<will-bloggs-too>

If you’re a Star Wars fan, then here is one for you: Mimobot Star Wars edition.

16 year old kid speeds up the plastic decomposition process! That’s just impressive! The “Canucks” are on their way!

This article is following-up on my previous post regarding VMware web access and LDAP authentication. A few days later and I found myself in a  pickle. It turns out that the permissions that I had setup were somehow removed from the VM console. This meant that all users authenticating against LDAP were unable to log-in.

I said “no problem”, I’ll just add the permission back in there. I followed the same steps from my previous post and I ran into an error. I like to see what’s going on in the background, so I tail /var/log/vmware/hostd.log recursively while I perform the tasks on the web console. The following error (s) were coming up in the log:

[2009-06-01 17:23:39.559 'TaskManager' 1096079680 info] Task Created : haTask–vim.AuthorizationManager.setEntityPermissions-148278022
[2009-06-01 17:23:39.559 'PropertyProvider' 1096079680 verbose] RecordOp ADD: recentTask["haTask--vim.AuthorizationManager.setEntityPermissions-148278022"], ha-taskmgr
[2009-06-01 17:23:39.586 'TaskManager' 1096079680 info] Task Completed : haTask–vim.AuthorizationManager.setEntityPermissions-148278022
[2009-06-01 17:23:39.586 'PropertyProvider' 1096079680 verbose] RecordOp ASSIGN: info, haTask–vim.AuthorizationManager.setEntityPermissions-148278022
[2009-06-01 17:23:39.586 'Vmomi' 1096079680 info] Activation [N5Vmomi10ActivationE:0x93dba40] : Invoke done [setEntityPermissions] on [vim.AuthorizationManager:ha-authmgr]
[2009-06-01 17:23:39.586 'Vmomi' 1096079680 info] Throw vim.fault.DatabaseError
[2009-06-01 17:23:39.586 'Vmomi' 1096079680 info] Result:
(vim.fault.DatabaseError) {
dynamicType = <unset>,
msg = “”

So, I a little bit of research lead to the following solution. Pause all VM guests, then edit the file /etc/vmware/hostd/authorization.xml and modify the value of the following line:

<NextAceId>11</NextAceId>

Change it to 12, save the file and restart the vmware service. Once this has been done, go back in the VM console and add the permission in there. Be sure to force the permission to the child objects as well.

Problem solved, and we all live to see another fun filled VMware day!

I was attempting to join my RHEL5 x86_64 machine to LDAP when I received the following error:

[2009/06/01 18:52:39, 0] libads/kerberos.c:create_local_private_krb5_conf_for_domain(651)
create_local_private_krb5_conf_for_domain: failed to create directory /var/cache/samba/smb_krb5. Error was Permission denied

Umm.. okay, fine, I created the directory smb_krb5  under /var/cache/samba/and problem solved. Not sure, if this is a bug but here is what I have installed: samba-client-3.0.28-0.el5.8 and samba-common-3.0.28-0.el5.8.

Go figure…

We have a bunch of Linux VMware 2 servers, so I wanted to make the VM web access interface is available to some key individuals. The goal is to do this without having to create local users for each user on the hosts. That said, since we have Active Directory, I decided to use it with the hosts. The first thing you have to do is, to make sure that the host has LDAP authentication setup. My implementation involves RHEL 5 hosts, which has a built-in mechanism to set up LDAP authentication. I’m not going to regurgitate how this is done since most confident system administrators will know the procedure already.

Proceed with Caution and at your own risk! Read the rest of this entry »

Right, so what do you get when you have a company that’s “owned by its employees”, who seem a little like the school yard bullies? You get Dreamhost! Here is a prime example of why they have absolutely no respect for anyone.

In case you can’t tell, yes, I am bashing them for their lack of professional demeanor.

KnowEm checks the availability of your brand name, user name or vanity URL on 120 popular Social Media websites.

Prime example of what happens when your web hosting company takes the irresponsible approach: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=854408

So, I decided to use AutoMySQLBackup to maintain our internal MySQL server backups. Unfortunately, this posed a problem with a certain server monitoring service that rhymes with Shamix (let’s just keep it that way). The problem is that “Shamix” places a lock on the database tables and this causes everything to break on the monitoring end, sending a ton load of false positive alerts.

The solution was very easy. Stop the monitoring servers from reading or writing to the database tables while AutoMySQLBackup ran. To solve the issue, the backup script does allow you to execute command pre/post backup. This means I can issue command to the remote hosts from the MySQL server to perform certain tasks.

Disclaimer: What I’ve done is by no means secured and should not be used in a production environment.

1. Create a user, call it whatever you like. Make sure that you generate the SSH key for the user in the user home directory. Copy the necessary bits for SSH authentication to the remote server (s).
2. Add the user to the “wheel” group on the remote hosts.
3. Modify /etc/sudoers. (I’m using RHEL)
   • Comment “Defaults requiretty”. If you don’t then, the remote host will throw a bunch of errors.
   • Uncomment “%wheel ALL=(ALL)  NOPASSWD: ALL”.
4. Make sure that you can SSH from the MySQL server to the remote hosts without pass-phrase challenges.
5. Setup the scripts in the user’s home directory (/home/[user]/) and CHMOD it to be an executable. This script is available for download here.
6. Edit AutoMySQLBackup, look for “PREBACKUP” and add the following: su – [user] -c /home/[user]/[script].sh
   • This means the script will be executed as [user].
   • Repeat the same step for “POSTBACKUP”  and modify the stop commands to start.
7. Save AutoMySQLBackup script and give it a whirl!

Enjoy!

The ultimate in anti-stalker, anti-collections caller, “john” unblocker tool: trapcall.com

I was running the Plesk reconfigure tool, to modify the IP address for the virtual hosts to a different one when I ran into the following error:

Unable to execute “C:\Program Files\Parallels\Plesk\admin\bin\websrvmng.exe” –change-ip-address –old-ip-address=10.20.44.14 –new-ip-address=10.20.44.14:
Invalid pointer (COM Error 80004003) at execute console command –change-ip-address

After doing some debugging, I found out that the following registry key is the culprit for the error:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PLESK\PSA Config\Config\SitesCache

I removed the key (trust but always backup), and then re-ran the Plesk tool. It resolved the issue! I still think Plesk is a miserable piece of code!