Mike's Realm

Dust behind your front lens element?  Not to worry–disassembly is easy:

Remove the 3 black phillips screws around the front edge:

You can now lift that front ring off the rest of the lens.

Don’t bother trying to unscrew these next 3 phillips head “screws” they are pins that you’ll need to remove with some small needle nose pliers.  Pull them straight out, they come out very easy.

Now carefully tip the lens over being careful not to let the front lens element fall out, if it doesn’t fall out easily gentle tap and shake the lens a bit and it should fall right out.

This is what the inside of the lens looks like

Now you can clean the dust off the back of the front lens element, reassemble by reversing the disassembly process.

If you are building server images/templates and want to document how you’ve built them why not list the updates that are installed?  Cool, but we can’t copy-pasta the updates in bulk…These tools will handle this for you:

Windows Server 2003

If you are running Windows Server 2003 take a look at WUL (Windows Update List) a freeware app from Nirsoft.  You can download it as a .zip which has the standalone version that doesn’t require an install.  Check it out @ http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/wul.html.  Unfortunately this doesn’t work for Windows Server 2008…

Windows Server 2008

So if your running Windows Server 2008 and want to export a list of updates, there is a built in tool to do this.  Using WMIs Command-line interface (WMIC) you can export this list.

Launch a command prompt and type:

Also note that instead of a csv you can use these other format options:

HFORM/HTABLE are HTML
LIST is Tab Delimited
RAWXML is XML

The official VMware KB 1006996 on virtualizing existing domain controllers recommends 4 options (simplified below):

1. Demote the DC via dcpromo, do the conversion, then promote the DC back again using dcpromo–With all that trouble why not just build a new one?
2. Cold Clone–Cool, except if I’m working remote I need a working out of band management solution to boot the DC with the ISO…or setup a PXE server to provide a bootable cold clone image to do this, regardless too much extra leg work.
3. Use Directory Services Restore Mode (DSRM) and do a hot conversion, cool, but now I need to reboot these guys and hope someone remembers the DSRM password, or reset it before hand…
4. Get rid of the old DC via dcpromo and build a new VM and promote it–no conversion at all, wait what?

Having to P2V over a hundred DCs we didn’t particually like any of these options, the KB focuses on the possibility of a corrupt NTDS.DIT if you don’t follow any of those recommendations.  For our first few we did the DSRM route:

Read the rest of this entry »

This is an updated version with more Intel removal goodness…see my previous post for more information on Automated P2V Cleanup: Remove/Uninstall Dell OpenManage & Broadcom/Intel Drivers

This Removes:

• Dell OpenManage Server Administrator
• Broadcom Drivers and Management Applications
• Broadcom NetXtreme II Driver Installer
• Intel(R) PROSet for Wired Connections
• Intel(R) PRO Network Connections

Read the rest of this entry »

Posting this command reference as a cheatsheet for those trying to setup a Honeywell (previously Northern Computers, Inc.) N-1000 panel at home.  These are the basics for programming it:

Remember to prepend all commands with a space before typing them!

– Panel buffers and prints all activity

– Set Pulse Time on Output 1 to 1 Second

– Assign Reader 1 to Output 1

– Add Card 01110 to database during Timezone 1 on Reader 1

– Set time to 20:48

– Set Panel name as “House Panel”

– Set Reader 1 name as “Garage Reader”

– Set Output 1 name as “Garage Door”

– List all cards in database

– Energize Output 1 for 1 Second

Close to a year ago we proposed the idea to virtualize all the servers at our remotes sites.  It took a significant amount of time to prove the value of virtualizing these remote sites, build the business case, present it, finally get approval, then create the in-depth project plan.  As of today we have 10% of our sites virtualized.

One of the major decisions we made was to use ESXi Free–we had a lot of push back at first, but continued to explain any risk of using the free product was mitigated with our plan.  For the technical folks it was simple, ask them:  What does licensing ESXi get you?  Most people who were asked this didn’t know the answer–the big hit is vCenter.

No vCenter?

Yes thats right–no vCenter.  The biggest frown here is no centralized console to manage everything from.  To us that isn’t a big deal–we’ve been manging distributed systems for years without a centralized management console.  All the hosts are setup with  Active Directory authentication so Role Baesd Access Control (RBAC) is cake, and the staff that need access have just the access they need.

We do not have shared storage in the remote sites so we can’t really take advantage of clusters–and along with that DRS, DPM, HA, FT, etc.  as well as vMotion…

vCenter does provide all the hardware and performance monitoring, but we have that covered to…

What about monitoring?!

At the VMware level

The hosts are monitored by Veeam Monitor Free is a fantastic product that will give us the nice dashboard and aggregate alarms and performance from all the remote hosts.  It’s awesome that Veeam offers this product for free.  The only limitation we’ve really noticed thus far is email alerts of these alarms.

At the Hardware level

Hardware is monitored using Whatsup Gold! with a monitor against the DRAC for hardware status–Whatsup will generate the email alerts on any hardware issues.

I posted howto setup this monitor on the WhatsUp Gold Community site: Dell Server Hardware Monitor VIA DRAC (SNMP Monitor)

What about updates?

While vCenter Update Manager is nice we can patch the hosts  using the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) appliance–look out for posts in the future on how we accomplish this.

Here we are about a month and a half into the actual conversion process!

I’ve already posted some of our obstacles in previous posts and how we avoided/got around them, but stay tuned for more–like how we actually handled provisioning 180+ ESXi hosts.

Making the move from WordPressMU 2.x to 3.x isn’t all seamless. If after you upgrade all your uploaded images are broken download a broken image (because the webserver is actually serving an image, just your browser can’t read it). Open this image in notepad and you should see something like:

If you followed the upgrade instructions exactly you deleted the file /wp-content/blogs.php. Well thats a problem, in WordPress 3.0 they decided to move the function of /wp-content/blogs.php to /wp-includes/ms-files.php. Now if you have broken images and you still have blogs.php–it’s still a problem with your rewrite rules anyway because the old 2.x version of blogs.php isn’t going to work now that you have upgraded everything else to 3.x.

To fix this we need to update your rewrite rules in the .htaccess file
Find the line:

And replace it with:

It’s that simple, now to see it take effect you will need to clear your browser cache, use another browser, or force reload (Ctrl+F5 typically)

sudo visudo

%DOMAIN\\linux^admins ALL=(ALL) ALL

When your done hit escape then type:

:wq

This will write the file out and exit visudo

Some things to note:

• The % MUST be the first character on the line
• Escape the slash between domain & user with a slash (double slash)
• Use ^ in place of spaces
• Obviously replace DOMAIN with your domain
• If you have problems try dropping case on the group name

So how many times have you done a P2V only to have to go back and manually cleanup all the extra crud a physical server requires–Dell OpenManage Server Administrator(Dell OSMA), Broadcom Drivers and Management Applications, Intel Drivers and Management Applications, etc.  Now expand that to having to do over 500 P2Vs in a few month span and you find the need to automate….

Presenting a huge honking script to automate those pesky uninstalls, right now it’s only Dell specific, but I plan to expand it to other vendors like IBM & HP.

This Removes:

• Dell OpenManage Server Administrator
• Broadcom Drivers and Management Applications
• Broadcom NetXtreme II Driver Installer
• Intel(R) PROSet for Wired Connections
• Intel(R) PRO Network Connections

Read the rest of this entry »

sudo /opt/likewise/bin/lwregshell set_value ‘[HKEY_THIS_MACHINE\Services\lsass\Parameters\Providers\ActiveDirectory]’ LoginShellTemplate /bin/bash

sudo /opt/likewise/bin/lwregshell set_value ‘[HKEY_THIS_MACHINE\Services\lsass\Parameters\Providers\Local]’ LoginShellTemplate /bin/bash

sudo /opt/likewise/bin/lwsm refresh lsass

sudo /opt/likewise/bin/lw-ad-cache –delete-all

Enjoy