Archive for the 'Computers' Category

Quick windows tip again, if you find yourself unable to access the administrative shares (\\machine\c$, tasks, etc) on a Windows Server 2008 or Vista computer with UAC enabled, using the credentials of a local administrator — don’t panic. This is actually intended.

Turns out local administrators cannot elevate their privileges over the network, with UAC enabled.

Note that this doesn’t affect users in the Domain Admins group!

Now, you could do the dumb “neowin poweruser” thing and turn UAC off, or you could change this particular behavior in the registry. Navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

And add a new DWORD named LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy with a value of 1, and then reboot. It all should work.

Again, users with Domain Admin privileges are unaffected.

I really am. I got an iPhone 3G.

Mitigating factors are that the camera is really awesome, and also that I got root on it, voiding my warranty a mere fifteen minutes after unboxing it.

I have compiled version 1.0.6 of Xapian for Windows, and I have built and packaged the Python Bindings for your convenience.

You can find the new version here.

Questions, comments or Mirrors are welcome, as usual

UPDATE: Charlie Hull informs me that he has coerced my hacked-up Distutils file into SVN Head, which means there’s a good chance my packaging environnement will be integrated into mainline Xapian, or into the Lemur Consulting makefiles. Either way, this means one can build binaries a lot faster, which is great.

I just installed Leopard on my Mac Book Pro, waiting to see how all the shit I have installed in /opt and /usr/local would survive before taking the actual leap with my Dual G5, which I still use for a bunch of development stuff that I don’t want to break. Yet.

So far so good. The under-the-hood features are actually great, and I pretty much enjoy the tabs in terminal. About damn time. I have yet to see if special keys work by default without me hacking it up. Oh and dtrace has a really fruity front-end in the developper tools. Fairly awesome if you ask me.

Anyways, the point is, I was finding Coverflow amusing for 3 whole seconds before switching back to the usual view, and decided to browse the network. By the way, this now actually works now. So, if you pay attention to the actual icon used for Windows machines on the network…

Now that’s fairly ballsy. Not too professional, but I chuckled nonetheless.

I have compiled version 1.0.3 of Xapian for Windows, and I have built and packaged the Python Bindings for your convenience.

You can find the new version here.

This time they are available for both Python 2.4 and 2.5. Enjoy.

I now have a /29 subnet at home. This is probably the pinnacle of network geekdom.

I SO feel like running a honeypot…

So, the situation is this. I’m sitting remotely at a client site, and suddendly, due to some sleep-deprived slip-up, ended up erasing part of the configuration for their local server.

Being the kind of guy to plan things through before taking action (usually), I had previously made a test set-up with all the configs in vmware on my local workstation at home, before heading over and installing them. So I pop open my laptop, fire up the Cisco VPN Client, connect over there, leapfrog some routers in between and land on my workstation. Turns out I hadn’t left the vm running, so I can’t access it from the shell by SSH’ing in.

“Hey, no problem!” I thought. “I’ll just mount the disk images with vmware-mount.pl, fetch the configuration files, send them over with a convulted mess of ssh-within-ssh-within-ssh and unix pipes to my laptop! Piece of cake!”

But then something hits me. The Virtual Disk Image (vmdk) file had LVM Volumes as partitions. Which I can’t directly mount from my Ubuntu workstation. Usually, you can get away with issuing the following:

$ sudo /opt/vmware/bin/vmware-mount.pl /path/to/disk-image.vmdk patition_number -t ext3 /mnt/mountpoint

But to much of my dismay, partition 2 on this particular disk image is an LVM Volume, so it can’t be directly mounted. I has to be mapped and a bunch things has to be done before I can get to the data. I’m not even sure I have LVM support on the Ubuntu machine at the moment.

Curses. Unless I fuck around with it to make it work. Which I did. Read on for the details.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have built the Xapian Python Bindings on Windows. They comes packaged with an easy, standard (distutils) installer. This may help with some of the headaches associated with running Xapian on Python and Windows.

Getting the whole thing to compile was not exactly a walk in the park, so I assumed people would be glad to have an easy Binary installer handy. I plan to use this library for a few internal projects, and I want the said project to be as multi platform as possible.

So far, they are only packaged for Python 2.5 but I will try to package them for 2.4 later on today or during this week.

See the details here.

They were built on Windows Server 2003 with MSVC from Visual C++ 2005 Express.

I hope this helps.

Hi everyone. Sorry for the lack of updates, I’ve been fairly busy — I’m migrating all of my servers to a single, brand new Dell Poweredge 2900 server. I have a couple of great tutorials regarding Xen coming up soon, I’m sure at least someone will find them useful — I found the Xen documentation to be really scarce.

So, right now, I’m migrating my qmail, vpopmail, courier, clamav and friends set-up from Gentoo to Debian, on a new virtual machine. I followed the basic steps from here:

http://wiki.debian.iuculano.it/quick_howto

This gent was nice enough to provide the required qmail packages and patches. Only problem came when I tried to make courier work with vpopmail — turns out the official debian courier-imap packages don’t support vchkpw, which is the authentication mechanism for vpopmail. Fortunately, I managed to hack it in an almost clean way, that doesn’t involve building it yourself from tarball.

Read on for the jazz.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have spent most if not all of last week frantically running around servers and devices trying to patch them up­. Some were pleasant, some were not.

My Cisco PIX 501 for instance, was easy to patch for DST.

azrael(config)# sh clock
12:30:25.078 EST Tue Mar 13 2007
azrael(config)# clock summer-time EST recurring 2 Sun Mar 2:00 1 Sun Nov 2:00
azrael(config)# sh clock
13:30:26.999 EST Tue Mar 13 2007
azrael(config)# wr m
Building configuration...
Cryptochecksum: 7898776d bee63c89 5f3ab01b 9064f51c
[OK]

I’ve had the pleasure of patching production servers running Oracle 9i and UC4 Global. Doing the Oracle jazz helped me fully grasp the deadly truth that is, I am not a DBA. With reason. I have spent a day just to determine the consequences of the DST changes. Turns out none of the systems used TZDATA columns, whatever that means. So I have pushed the patch into the next maintenance window.

Since everything java is affected, I had to run around upgrading every single jvm and jdk running on servers. The problem is now apparent with a Macromedia/Adobe Jrun instance we have. Log entries are off by one hour for two weeks, and I hope none of the transactional code is actually fucking up. I couldn’t patch the jdk on the production server because of a nasty bug with anything above 1.5.0_05, where the Java compiler outputs notices no matter what, and Jrun interprets these as errors, thus rendering your web application non functional in some cases.

I think it is time they get rid of Jrun. It has brought nothing but misery. So, all of this just so it can be dark outside when I get up to go to work, and “save costs” while spending thousands trying to get everything patched up? (A giant bitchslap to companies who provided their patches last tuesday before the change). Just so that we can all spend the two weeks adjusting to the change and living with jet lag-esque effects? Sometimes I wonder who the fuck decides these things…

Just to let everyone know I’ve poked my head in the Apache2 hanging on digest generation problem again, and figured out a better solution than relying on rng-utils.

Check it out.

I just woke up, glanced tenderly at my Mac Book Pro next to my bed, and plugged the cord in. I pushed the button on the battery that is supposed to tell me in what condition the charge is. Nothing occured.

I power up the laptop, and see this.

For those not speaking french, it means “No battery available”.

Fuck. And I’m about to go on a trip to toronto. The battery of my older Powerbook died the same way in the very same outlet. What the fuck is wrong with this power outlet, I ask you? Damn.

See the following link. Clicky clicky.

I have waited so long for something like this to occur. Especially from Dell.

Apparently they started offering machines without windows. They are called the -n series, the hard drives come unformatted. And they explicitely mention Linux. Great.

In other unrelated news, it seems I’ll have to upgrade wordpress since 2.1 came out. Last major upgrade was nothing short of hairy, let’s hope it goes smooth.

Well, you’ve seen it. So have I. You probably have been extremely excited, clutching your credit card tightly into your groin as you watched the keynote. So have I.

And now, it turns out uncle Jobs came out with a total boner killer.

No third party applications on the iPhone.

Jobs said:

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

He also said:

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

Of course, the third-party applications on my Treo are such a goddamned liability. Meh.

This probably made a few thousand hackers (myself included) cringe. I was eager to hack around on the device and saw infinite potential. I already saw myself running a terminal on it, and ssh’ing around from my 600$ USD iPhone.

600$ USD is around 705$ CAD. That price would have seemed right if I was allowed to do whatever I damn please with it. Now it is just another overpriced toy which I doubt I’ll ever buy…

Oh well. My bank account is probably happy. As far as I’m concerned now, Steve just announced a very expensive brick.

If you have an Intel Mac, you already know what Parallels is and what wonders it can accomplish. Virtualization is awesome, especially with Intel VT, of course.

One new feature of the latest version that came out last week would be Coherence Mode. It is similar to running X11 applications “rootless”. I’m not sure of how to describe it. To cite David Young from StuffOnFire, who describes it in much better words than I would:

Have I ever mentioned how freaking awesome Parallels Coherence mode is? Probably not, because it’s only been out for a week. Well, it’s freaking awesome. What do you run Windows for? Visual Studio? Office? You put the taskbar on auto-hide and it’s just like using a really ass-tastic Mac application, like something made by Adobe. And it runs on your Boot Camp partition! Hell yeah. If there were a Mac Software Engineering Team of the Year award, I’d suggest that the Parallels guys get it.

I just wanted to mention how awesome it was really. No acerbic rant about stuff, or witty comments, really. Just a plain “Oh shit it’s awesome, I want people to know this and belch, fart and shit their pants at the same time when they see this”.

I’ll post a screenshot later on.

At this price, is hope the memory stick is gold plated, beautifully marked with the Cisco logo, hand chiseled by romanian virgins trained in their craft since birth. And guaranteed to never, ever go bad.

That’s a metric fuckton. Well, I guess the enterprise can justify it, else, they should have gone with the SOHO stuff. I use cheap hong kong made knock off flash SIMMs in my personal 2611 router. 20$ for 64 megabytes on e-bay. Don’t do that if you’re using your router seriously, though, unless you like words like “void warranty” and “obscure failures”.

On another note, their new logo looks like two raised middle fingers. Appropriate, for the price tag.

Just when I was starting to actually enjoy (read: thinking “hey, it’s not so bad!”) Windows scripting after discovering documentation for the 32 bits command interpreter in Windows NT, I realize I have been spoiled by Unix shells and expect some things to work, and then frown in disgust when they don’t.

for /F "usebackq tokens=2,*" %i in (`net use | find "..."`)... 
| was unexpected

I really wanted to like writing cmd scripts. But the parser is way too obnoxious when parsing brackets. For instance, you can’t set an environement variable in one branch of a conditional statement.

if "text" EQU "othertext" ( 
    set VAR=value 
) else ( 
    echo Not Working. 
)

This will fail silently or with unexpected results. Can’t wait until PowerShell becomes mainstream enough for me to use.

EDIT - 2008-03-03: Actually, screw this shady use of the remote debugger. Use psexec like a man instead, and enjoy the power of WMI.

This is nifty. Not something to scream about while tearing your clothes off in a moment of raw ardency, but still, I find it relatively useful.

You perhaps already know how Windows Debugging Tools such as WinDbg can output to a serial or network console, but I found out this concept can be extended to basically any console application that doesn’t really mess around with the terminal. See it as a mix between netcat and screen.

You just need “remote.exe” that comes with the Windows Debugging Tools. I personally use it to launch Macromedia JRun4 in a console on a development server at one of my client sites to debug their web application remotely. That way I can see the log in my local console instead of toggling between the server and Terminal Services. Read on for an overview of how it works. Read the rest of this entry »

That title is way longer than it should be. Anyways, I just like to administer Active Directory Users and Computers from my workstation, on which I am logged on as a plain user.

To run the Active Directory Users and Computers with Administrator rights, you can use some runas.exe magic. Just create a shortcut to the following target:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\runas.exe /USER:DOMAIN\adminuser "mmc dsa.msc"

Of course, just change DOMAIN\adminuser to whatever applies.

It works fine for my purposes. The trick is just knowing the name of that particular mmc snap-in. That’s pretty basic knowledge, but I’ve been asked three times this week about it.

Microsoft PowerShell was just released.

PowerShell is actually the only new technology coming from Microsoft that has gotten me excited. I have played around with the Betas and Release Candidates at work, now I can finally USE it. It will take some time before it reaches the production environnement, but this will make my life substantially more pleasant when working with windows.