Kenplaysviola » Information Technologies

pstools, network path cannot be found, and admin$ share

kenplaysviola — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 15:27:29 +0000

I was banging my head trying to get the pstools working so that I can remotely run commands on our Windows machines. When running the command, for example:

psinfo \\192.168.0.2 -u foo

I would then input my password and would get an error about the network path cannot be found and that I may need to enable the admin$ share.

My target machine, 192.168.0.2, did not have an admin$ share, and this puzzled me. It’s supposed to reappear after a reboot. Even issuing the command, net share admin$, which brought back the admin$ share, did not work with pstools.

Make sure of the following to get the pstools to work:
-remote registry service is on
-file and printer sharing is enabled via the Windows Firewall AND on your network interface card (NIC).
-computer browser service is on
-server service is on
-workstation service is on

DNS is not required. You can use IP addresses.

Team Fortress 2 checkerboard graphics glitch

kenplaysviola — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 05:58:15 +0000

For the past couple of months, my Team Fortress 2 was having severe graphics issues. I would mainly see checkerboard patterns on the floors and walls during gameplay. Sometimes the checkerboard patterns were purple/black, and sometimes they were brown/black. I could not find a solution, and even upgrading my video card drivers did not not resolve the issue.

My solution? Uninstall and delete all Team Fortress 2 files through Steam. I then had to re-download Team Fortress 2 again. Once I did that, the checkerboard patterns disappeared and all is well again.

Making Electrons Count

kenplaysviola — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:45:30 +0000

I have an old film reel of some documentary by IBM titled, “Making Electrons Count”. It was left by a former co-worker who retired. He had received it from a friend. Not sure what I can do with this, but it would be really cool to get this onto digital format.

Red Hat SIGALRM loop

kenplaysviola — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 06:42:17 +0000

I recently upgraded my Dell Precision 690 at work from 2GB of memory to 8GB of memory. After installing the memory, my Red Hat 5 would not boot up the X server and present me with the typical login screen. I noticed that my mouse cursor was moving against a solid black background, and it was moving very slow and choppy. I was able to SSH into the machine from another machine and noticed that the xorg was running about 90% CPU! Doing an strace on the processor ID, I found that there was a SIGALRM loop! It turns out it is exactly this
Red Hat Bug.

There isn’t an official fix for this problem, but what worked for me was to download the most recent ATI drivers and install it. With the new ATI video drivers, all was well again. I figure that the same solution would be true for Nvidia users. I’m not sure why upgrading my system memory from 2GB to 8GB would affect the video performance, but somehow it did.

Drupal modules suck

kenplaysviola — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 01:34:40 +0000

Drupal provides a nice framework to building a website. People always mention that “there’s a module for that!” when you need to implement some kind of feature for your website. For example, a photo gallery or forum. This is nice and dandy, but the problem becomes that a lot of these modules lack customization and options. They are designed by the module designer in mind and NOT for you, specifically. I constantly end up finding myself saying, “That’s almost what I want, but I would like to add this and this in this module.” Good luck! Hacking the custom module and figuring out how everything is put together takes more time than to simply just write my own PHP code to get the functionality that I want. Drupal also isn’t very smart about creating its own custom VIEWS (SQL queries). It’s a give and take situation, but so far Drupal has been a crappy experience. I find myself banging my head and thinking, “I should have just written this in PHP myself and ditch Drupal!”

Linode versus Slicehost

kenplaysviola — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:27:03 +0000

I had been a slicehost.com customer for over 1-year. I was paying the $40 plan for 20GB of disk space, 200GB transfer, and 512MB of RAM. I recently switched to linode.com after investigating other Virtual Private Servers. For the same amount ($40), I am getting 32GB of disk space, 400GB transfer, and 720MB of RAM. Also, I get to choose an x86 or x64 of my OS choice!

Slicehost uses an AMD Opteron (4 processors) on their servers. Linode uses Intel Xeon 5520′s @ 2.27GHz (4 processors). I don’t have any objective benchmarks, but I am finding that my performance is much better on the Linode server. I host a Left4Dead game server on it and it runs well with up to 8-players. Perhaps it’s because I get more memory, or that the CPU is better, or that I am running a 32-bit OS instead of 64-bit. Maybe it’s all three! Whatever the primary reasons, I am getting more bang for my buck!

Slicehost’s data center is out in Missouri. Linode has 4 data centers up across the US (California, Texas, Georgia and New Jersey). Since I’m in California, my latency and response time has been very low! When I play on my Left4Dead server, I get around 13ms latency. When I was with Slicehost, I was getting about ~100ms.

Slicehost had really good uptime. It’s too early to tell with Linode, but so far the past month has had no problems.

Slicehost did have nice tutorials and a good community forum, however, if you are a competent Linux systems administrator then you should have no problems setting up your virtual private server. Linode does have a help section and a community forum area, but I did not explore it thoroughly as I was able to get myself up and running without the helps and FAQ’s.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have chosen Linode. I hope that Slicehost will be able to competitively compete with Linode in the near future.

Just to be absolutely clear, I am in no way represented by Slicehost or Linode. This is all from my own personal experience and opinions.

NTLDR is missing

kenplaysviola — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 05:01:36 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I got presented with the message that NTLDR IS MISSING when booting up the operating system on one of our Windows Server 2003 machine. First, I suggest you check out http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm. Did all those methods fail? Then read on …

For me, none of the “obvious” solutions for NTLDR IS MISSING worked, despite all the Googling I did. It turns out that I had inadvertently marked the wrong drive letter as the active partition, which Windows will now make as the bootable drive letter. When I popped in my Windows recovery CD, the drive letters were reversed. C: => D:, and D: => C:. That’s why my OS wouldn’t boot. The only way to flip the drive letters back while preserving data was to do a parallel install of Windows WITHOUT formatting or overwriting the old Windows. After you boot into your 2nd Windows OS, just go to the disk manager and right-click the REAL C: drive with the c:\windows on it, and mark that as the ACTIVE partition. Go ahead and reboot and all should be back to normal. C: => C:, and D: => D:.

Adding a shared printer with a script in Windows Server 2008

kenplaysviola — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:01:46 +0000

rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /n\\printservername\printersharename

The above command in Windows Server 2008 will allow you to add a shared printer. Pop this command in a batch file and put this on your machine’s local start up folder (c:\program data\microsoft\windows\start menu\programs\startup). Anyone who logs in with the appropriate printer share permissions will get the printer automatically mapped with their account. You could also put this in your start up scripts in group policy for your domain.

PandoraFMS sucks (for me)

kenplaysviola — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:49:42 +0000

PandoraFMS is an open-source systems and network monitoring tool created by some Spanish folks with typos on their website. Sounds great! So why do I hate it? Because I can’t install it. Let’s go through my hoops.

1) Their newest 2.1 virtual image for VMware doesn’t work with VMware ESX 3.5. It doesn’t recognize it so it is worthless.
2) Their Perl CPAN requirements cannot be met with Fedora 10. Fedora10, which plain out sucks already for me, couldn’t even use CPAN. Some weird errors. Fedora 10 fails again!
3) I switched to ubuntu 8.10 x64. Everything goes well until I try to install the CPAN Net::Traceroute::PurePerl. Again, some more obscure errors pointing me to some stupid stats site.
So what the hell does the below mean? I have no idea. Good luck.
——–
cpan[1]> reports AHOYING/Net-Traceroute-PurePerl-0.10.tar.gz
CPAN: Storable loaded ok (v2.18)
Going to read /root/.cpan/Metadata
Database was generated on Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:29:03 GMT
CPAN: YAML loaded ok (v0.68)
Going to read 33 yaml files from /root/.cpan/build/
CPAN: Time::HiRes loaded ok (v1.9719)
………………………………………………………………….DONERestored the state of 33 (in 0.2969 secs)
Distribution: A/AH/AHOYING/Net-Traceroute-PurePerl-0.10.tar.gz
CPAN: CPAN::DistnameInfo loaded ok (v0.07)
CPAN: LWP loaded ok (v5.812)
CPAN: File::Temp loaded ok (v0.21)
Fetching ‘http://www.cpantesters.org/show/Net-Traceroute-PurePerl.yaml’…DONE

0.10:
+PASS 5.8.8 on Linux 2.6.16.14 (x86_64-linux-thread-multi-ld)
+PASS 5.9.5 on Darwin 8.10.1 (darwin-2level)
+PASS 5.8.8 on Openbsd 3.5 (OpenBSD.i386-openbsd)
+PASS 5.6.2 on Linux 2.4.27-3-686 (i686-linux)
+PASS 5.9.5 on Netbsd 2.1.0_stable (alpha-netbsd)
+PASS 5.9.5 on Solaris 2.9 (sun4-solaris)
+PASS 5.8.6 on Freebsd 5.4-release (i386-freebsd-64int)
+PASS 5.8.8 on Linux 2.6.20-gentoo-r6 (i686-linux)
UNKNOWN 5.10.0 on Linux 2.6.22.10 (x86_64-linux-thread-multi-ld)
+PASS 5.11.0 patch 33684 on Darwin 8.10.0 (darwin-thread-multi-64int-2level)
UNKNOWN 5.8.8 patch 33662 on Freebsd 6.1-release-p23 (i386-freebsd)
UNKNOWN 5.8.1 on Darwin 7.9.0 (darwin-2level)
+PASS 5.10.0 patch 33921 on Darwin 8.10.0 (darwin-thread-multi-64int-2level)
UNKNOWN 5.10.0 patch 34065 on Darwin 8.10.0 (darwin-thread-multi-64int-2level) UNKNOWN 5.10.0 on Freebsd 6.1-release (i386-freebsd)
+PASS 5.6.2 on Freebsd 6.1-release (i386-freebsd)
UNKNOWN 5.10.0 on Solaris 2.9 (sun4-solaris)
+PASS 5.10.0 on Freebsd 6.1-release (i386-freebsd-thread-multi)
+PASS 5.8.8 on Freebsd 6.1-release (i386-freebsd-thread-multi)
UNKNOWN 5.8.8 on Freebsd 6.1-release (i386-freebsd-64int)
UNKNOWN 5.10.0 on Linux 2.6.24.3 (i686-linux)
+PASS 5.8.8 patch 34327 on Darwin 8.10.0 (darwin-thread-multi-64int-2level)
UNKNOWN 5.8.8 on Linux 2.6.24.3 (i686-linux)
UNKNOWN 5.11.0 patch 34383 on Linux 2.6.26.5 (i686-linux)
UNKNOWN 5.10.0 on Linux 2.6.26.5 (i686-linux)
UNKNOWN 5.8.8 on Linux 2.6.26.5 (i686-linux)
UNKNOWN 5.11.0 patch 34435 on Linux 2.6.26.5 (i686-linux)
UNKNOWN 5.8.9 on Freebsd 7.0-release (amd64-freebsd)
UNKNOWN 5.8.8 on Freebsd 7.0-release (amd64-freebsd)
UNKNOWN 5.10.0 on Linux 2.6.24-etchnhalf.1-amd64 (x86_64-linux-thread-multi-ld)
+PASS 5.8.8 on Linux 2.6.18.3 (i486-linux-gnu-thread-multi)
+PASS 5.8.9 on Linux 2.6.21.5-smp (i686-linux-thread-multi-64int-ld)
UNKNOWN 5.10.0 on Linux 2.6.26-1-amd64 (x86_64-linux-thread-multi-ld)
See http://www.cpantesters.org/show/Net-Traceroute-PurePerl.html for details
——
So why would I even remotely think about purchasing PandoraFMS Enterprise if I can’t even get the open-source version working? Time to check out Zabbix

How to disable SFTP connections

kenplaysviola — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:29:32 +0000

To disable SFTP connections and keep alive SSH connections, just comment out this line from your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file
#Subsystem sftp /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server

Remember to restart your ssh service
/etc/init.d/sshd restart