Earlz's questions

I have an Arch Linux server that was working fine, but was pretty far out of date. After getting everything settled with pacman -Syu the web service it runs would no longer load, just a generic 503 error. I can't seem to get any detail about the error other than from the Apache logs:

Failed to connect to mod-mono-server after several attempts to spawn the process.

In addition to this, I'm using the "event" MPM model. Yet, for some reason Apache will initially startup around 8 processes, and then with each request to the website, seems to startup 8 more without killing any of the previous processes. It will basically continue to spawn processes until it hits the process resource limit, or until it's out of RAM, whichever comes first. Each process will consume all of the CPU it can.

mod-mono-server itself will start, though it does take a few seconds, and a static (not using mono) site on the same apache instance works fine. None of the journald logs, nor other logs I can find in /var/logs gives any kind of info

How do I begin to even get more info about this error? And of course, how can I fix it?

My U-Verse modem has something called "Reflexive ACL" described as

Reflexive ACL: When IPv6 is enabled, you can enable Reflexive Access Control Lists to deny inbound IPv6 traffic unless this traffic results from returning outgoing packets (except as configured through firewall rules).

This seems like a pretty good way to keep from having to maintain a firewall on each computer behind my router that gets handed an IPv6 address. It sounds about like a NAT, which for my small home network is all I want right now.

Now my modem sucks as a router though, so I'm in the process of configuring an OpenBSD router to do that. I've got IPv6 supported and all that and my OpenBSD router will hand out IPv6 addresses by rtadvd. Now I want to keep people from having instant access to my local network through IPv6.

How would I best do something like Reflexive ACL with pf in OpenBSD 5.0?

I've never set up a VPN but have now been tasked with creating one on a Windows 2003 server.

What basically needs to happen is this server(which does not function as a router) needs to function as a VPN server. This is so that we can VPN into this server from across the internet. Whenever we VPN into this server we need to be capable of accessing the server and it's LAN. We also need some form of encryption through the VPN

How would I best set this up?

I've been trying all sorts of different combinations of startup flags to SQL Server 2008 R2 Express and I can not get past this error:

Login failed for user 'LOCALSERVER\Administrator'. Reason: Server is in single user mode. Only one administrator can connect at this time. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18461)

I've tried starting it up in Single User mode by both -m"SQLCMD" and -m"sqlcmd" and Iv'e even tried to start it up with -m"Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio - Query" and connecting with the appropriate clients I ALWAYS get this error. I'm 99% sure that nothing else is stealing my connection and when connecting with SSMS I make sure to do the "new query-connect` method to ensure it only uses 1 connection.

Has anyone else had this problem? How do I fix it and login?

One of our clients has an installation of SQL Server Express 2008 R2 that we more or less manage for them. Today I need to create a new database(a fairly rare occurrence). So I go to login as the user we usually use and we don't have permission to create databases.. No biggie, just remote desktop and login as Administrator locally to create a new user for this....

Well, turns out the latest version of SQL Express stopped providing the BUILTIN\Administrator login... There is the sa account, but no one can remember what the password is.

How can I reset the password for sa or enable the BUILTIN\Administrator login?

I have a bit of an odd setup. Basically, originally in the server was an older lone 160G harddrive. We've decided to upgrade it to a RAID-1 mirrored 2 disk setup against two new 500G harddrives. It'd save a lot of time if we didn't have to reinstall server, so I decided I'd give cloning the disk a try. I can successfully clone it (manually using dd from an OpenBSD install disk). It works after that, but it has over 300G of unallocated space. I wanted it to just be one big parition, so I used GParted to resize the parition. It works after this, chkdisk runs without any kind of errors and such.

Then, when I try setting up this one drive to be a dynamic disk, it will say it must unmount and reboot the computer and such. Consistently, however, when it reboots I just get the error "A disk read error occurred. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart" or something along those lines. I've tried this 3 times, with the same thing each time.

Also, I'm aware of the needed 10M of unallocated space on the drive. I went ahead and left 100M just to be safe.

Is there anything obvious that would cause converting a perfectly fine basic disk to a dynamic disk to fail?

Also, I am using Windows Server 2003 Standard edition, 32 bit

I'm wanting my website to use MongoDB as it's datastore. I've used MongoDB in my development environment with no worries, but I'm worried about security with a public server.

My server is a VPS running Arch Linux. The web application will also be running on it, so it only needs to accept connections from localhost. And no other users(by ssh or otherwise) will have direct access to my server.

What should I do to secure my instance of MongoDB?

I recently tried deploying my extremely "odd/custom" web application and I'm having some problems.

Basically, in my code at Global.asax I have

if(context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath=="/"){ //doesn't work(yields 404 error for index.aspx)
  Response.Write("foo);
}
if(context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath=="/test"){ //does work
  Response.Write("bar");
}

At the moment, I am just using the simple auto configuration for Apache and mod_mono. The only thing I added was making it use .Net 2.0 and I added

ForceType application/x-asp-net

How can I make it so that it won't try to resolve / to some index file, and instead let it be handled by the application?

Note: This works perfectly using xsp alone in my debugging environment

Is there some list of printers/scanners that are known to work with Terminal Services or some way to determine automatically if the device will work from the specifications?

I am needing to advise a customer on a small(as in, can set on a desk) all-in-one printer/scanner/fax that works with Terminal Services.

The client OS is Windows XP, the server OS is Server 2003.

I have a Linode VPS. This means I have root access; well, I thought I'd offer a bit of shared hosting.

How do you get started doing this? I'm wanting to give PHP, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Also, I'm going to be using Arch Linux.

Can anyone point me to some web pages or something for how to setup shared hosting that is secure? Also, without using PHP's safe_mode and possibly offering SSH access.

I am trying to run point a domain at my pfsense server and have it run a DNS server which is authorative. So I installed TinyDNS.

Ok, so I setup a rule in pf. The rule is TCP/UDP. Source interface is WAN, source address is *, destination address is [PfSense's public WAN IP], destination port is 53.

Then, I proceeded to setting up TinyDNS. All I did here was enter my domain and such and then I added an A record with [Domain] as my domain and [Seperate WAN Server IP] as the destination IP.

Also, TinyDNS is binding to 127.0.0.1, but I've also tried binding to the router's public IP. (note the Router is the PfSense DNS server) Now, the results of dig

-bash-3.2$ dig DOMAIN.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_4.1 <<>> DOMAIN.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 40365
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;DOMAIN.com.           IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
DOMAIN.com.    123     IN      A       ROUTER WAN IP

;; Query time: 0 msec
;; SERVER: 209.59.139.5#53(209.59.139.5)
;; WHEN: Tue Jan  5 19:38:52 2010
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 53

Instead of going to the IP I intend, it for whatever reason is going to the (PfSense) router IP. It's very strange cause I do not have an A record setup to point to my router, so how is this happening? Also, when I use the http://afraid.org DNS Auth Trace tool, the PFSense router returns an answer but is not authorative.

What am I doing wrong here?

Edit:

I am getting this (with no lookups happening as far as I'm aware) in my TinyDNS logs

TinyDNS Server logs as of Tue Jan 5 21:15:34 UTC 2010

2010-01-05 21:15:18.525985500                :4010 wlan_str                          xmlrpc.php

(with that entry repeating)

we have a 5 public IP addresses. What we basically want to do is have a router(one single router) that will translate a static private IP so that it uses a static public IP(as in, NOT the gateway public IP)

Is this possible to do without multiple routers/nic cards(more than 2 nic cards)?

For example: say we have 3 computers 192.168.1.2-5 well we want for 192.168.1.3 to have the static public IP of ..*.1 where our gateway has *.6.

Basically, it would be setup so that whenever someone does a ping from the internet to ..*.1 it would come through the router and be routed to our computer 192.168.1.3. And also for all outgoing traffic from 192.168.1.3 it is marked as going out from ..*.1

Hello I am running a Server 2003 server. I keep getting error messages saying to "increase page file size" When I looked in task manager for culprits I got mad.exe is using over 1G of virtual memory and over 100M of physical memory.

What could be causing such extreme usages of memory. Also, I've heard there was Norton problems with mad.exe, but we do not have Norton installed on the server.

Also, this server is very low usage. It is only used as a SVN and development database server.

Hello I have an HP server configured for RAID 1+0 using 2 SATA disks. I'm pretty new to handling servers also.

The server has had the same OS(Windows Server 2003) on it for a while so I'm not sure of what all it has been through.

It has a dual core P4 cpu running at 3ghz. 512M Ram.

The server runs very slowly.. I am not sure what is making it so slow though. There is not much performance different between when it has nearly no RAM free and when it has over 100M of RAM free. The only thing it is used for is a SVN server and hosting a low activity development SQLExpress database. Yet at times it can take over 1 second to perform a simple SELECT * FROM TABLE where the table only has like 5 records in it.

The CPU is not maxing out or anything either. It hardly ever gets above 25% usage.

So my only idea is disk access. But even with a disk speed test I can't be sure that is where the bottle neck is. I've tried doing some performance monitoring, but the only odd thing I'm seeing is a large amount of Pages/Sec.(idles at close to zero and peaks at over 1000 while accessing the database and such).

TL;DR: How can I tell where the performance bottle neck is on my server in terms of disk, CPU, or memory, or something else?

I am trying to create a copy of a SQL Server 2008 database under a new name on the same server.

I have physical access to the machine. I have tried to create a full backup and then restore that backup under a new name and I get an error from SSMS that "The backup set holds a backup for a database other than the selected database."

I have also tried doing a restore from database rather than restore from file and that did not work either.

What is the best way of making a full backup of a database and restoring the database with a new name?

I have a setup of two SQL server(these are independent, only for development and testing) running computers and I would like to be able to use source safe so that I can keep these two SQL servers in sync(they are on a LAN). I have SQL server 2008, though it works in 2000 compatibility mode; and Source Safe 2005.

I have source safe installed on both computers, and I have a source safe database on one of the computers. On the other computer(the one that doesn't control SS) I have a SQL database that I need to put into source safe. How do I do this? The toolbar buttons in SQL Server Management Studio are there, but they are greyed out, the only thing it will let me do that has to do with source safe is "launch source safe" and inside sourcesafe, there is nothing about SQL databases.

I'm wondering, is there any wifi latency problems? Like, say this was taken to an extreme though. Like we had a wifi repeater. The repeater consisting of a receiver, which then immediately repeats the signal to an access point, but under a different SSID(I do not need this to all work as one network). The repeater could make it so I could have no need for wires for a very long distance, though it could require quite a few repeaters(more than 4). Assuming the software is as fast as the hardware, could there be any latency probelms with this also assuming that all the repeaters were within full-speed distance of each other?

Also, could this depend on hardware? or is the wifi standard designed to be latency free?

I am attempting to setup nightly builds of a Linux OS on my webserver. Well, the problem is I need to generate a floppy disk image without being root.

Really, I don't need to fully generate it. I just need to update the image. As I have a FFS image with boot manager and such, and just need to add my kernel file to the image. I have seen no useful image tools out there though with dealing with FFS.

Does anyone know of some tools to use for updating such a floppy image. I wouldn't mind programming a little glue program, but I really don't want to code up full FFS support by myself at the moment.