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[SYSTEMS ADMINS & IT MONKEYS] TrackPoint is trademarked. Call it a clit mouse instead.
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Put Wireshark on the client and filter for ICMP. This works before the firewall/OS even touches the packet, so you can discriminate directly between networking failure and software/policy filtering on the client.
Then another very interesting network issue I might post about later.... two ADSL routers, two subnets, one network. Speeds on each subnet are great but talking between subnets speed is abysmal. Once again I have a feeling it is either a patch cable between switches/subnets, or a switch issue, but I'm probably going to install a Sonicwall and throw in some routing rules and let it do load balancing between the two routers for me, get all the end users onto one subnet. Wee.
Thanks. After spending some more time with our hardware firewall today and verifying with their support it turns out it did in fact support AD integration for web filtering. The vendor who installed it had just set it up wrong....sigh.
I need to find another machine to load up vSphere and try it as well, but I'm impressed with what I've seen so far.
Gonna run by Best Buy today and pick up a cheapo router so I can set up a separate test LAN and see how difficult it's going to be to migrate my live servers over.
Nintendo ID: Beltaine
3DS: 2423-2361-7857
Steam: beltane77 PSN: Beltaine-77
So Groundskeeper Willie sent an email to Sherry Bobbins the other day (email has 3 small attachments, 1 of them being a useless image embedded in a sig). Subsequently she receives this same message (same Message-ID even) with attachments constantly every 2 minutes and 20/21 seconds afterwards. Message Options show the email being received by the email server from itself (Received: from MAIL.springfield.com ([fe80::447c:41a4:dd6d:a39f]) by mail.springfield.com ([fe80::447c:41a4:dd6d:a39f%11]) with mapi; Tue, 6 Mar 2012 15:01:19 -0600) so it does not appear to be an issue with the sending email client.
Things I've tried:
Having Willie check his outbox (nothing's stuck there).
Having Willie reset his iPhone.
Having Sherry close and re-open Outlook with cleanfreebusy switch.
Having Sherry reboot her machine.
Created a new email profile for Sherry
No change. I've created a rule for Sherry to automatically delete any message with that subject from Willie, so she's happy, but I want to know how to debug this.
Seems like it's a server issue to me. Tonight or this weekend I plan on doing a full backup, windowsupdate, and reboot of the email server. Though if that mysteriously fixes the issue I'd still like to know how you guys would go about troubleshooting this.
Edit: Also, Willie's sent mail items only shows the one email sent, not the thousands Sherry's received.
It' really going to depend on total cost. I work for a K-12 school district so some things are dirt cheap for us, while other things not so much. Microsoft has a program that let's us pay a subscription fee yearly to have every product they make. But it's REALLY expensive when you consider how little of it we would use. (Pretty much just standard Server, Terminal Server, and desktops.)
Then I have to justify whatever we decide on to our school board. I'm already dreading explaining how turning our 15-server farm into 3 physical machines running virtualization is a good thing. Even my boss keeps saying "eggs in one basket" to me under his breath. He still likes DOS prompts and uses Windows XP configured to look like WIndows 98....
Nintendo ID: Beltaine
3DS: 2423-2361-7857
Steam: beltane77 PSN: Beltaine-77
Anyone have suggestions for hardware RAID cards that aren't like $500?
Maybe Outlook is only doing a one way Sync - if Sherry's mail store isn't ballooning when her Outlook is off then there is only the one message in there. What does her OWA look like?
Can anybody tell me if a domain controller running Server 2008 R2 is supposed to update it's time for DST automatically? It's odd, it says it is going to, then when 2 am rolls around it doesn't update, but if I open the time control panel it gives me a warning that the current time is not valid since it's between 2 and 3 am which isn't possible today. I ended up manually changing it and it propagated all throughout the domain, I just find it weird that it says it will change itself and then doesn't.
It did the same thing last year when DST ended, but these are my only two experiences with it, so not sure if this is business-as-usual or not.
side note: fuck the DNS service on that server too. I was having issues with outbound mail not working for a couple external domains. I am able to ping them but nslookup fails (WTFBBQ!). Restart the DNS service and they all go through... lame.
I would start off with Fedora/CentOS. Fedora is the "bleeding edge" community version of the Red Hat* corporation. CentOS is the open source binary equivalent of RHEL, which is the major enterprise linux.
However, Ubuntu server is gaining ground, and Debian has never been a slouch. So any of those would be worth taking a look at. However, I recommend starting with the perhaps less friendly options (i.e. not Ubuntu) for the purposes of getting to grips with how Linux actually works, as the automagical ways in which Ubuntu does this are a little-non-standard and a little opaque.
Fedora/CentOS/Red Hat can be considered a family of linux - they use the yum packaging system and have their own folder conventions. Debian/Ubuntu is another family, it uses the apt packaging system. They're both pretty user friendly and intuitive. Then, there are other flavours which do things in other ways, they're all more or less interchangeable in what they ultimately do but they can be radically different in the way it works - it depends on what you're trying to do to determine which one is best.
You might also want to look into puppet or something of this nature, which is often used to configure or deploy a large number of linux machines.
It is likely that any enterprise software you come across will have an rpm package available - which fits most comfortably with Red Hat (and by extension CentOS), chances are they won't have packages or binaries or support for other distros.
* Time for my endlessly repeated anecdote about Red Hat. It was so named because Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit was involved in its creation and named for his trademark red cap.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
It's pretty cool. VMWare will do the same thing. You need not run your proposed Citrix solution via the XenServer, you can run all of the Citrix stuff via VMWare. I am thinking what you described earlier is XenDesktop, but I can never keep the different things straight.
As you might have picked up, I am VMWare partisan over Xen and Hyper-V. Though, in truth, I wish I could say that the Red Hat virtualisation system is the best, because <3 Red Hat, but this is not really supported by reality.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
I definitely want to go with Citrix for the desktop stuff though because they have mobile device clients and I want to give my teachers the choice between using a laptop OR an iPad/Tablet and having the same functionality.
Nintendo ID: Beltaine
3DS: 2423-2361-7857
Steam: beltane77 PSN: Beltaine-77
VMWare's VMotion is a great way to use redundancy if you have the infrastructure to support it. I don't know if XenServer has a similar system, but it's pretty cool.
But Citrix is definitely the most ubiquitous in terms of the support across multiple platforms for their desktop/app virtualisation options.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
That's not true at all! XD
"If you don't know who Kendra is, I'm officially not speaking to you."
Any suggestions for getting the stuff off of this drive? Oh, it's an NTFS file system.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
The reason I ask is that I recently discovered that one of our client's virtual servers was somehow set up in a 2 NIC configuration. I've been tasked with removing one, but I don't want to kill one of this machine's IP addresses and then have stuff start breaking.
I wouldn't suspect anything to break on the workstation with 2 NICs unless it was a static IP and there was a network share on that machine.
I don't even think double NICs would matter, and I would assume windows always uses the first in the list of NICs to transfer data unless there was some sort of round robin NIC selection set up for socket open ?
I guess I'll just schedule a time to disable one during off-hours, push a /flushdns across the network, and test that nothing broke.
You could always assign the 2nd IP to the same NIC if this is the case, or fix that something.
dd_rescue.
You need to just straight up try and image what's there. dd_rescue will write nulls when something's unrecoverable, so it's the best way to get everything that's accessible back.
You should do this ASAP, then you can mess around with copies of the image file to try and extract things from the filesystem. It sounds like the crash you're experiencing is just the disk locking up in retries on a few contiguous bad sectors.
*hiss*
Previously, my boss used a VPN to access the network from his house. The way it was set up (from what I can gather) was that our gateway router and his home router (same model of Netopia routers) set up a VPN tunnel to each other and that allowed him to function as if he were on the network locally.
I am the third IT guy at this company, this system was set up by the first, and it broke during the reign of the second-- his inability to fix it was one of the many reasons he was let go (suddenly, and with zero turnover documentation to me). I've tried everything I can do within the settings of the routers to get them to talk, but they don't seem to like each other anymore.
Before this, my understanding of VPN's was that you could set up a Windows box to act as a RRAS server, forward vpn packets from the gateway to the RRAS server, and the client didn't require any special hardware on their end. My question to you guys is if this router setup is for some reason necessary or somehow more secure, or should I just setup a RRAS server and forget the router-to-router setup?
Does any of that make any sense?
The hardest part about being a one-man IT shop is there is nobody else to tell you when you're being stupid.
Thanks for being my sounding board, IT thread.
Any suggestions?
It depends on the depth of asset tracking you need, just hardware or software as well?
Altiris is commonly used as well. But it is not free and Symantec... sooo
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
SODOMISE INTOLERANCE
Tide goes in. Tide goes out.
Good goddamn luck. The company I work for has a product we're rolling out that may overlap your requirements, however the edge for us is data security, not asset tracking (very much ancillary).
Monitors? What exactly do you want? Because if it's to track "what hardware they have...when it was purchased...who has it...serial numbers...etc." then I don't know what to say. Most of the metrics you're trying to follow are going to have a lot of admin work overhead (meaning you will have to compile that info yourself and maintain that database, and its accuracy dovetails directly to your vigilance).
This problem is a test case for IT: managing assets that do not have much logic in them.
I've yet to find anyone using an asset management/inventory system that's easy or that they like.
If I had the capital backing, I'd look into building one myself.
Nintendo ID: Beltaine
3DS: 2423-2361-7857
Steam: beltane77 PSN: Beltaine-77
This is the truth.
Few things I've noted already.
-VMware's evaluation guide is worthless. It assumes I have 3 hosts + a SAN free to do testing with, so I feel like I'm flying blind to load it up on a standalone machine.
-I had to go hunt down a driver and inject it into the install ISO for an Intel NIC.
-Vsphere client isn't as user-friendly as XenCenter
I understand ESXi is the market leader, but damn. XenServer was stupid easy to get up and running by comparison.
Nintendo ID: Beltaine
3DS: 2423-2361-7857
Steam: beltane77 PSN: Beltaine-77
As part of their service, they will build/customize just about anything your heart could desire.