reconbot's questions

There's a "rule of monitors" that a user of scom might be aware of. If you have an alert that was generated by a monitor (as opposed to a rule that generates alerts) do not close it and let it close it self. If you do close the alert you wont be notified of the issue again until the monitor returns to a healthy state and then goes back into an unhealthy state.

If someone closes an alert for disk space (or if it occurs during maintenance, or it's old and gets auto closed) we don't find out the server still has space issues until the machine has problems. I'd like a way to regenerate alerts for monitors that are in an unhealthy state.

Currently I've looked at a powershell solution called GreenMachine but it doesn't seem to work very well and is very very slow.

What solutions have people found to this problem?

I have a network with windows 2003, 2008 and 2008r2 servers. I have a powershell script that I wrote to patch a local machine using the "Microsoft.Update" com objects. (Similar to Windows Update PowerShell Remoting.) My script works wonderfully locally but I'd like to use it's functions remotely as I have a fair number of servers to manage. In that case it falls down (similarly to that other post, which wasn't solved).

I was however able to narrow the failure down to two methods on a particular class.

(New-Object -ComObject "Microsoft.Update.Session").CreateUpdateDownloader()
(New-Object -ComObject "Microsoft.Update.Session").CreateUpdateInstaller()

If you run these in a powershell locally as an admin, you'll have no issues. If you try to use invoke-command (or enter-session, or winrs) you'll get the following error. (This is testing with localhost, but any host will do. I've also tried with different authentication methods such as credssp and kerberos.);

PS C:\> Invoke-Command -ComputerName localhost -ScriptBlock { (New-Object -ComObject "microsoft.update.session").createUpdateDownloader()}
Exception calling "CreateUpdateDownloader" with "0" argument(s): "Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005
 (E_ACCESSDENIED))"
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [], MethodInvocationException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : ComMethodTargetInvocation

I've seen this mentioned on blogs as a bug, but with no backup to that claim. Two workarounds exist and both don't make me happy.

• Use psexec to run commands as the system user. PSExec is what I'm trying not to use as it has proven unreliable. I'd also like a pure powershell solution.
• Create a scheduled task and tell that to run your script as the system user. (via this post) This is not only messy but then I wont have the update results. I'll have to log to a file or update a database or something.

I'm open to other ways to run updates on a host remotely as this seems to be an issue a lot of people are hitting.

I found some docs that explains the message but not the reason or workaround.

Return Value Returns S_OK if successful. Otherwise, returns a COM or Windows error code.

This method can also return the following error codes.
Return code   Description
E_INVALIDARGA parameter value is invalid. 
E_ACCESSDENIED    This method cannot be called from a remote computer.

How does it know I'm on a remote computer?

I'm about to embark on a writing a project to allow my users to subscribe and unsubscribe from a subset of distribution lists. Before I start I did a little research and found an old Microsoft product for exchange 2000 called AutoDL (More).

It allowed people to join and leave groups based upon permissions and it let group administrators add and remove people from their group as well. All from a little web app.

Before I reinvent the wheel, does something like this exist for exchange 2007-2010?

Thanks

I have to chmod and chown hundreds of thousands of files as part of a migration script. Each command takes about an hour and a half to complete. I realized these two operations can be run at the same time which cuts down on running time, which I confirmed by testing in the shell.

I know the trick of pushing commands into the background with '&', but I need to make sure both processes finish before proceeding with the rest of the script.

Thanks

Like a lot of offices we have a few public shares for different teams to save their data. Today I helped someone restore some folders from a shadow copy that had been deleted sometime last week. While I had the shadow copies (and backups elsewhere), I couldn't answer the obvious first question.

"Who deleted the files?"

We're running Windows 2003 server, everyone has active directory accounts.

I'm deploying my first django app. I'm familiar with nginx and fastcgi from deploying php-fpm. I can't get python to recognize the urls. I'm also at a loss on how to debug this further. I'd welcome solutions to this problem and tips on debugging fastcgi problems.

Currently I get a 404 page regardless of the url and for some reason a double slash For http://www.site.com/admin/

Page not found (404)
Request Method: GET
Request URL:    http://www.site.com/admin//

My urls.py from the debug output - which work in the dev server.

Using the URLconf defined in ahrlty.urls, Django tried these URL patterns, in this order:
^listings/
^admin/
^accounts/login/$
^accounts/logout/$

my nginx config

server {
       listen   80;
       server_name  beta.ahrlty.com;
       access_log  /home/ahrlty/ahrlty/logs/access.log;
       error_log  /home/ahrlty/ahrlty/logs/error.log;

       location /static/ {
               alias  /home/ahrlty/ahrlty/ahrlty/static/;
               break;
       }

       location /media/ {
               alias /usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/django/contrib/admin/media/;
               break;
       }

       location / {
               include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
               fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8001;
               break;
       }
}

and my fastcgi_params

fastcgi_param  QUERY_STRING       $query_string;
fastcgi_param  REQUEST_METHOD     $request_method;
fastcgi_param  CONTENT_TYPE       $content_type;
fastcgi_param  CONTENT_LENGTH     $content_length;

fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_NAME        $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param  REQUEST_URI        $request_uri;
fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_URI       $document_uri;
fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_ROOT      $document_root;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_PROTOCOL    $server_protocol;

fastcgi_param  GATEWAY_INTERFACE  CGI/1.1;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_SOFTWARE    nginx/$nginx_version;

fastcgi_param  REMOTE_ADDR        $remote_addr;
fastcgi_param  REMOTE_PORT        $remote_port;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_ADDR        $server_addr;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_PORT        $server_port;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_NAME        $server_name;

fastcgi_param  PATH_INFO          $fastcgi_script_name;

# PHP only, required if PHP was built with --enable-force-cgi-redirect
fastcgi_param  REDIRECT_STATUS    200;

And lastly I'm running fastcgi from the commandline with django's manage.py.

python manage.py runfcgi method=threaded host=127.0.0.1 port=8080 pidfile=mysite.pid minspare=4 maxspare=30 daemonize=false

I'm having a hard time debugging this one. Does anything jump out at anybody?

Notes

• nginx version: nginx/0.7.62
• Django svn trunk rev 13013

We had someone steal some files before quitting and it has eventually come down to a lawsuit. I've now been provided with a cd of files and I have to "prove" that they are our files by matching them to our files from our own file server.

I don't know if this is just for our lawyer or evidence for court or both. I also realize that I am not an impartial 3rd party.

In thinking how to "prove" these files came from our servers we realized I also have to prove we had the files before receiving the cd. My boss took screen shots of our explorer windows of the files in question with creation dates and file names showing and emailed them to our lawyer the day before we received the cd. I would have liked to have provided md5sums but I wasn't involved in that part of the process.

My first thoughts were to use the unix diff program and give console shell output. I also thought I could couple it with the md5 sums of both our files and their files. Both of these can easily be faked.

I'm at a loss of what I actually should provide and then again at a loss on how to provide an auditable trail to reproduce my findings, so if it does need to be proved by a 3rd party it can be.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

Facts about the case:

1. The files came from A Windows 2003 file server
2. The incident happed over a year ago and the files haven't been modified since before the incident.

I have a hardware device I need a server to dial into at regular intervals. The problem is I no longer have a POTS line or a modem in any of development computers, and all my production servers are virtual. I went out and got a usb modem for development and will plug it into a broadvoice VOIP line, but this seems quite kludgey. I've googled around and have found "virtual modems" that simulate serial connections or "at based" modems over IP, but so far nothing supports SIP or any kind of VOIP.

Is there a way to connect a virtual modem to a real one?

Thanks.

Update Putting a computer near the device isn't a good option as its in a public basement, (though the ALIX boards might work) and even then I'd have to dial into it. I also can't replace the modem with a serial device or an ip device as the only connection to location is the phone line and I don't know enough about the device to modify it. This is for some old smart meter equipment.

I'm currently an admin at a company and am part of a windows domain with two Primary Domain Controllers in different locations connected via a vpn, There is at least one backup domain controller in each location and we have less then 100 users. The servers are mostly windows 2003. I also have Exchange 2003 servers in both locations for redundancy and to serve the users in both locations.

When I make a change to a user in active directory, either a name change or I add or remove a user. It takes our global address book a few hours, sometimes up to a day to update in everybody's outlook.

Why is this and how would I go about speeding it up?

Also please forgive this being not directly related to programming, I hope it's not too out there, as some of us have to wear many hats.

I've got an old windows 2000 box in a remote location with a T1 connection and a vpn to my location. I normally use smb mounts to transfer files but now it's time to decommission the server and copy it's backups to my location. I have about 40 gigabytes (compressed) to copy. I'm prepared for it to take a long time, but I have a few caveats.

• I need to limit the bandwidth so terminal service connections to the site are not affected
• I want to be able to resume a partial transfer

There are a few small files and several large files (10-20 gigabytes). I'm familiar with rsync on *nix platforms but have had bad luck with windows and I don't know that it will really keep partially transfered files. What do you use?

During load testing my server is dropping packets due to "connection tracking" way before it's running out of resources. I'm using Ubuntu Jaunty with ufw. In my syslog I get:

ip_conntrack: table full, dropping packet.

I looked at upping the max connection table size, but I don't know of an advantage for tracking these connections on these ports. I would like to know how to use ufw to tell it not to track requests to port 80 and 443.

Clarifying

• No natting needed, it's just a web server.

Thank you.

I'm designing a new server setup for hosting multiple websites. (Shared hosting for my clients over at SliceHost.) I've recently moved away from the traditional LAMP setup and chosen Ubuntu, Nginx, php-fpm and mysql.

I like it a lot better then my old Apache, suphp, mysql setup. It works great, provided encapsulation between sites and uses substantiallly less memory. However I have one major maintenance problem. In order to have a recent version of Nginx and in order to use php-fpm I've had to compile these programs from source.

The reason I see this as a problem is that keeping track of updates, and build configurations will end up being a lot of work. For two programs (and a patch) I can handle it, but it seems like this setup would not scale with many packages and servers. Are there good ways to manage this situation? I'm sure people do this all the time.

I have a small business client who has a few windows servers and many workstations but as far as I can tell only has a few valid oem licences (some mismatched like xp home when xp pro is installed) for the workstations and almost no valid licences for the servers (It came with 2000 and now has 2003). They're partially interested in going legit and becoming properly licensed but fear its going to be a large cost. Interestingly enough they also fear that they'll get hammered on not being licensed so far and would rather keep under the radar.

I can't say this is the first time I've come across this, someone gets a hold of a slipstreamed xp pro cd or an office install that includes the key and are happy when it just works.

I'm not interested in giving them a hard time or turning them in. As I said I see this in my small business clients all the time and it wouldn't behoove me to mess with their businesses. I'm just looking for a good path to get them back into legitimacy.

Anyone have experience with this?

I'm tasked with providing fail over of our Exchange 2003 Server. Currently we're using Microsoft backup to backup the mail store nightly over the network to another machine. We currently use double take to mirror a database server and it seems like a reasonable solution for the exchange server but it is quite expensive and I'd need to dedicate a standby server for it. I've heard double take can sync to a VM, but I'm not on support with them anymore and I can't find much info on the subject.

My goals are (of course) to minimize cost and downtime. I'd love to use my double take backup server as a standby for multiple machines (it's got the space), but I don't know if it's possible. The maximum downtime I can afford is less then a day (my servers are on hardware support contracts, but hardware (drives, raid controllers, motherboards etc) still takes time to ship), so I'm not looking for immediate fail over, just the ability to smoothly transition to a backup machine in an emergency.

What have people used? What works well?

I've got a Windows 2003 terminal server and my users often search though remote text files for order numbers. We previously had a windows 2000 terminal server and the normal windows find dialog worked fine. Now with windows 2003 we always get zero results returned. Is there anything I need to tweak to get this working again?

Indexing services is enabled, everything else is on the default settings.

I've got an application I wrote (with cakephp) for the lamp stack and I'm moving it to a windows server. I'm having a lot of trouble with apache for windows (memory and cpu issues) so I would like to use the existing installation of IIS v6 but it seems to lack any url rewriting ability. I have found expensive addins (isapi) but I don't know enough about IIS or the programs around it to know if any are a good idea.

What works and has simple or compatible to mod_rewrite rules that is hopefully free?