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[SYSTEMS ADMINS & IT MONKEYS] TrackPoint is trademarked. Call it a clit mouse instead.

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Posts

  • tessarjitessarji Registered User regular
    uean wrote: »
    So weird problem at one of my sites. New server installed to a workgroup and began migrating clients into the domain. After joining one client to the domain, I noticed that I can ping the server, but the server cannot ping back. Yeah - server can't ping back, the desktop joined the domain properly.... So here's what I've tried:

    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.




  • ueanuean Registered User regular
    Thanks for the suggestions. I've been thinking along the same lines so it makes me feel better seeing your ideas matching up. I have a feeling it's the switch - its unmanaged from my perspective, but has management capabilities that are handled by the ISP (Telus) as the ISP is providing a private network pipe direct to this facility for patient confidentiality. Subnets are the same, all DHCP like I said is handled externally but I did check the subnet info and its all good. I'll be doing some Layer 1 and 2 testing tomorrow, already got my laptop with Wireshark and an unmanaged switch so I can rule out the NIC and cable as issues, then move onto the switch.

    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.

    Guys? Hay guys?
    PSN - sumowot
  • ghost_master2000ghost_master2000 Registered User regular
    Feral wrote: »
    Can anyone recommend a good web content filter that integrates with AD? We were using an ISA server on our old domain, and depending on costs I may migrate it and use it on our new domain, but if there is something better I'd like to use that.

    Won't really need firewall services as we have a hardware firewall for that. The hardware firewall has limited web content filtering, but it does not integrate with AD making it virtually useless for blocking anything but porn.

    Barracuda.

    The AD integration is done two ways; either a simple LDAP query configured on the webfilter itself, or with a small Windows program that you install directly on an AD server that runs as a service and communicates with the webfilter.

    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.

  • BeltaineBeltaine BOO BOO DOO DE DOORegistered User regular
    Loaded up a trial of XenServer. Gotta say, I really dig it. After the initial set up of a Server 08 VM, I took a snapshot and converted it to a template. Now I can load up fresh 08 Servers in just a couple minutes.

    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.

    XdDBi4F.jpg
    PSN: Beltaine-77 | Steam: beltane77 | Battle.net BadHaggis#1433
  • FeralFeral MEMETICHARIZARD interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    It's funny, I'm actually investigating the possibility of moving away from Citrix towards Microsoft's first-party virtualization tools.

    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
  • DjeetDjeet Registered User regular
    edited March 2012
    Weird email problem that's got me stumped. Server is Exchange 2010, complaining user (Sherry Bobbins) is using Outlook 2007, problem email originated from another internal user (Groundskeeper Willie) using the built-in email client on an iPhone 4 (iOS 5. something).

    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.

    Djeet on
  • BeltaineBeltaine BOO BOO DOO DE DOORegistered User regular
    Feral wrote: »
    It's funny, I'm actually investigating the possibility of moving away from Citrix towards Microsoft's first-party virtualization tools.

    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....

    XdDBi4F.jpg
    PSN: Beltaine-77 | Steam: beltane77 | Battle.net BadHaggis#1433
  • mrt144mrt144 King of the Numbernames Registered User regular
    Finally got a barracuda backup system in. I am so much more happy.

  • ueanuean Registered User regular
    We've been selling HP ML150 G6 servers for awhile now as it seems to be the only pricepoint at which people will bite. Now we're looking to start moving everything over to VMware, and wouldn't you know it, the ML150 is the only server in the lineup with a software RAID. And VMWare doesn't support software RAID. Cheapest RAID card I've found is... not cheap.

    Anyone have suggestions for hardware RAID cards that aren't like $500?

    Guys? Hay guys?
    PSN - sumowot
  • ueanuean Registered User regular
    Did he send it from his phone? I'd try just switching off Activesync on that account.

    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?
    Djeet wrote: »
    Weird email problem that's got me stumped. Server is Exchange 2010, complaining user (Sherry Bobbins) is using Outlook 2007, problem email originated from another internal user (Groundskeeper Willie) using the built-in email client on an iPhone 4 (iOS 5. something).

    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.

    Guys? Hay guys?
    PSN - sumowot
  • ghost_master2000ghost_master2000 Registered User regular
    edited March 2012
    YAY for DST!

    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.

    ghost_master2000 on
  • Apothe0sisApothe0sis Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Registered User regular
    edited March 2012
    Can any of you fine folks rec your fave (or maybe even one you see most commonly in live environments) Unix/Unix-like? Later this year, I'll be leaving the comfy confines of my small environment, it generalist, jeans and sandals wearin' gig and looking for something a little more professional in a new state and city, and I've always had a sucking chest wound in my knowledge pool when it comes to *nix. I don't want to be the guy that loses points for not getting the sudo joke, and I don't know if it'll even come up when I'm looking for desktop support/helpdesk jobs, but it seems like I should get on it (jump on it) ASAP.
    To add to the list of recommendations:

    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.

    Apothe0sis on
  • Apothe0sisApothe0sis Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Registered User regular
    edited March 2012
    Beltaine wrote: »
    Loaded up a trial of XenServer. Gotta say, I really dig it. After the initial set up of a Server 08 VM, I took a snapshot and converted it to a template. Now I can load up fresh 08 Servers in just a couple minutes.

    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.

    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.

    Apothe0sis on
  • BeltaineBeltaine BOO BOO DOO DE DOORegistered User regular
    Looks like it's going to come down to cost on Vsphere vs. XenServer as I've played with both and they both were equally easy enough to set up and figure out. I want a redundant setup as well, so throw that into consideration, and we'll see who wins.

    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.

    XdDBi4F.jpg
    PSN: Beltaine-77 | Steam: beltane77 | Battle.net BadHaggis#1433
  • Apothe0sisApothe0sis Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Registered User regular
    Beltaine wrote: »
    Looks like it's going to come down to cost on Vsphere vs. XenServer as I've played with both and they both were equally easy enough to set up and figure out. I want a redundant setup as well, so throw that into consideration, and we'll see who wins.

    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.

    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.

  • Apothe0sisApothe0sis Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Registered User regular
    Perhaps I have low expectations, but I just put a Symantec Brightmail gateway into our environment and it was totally painless. Very impressed!

  • Donovan PuppyfuckerDonovan Puppyfucker A dagger in the dark is worth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered User regular
    Apothe0sis wrote: »
    * 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.

    That's not true at all! XD

  • ThanatosThanatos Registered User regular
    edited March 2012
    I've got an old external hard drive that I think is probably on the way out. I'm copying files from it, but every so often, it crashes out, usually when I attempt to copy certain files. I have to shut off the drive to get it to work again (I can't even "end task" explorer; it completely locks up Windows). Now, it doesn't seem to be loading at all, but as I turn off the drive, it will pop up with the file list for a moment before it shuts off.

    Any suggestions for getting the stuff off of this drive? Oh, it's an NTFS file system.

    Thanatos on
  • ghost_master2000ghost_master2000 Registered User regular
    Depending on what kind of external hard drive it may just be the enclosure card that is going bad. One of the owners here had an external drive with almost identical symptoms last year. I just disassembled the enclosure, pulled out the hard drive, and hooked it up to one of the SATA ports on a mobo and it worked fine. I ended up buying a replacement enclosure and he was good to go.

  • Apothe0sisApothe0sis Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Registered User regular
    Apothe0sis wrote: »
    * 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.

    That's not true at all! XD
    Are you saying trolldb isn't a reliable source?

  • TL DRTL DR Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
    Does anyone happen to know how often a DNS cache will flush on a workstation? Would an IPCONFIG/RENEW do it?

    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.

  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    ipconfig /flushdns should be the command you're looking for?

    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 ?

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • TL DRTL DR Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
    It's an application server with the 2 NICs, each with a separate static IP.

    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.

  • bowenbowen How you doin'? Registered User regular
    Shouldn't unless something's hardcoded to that IP address.

    You could always assign the 2nd IP to the same NIC if this is the case, or fix that something.

    not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
  • electricitylikesmeelectricitylikesme Registered User regular
    Thanatos wrote: »
    I've got an old external hard drive that I think is probably on the way out. I'm copying files from it, but every so often, it crashes out, usually when I attempt to copy certain files. I have to shut off the drive to get it to work again (I can't even "end task" explorer; it completely locks up Windows). Now, it doesn't seem to be loading at all, but as I turn off the drive, it will pop up with the file list for a moment before it shuts off.

    Any suggestions for getting the stuff off of this drive? Oh, it's an NTFS file system.

    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.

  • punkpunk Professional Network Nerd Phoenix, AZRegistered User regular
    edited March 2012
    Apothe0sis wrote: »
    ... Symantec ...

    *hiss*

    punk on
  • AiserouAiserou Registered User regular
    I need some help with a VPN setup because I don't know diddly squat about setting up VPN's.

    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?

  • TL DRTL DR Not at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered User regular
    What kind of routers? If they had a working site-to-site VPN, I don't see a reason to mess with setting up another host unless you'd have to mess with Cisco voodoo or otherwise risk breaking something else that you couldn't fix.

  • AiserouAiserou Registered User regular
    Ugh, I was having a brain fart forgot there are both site-to-site and point-to-point VPN's. I now understand what is happening.

    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.

  • mrt144mrt144 King of the Numbernames Registered User regular
    Who the fuck designed 10.7.6 Server? 3 Separate places to set up share rights? Rights that don't propagate all the time? Needing a user to be logged in to the machine itself to allow share access to other users?

  • NathiasNathias Registered User regular
    Does anyone have any recommendations for IT Asset Management tracking software? I just took an IT manager position and this company has no idea what hardware they have...when it was purchased...who has it...serial numbers...etc. Need to get some sort of a database to start tracking it all. Probably looking at at least 200 assets (PCs, monitors, tablets, etc). At some point I'd also love to do reporting on all the data I'm collecting so I can see what hardware has reached a certain age....out of warranty...etc. Ideally...I'd love something that's free...but if it's not too expensive...I'm sure I can get management to bite at that.

    Any suggestions?

  • Apothe0sisApothe0sis Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Registered User regular
    edited March 2012
    Not sure - does Spiceworks do asset tracking?

    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

    Apothe0sis on
  • itzerokewlitzerokewl Registered User regular
    I've used Spiceworks for asset tracking, but in an environment with over 200 assets it may not be the best solution (we killed our network one day trying to do asset collection with Spiceworks....)

    signature.png
  • NathiasNathias Registered User regular
    Yeah, Spiceworks does the Asset tracking. I've found a couple various Asset Management solutions online...but just wanted to see if anyone here was actually using something now that they liked.

  • Apothe0sisApothe0sis Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality? Registered User regular
    I am pretty sure that asset tracking is one of the areas where you find a solution you can live with, not one that you like.

  • DjeetDjeet Registered User regular
    Nathias wrote: »
    Does anyone have any recommendations for IT Asset Management tracking software? I just took an IT manager position and this company has no idea what hardware they have...when it was purchased...who has it...serial numbers...etc. Need to get some sort of a database to start tracking it all. Probably looking at at least 200 assets (PCs, monitors, tablets, etc). At some point I'd also love to do reporting on all the data I'm collecting so I can see what hardware has reached a certain age....out of warranty...etc. Ideally...I'd love something that's free...but if it's not too expensive...I'm sure I can get management to bite at that.


    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.

  • BeltaineBeltaine BOO BOO DOO DE DOORegistered User regular
    edited March 2012
    We use a combination of Spiceworks, an Excel spreadsheet, and reports from my FOG imaging server.

    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.

    Beltaine on
    XdDBi4F.jpg
    PSN: Beltaine-77 | Steam: beltane77 | Battle.net BadHaggis#1433
  • mrt144mrt144 King of the Numbernames Registered User regular
    Apothe0sis wrote: »
    I am pretty sure that asset tracking is one of the areas where you find a solution you can live with, not one that you like.

    This is the truth.

  • BeltaineBeltaine BOO BOO DOO DE DOORegistered User regular
    Loading up a test VMware server now.

    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.

    XdDBi4F.jpg
    PSN: Beltaine-77 | Steam: beltane77 | Battle.net BadHaggis#1433
  • punkpunk Professional Network Nerd Phoenix, AZRegistered User regular
    edited March 2012
    For asset management, I'm a fan of Ray Allen. However, they could be a little overkill for 200 items. We use it for network hardware and SMARTnet contract management and track about 3000 pieces of hardware.

    As part of their service, they will build/customize just about anything your heart could desire.

    punk on
This discussion has been closed.