a new Windows 7 Ultimate machine joined to an OS X domain.

I found this Apple KB article discussing the very same issue we're having.

Basically, when entering all the information to join the domain (which all works fine on XP and Vista) we're receiving a "domain does not exist or could not be contacted" error message.

I also changed two local security policy settings per this article that are known issues between Windows and SMB authentication.

Has anyone else successfully put a Windows 7 machine on an OpenDirectory domain?

We're a small business (about 10 people) looking into a virtualization setup mainly for disaster recovery reasons, but also for backup and possibly some server consolidation capability in the future. I've done some research into the products, and have used VMware for desktop virtualization for some time. What I'm interested in using, though, is some bare-metal hypervisor setup, rather than something host-dependent, like VMware Server.

Cost is a major concern of ours (surprise, surprise). We have 2 physical servers currently: one is SBS2003 for DC/Exchange/printers, the other is for data shares/Backup Exec. We're on the cusp of getting a lot of new work (which will mean more people) and are looking to invest some money in new hardware/software, so I want to take advantage of the opportunity and do things right. The plan so far is to buy 2 new servers, each with some "type 1" hypervisor running 1 VM on local storage. We'll also probably upgrade to Server 2008 and Exchange 2007 as part of this investment. The disaster recovery conveniences of virtualization are attractive, and a proper setup would ready us to run multiple VMs on each host, et cetera.

Here are some questions I have:

• What kind of hardware do we need? - I assume some type of x64 configuration with lots of RAM...
• Hyper-V vs. VMware vs. other?
• Costs associated with hypervisor software?
• How do we create full backups of each virtual server? We currently backup to one of several large hard disks, rather than tape...
• Server storage? - is my idea to use local storage on each physical server for the VMs a sound one? We definitely cannot afford a SAN or some other shared storage.

All of a sudden on our network, none of the client machines can see any of the network shares or shared printers at all (XP clients, SBS2003 server), and cannot browse the domain via "My Network Places." I've looked through the event logs, but don't see anything out of the ordinary. We've rebooted the server a couple of times with no change.

I feel like it's either a Computer Browser service problem or that it's somehow DNS-related, but I'm kinda baffled...

I'm trying to configure my SonicWALL to allow LDAP authentication for VPN users. I've done this before with another device, and I remember it being pretty simple. But I can't get it to work this time for the life of me.

When I enable "LDAP + Local Users" mode, enter the LDAP server information and AD group names, I constantly get either "LDAP authentication failed" or "Credentials not valid at LDAP server" errors. I've tried all different permutations of settings that make sense to me, with the same results. SonicWALL support is absolutely no help so far. I've followed their manual's instructions to a T, with no solution.

Has anyone here had this same situation? I feel like I'm missing a setting somewhere...

At a client's office, their SonicWALL device is out of commission temporarily, so I've set up a Linksys WRT54G router in its place until we can get a fix.

They need some kind of VPN solution, though, for access until the SonicWALL is back online.

What is the easiest way to get a VPN setup configured between Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP client machines? I was thinking of something like Hamachi for the time being, but I'm not sure if doing it natively with Windows is easier...

We've got a few users in a remote office that only access any of the servers through the SonicWALL Global VPN Client. Their machines are members of the Active Directory domain here, so they can access Exchange mail and network shares while the VPN connection is active... works great.

The issue is changing their domain passwords. If I change it for them manually at the server, any authentication session taking place after the change should be fine (accessing shares, logging into email). But what about their local machine logins to the domain? Will they still need to login with their previous cached password on the machine? Since the VPN connection is activated after login (in software), the initial Windows login can never see the server.

Does anyone know what will happen if we go through with this? Does anyone know a workaround besides bringing the machines back on site here?

I screwed something up with a hard drive, and now I'm trying to get it bootable again.

I had Windows working fine, but it somehow assigned H:\ to the system disk on installation. In trying to edit the registry to change this (my mistake) I hosed everything up. I was going to just boot to my Windows XP disc again to reinstall, but now I'm receiving BSOD STOP error 0x0000007B every time.

I did some hunting around and it looks like this is related to a corrupt MBR on the hard disk, and found recommendations to run FIXMBR from the repair console. The problem is I can't boot to the hard drive, OR from the Windows disc to reach the recovery console, I get the BSOD. Does anyone know how I can easily erase/rewrite the MBR on the hard disk in this situation? I already tried using the BartPE disc and hit the same wall (it loads some kind of Windows kernel, I believe). I thought there might be some kind of bootable linux disc out there that could run something to fix the hard drive.

Any help would be appreciated...

The "sharing and security" option in the right-click context menu on a folder is no longer there. The File and Print sharing option is "installed" and turned on in the TCP/IP properties, but the ability to share any folders has disappeared, along with all previously shared folders. Where should I check to see what the issue is here?

EDIT From comments below:

"Server" service is not starting, see comment below for more... Firewall is completely disabled, too.

This is XP Pro, Simple File Sharing is turned on. We've discovered that the "Server" Windows service is not starting on bootup for some reason. When attempting manual start, we get "error 2001: specified driver is invalid."