I don’t know how many of you remember when you had to open up a .nfo, maybe you haven’t. ;D
But there was one awesome program that would display ASCII Art in windows properly. DMAN NFO Viewer. I’ve put it up for download.
DAMN NFO Viewer - A program to view .nfo files correctly, specifically displaying ASCII Art correctly.So, I’ve been getting emails address to this guy named Josh Trask. It’s been going on for over a year, and I’ve had this email for a long time, I think it was 2005 when I activated my email account.
Anyways. I’ve been getting these emails for the last year or so. I’ve been replying to the ones that actual humans receive and letting them know they have the wrong email. I also tell them to tell Josh Trask that hes giving out the wrong email. Typically I don’t get a response.
Today, I think his wife/gf emailed me and in the Subject it said “Thinking about you”. Which was kinda funny. So I told her to tell Josh not to give out this email to his friends because it isn’t his.
But what really gets my button is the SPAM this guy signs up for. Well, some of it is just silly stuff that I personally don’t sign up for.
I though he just signed up for MySpace because now I’m getting all this MySpace Junk. So I looked into it and I found out that this guy us using “j.trask@gmail.com” which is totally messed up.But this isn’t Josh, this is Justin Trask.
Anyways, if you click show details in Gmail, you will see a (Yes this is You, Learn More). Which links to this.
mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=10313#
So what do I do? I cancel his myspace account, he had no friends anyways. But I don’t understand why there was no email confirmation to opt in. That’s really messed up. Not only that, but if I want to unsubscribe I have to login and cancel the subscription that I didn’t even confirm to receive. LAME!
One idea that has come up and is really handy, is creating a general support user so that you can login to machines and have Administrative rights to that machine. We have many groups, and each group has a Desktop Admin group that we add people to who need Administrative access. But we also use it to remove people that seem to abuse it.
Instead of manually adding the groups one by one, you can use dsquery and dsmod. You simple do a query to find the groups that you’ve created. In this example we’re looking for anything that ends in “Desktop Admin”:
dsquery group domainroot -name “*Desktop Admin”
Which returns all of the groups we need. Next step is to take the Global Desktop Admin group and add it to all of these groups. This is simple with dsmod:
dsquery group domainroot -name “*Desktop Admin” | dsmod group -addmbr “CN=Global Desktop Admin,OU=Network Admin,OU=Groups,DC=DOMAIN,DC=LAN”
Voila! Done.
It’s a simple command:
vmkfstools -X new_sizevmfs_name:disk_name
I was doing some web design work for a friend/customer of mine, and he had a Web Hosting account with a company that used cPanel. I’ve used cPanel before, I’ve dabbled in it and fixed problems with it. But never really used it extensively as a client so to speak. Anyways, included in the customers Web Hosting package was 20 Addon Domains. What are “Addon Domains”?
Basically it allows you to run mutiple websites off your single account/domain name. Brilliant idea, if it was done properly. When you add an Addon Domain, it creates a folder in your main sites public_html folder, typically its name is that of your domain name. Lets just say that my customer has two domain names, the main one bob.com and an additional one jill.com
The customer creates jill.com as an Addon Domain, all is swell. Until they find out they can access the addon domain at “jill.com” and “bob.com/jill.com”. Why is this bad? Well google will see it as duplicate conent and your site will either never get indexed or have funky SEO results.
How do you fix it? Change the root directory to not be placed inside the public_html folder and viola, no duplicate content. Also make sure to edit the subdomain to forward to the correct URL as well or more duplicate content will exist.
This article will step you through the required steps to install VMWare Tools on Debian Lenny. Although this article is for Ubuntu, it will still work. I’ve successfully done it. ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=987631
I had run into a little bit of an issue when install Exchange 2007, which lead me to revert my VMWare ESXi Snapshot back to a later date. Once I did this, I had a fresh install of the same PC. When I tried to install Exchange 2007 I got hte following error message.
“[ERROR] The Client Access server role is already installed on this computer.”
For each rolle that I had installed on said server. I didn’t know why it was doing this. I suspected that ESXi left some reminents of the Exchange Install and that VMWare ESXi Snapshots weren’t really “Snapshots”. So I did a full re-install and still was receiving the above message.
I think starting doing some research and found out that there is Active Directory information that states what roles a server has, and the setup checks this before installing. All I had to do was delete this information. Here is the steps, that I found on the web.
1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Windows 2000 Support
Tools, point to Tools, and then click ADSI Edit.
2. Expand each of the following items:
Configuration Container
CN=3DConfiguration, DC=3DDomain_Name,DC=3Dcom
CN=3DServices
CN=3DMicrosoft Exchange
CN=3DYour_Organization_Name
CN=3DAdministrative Groups
CN=3DYour_Administrative_Group_Name_Or_Exchange5.5_Site_Name
CN=3DServersNote In this procedure, Domain_Name is a placeholder for the name of
your domain, Your_Organization_Name is a placeholder for the name of
your organization, and
Your_Administrative_Group_Name_Or_Exchange5.5_Site_Name is a
placeholder for the name of your administrative group or Exchange 5.5
site.
3. Right-click the Exchange 2003 server object, and then click
Delete.
4. Click Yes in every adsiedit dialog box that prompts you to confirm
the deletion.
Once I completed this, I was able to install Exchange 2007 again. I had to process this on the Domain Controller which is a separate machine.
You will require SSH access to your Virtual Machine, read over my article Gaining SSH Access To VMWare ESXi which provides the steps required to gain SSH access.
Once you have SSH access, you just need to create a Virtual Machine Directory in your DataStore which should be located in “/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/”. Type the following.
mkdir /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/NewVM
You will then need to run the “vmkfstools” to clone the Virtual Machine.
/vmfs/volumes/4991bc35-5ced5b0c-a99e-00221953f98d # /sbin/vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/exch01/exch01.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/newvmware/newvmware.vmdk
Destination disk format: VMFS thick
Cloning disk ‘/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/exch01/exch01.vmdk’…
Clone: 100% done.
/vmfs/volumes/4991bc35-5ced5b0c-a99e-00221953f98d #
The Virtual Machine should now be cloned.
Some may ask how you now create a new Virtual Machine based on this clone. You simply do the following.
- Make a new VM on this server
- Choose ‘Custom’ and when you get to the ‘Select a Disk’ portion of creation you will browse the datastore and select this newly renamed vmdk file.
Viola! Done!
*UPDATE* If you’re using ESXi 4.1 you no longer are required to manually enable SSH. You can do this via the “Troubleshooting” menu. More instructions here kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1017910
I was trying to get access to VMWare ESXi as this is the only way to access the images for each Virtual Machine as snapshots seem to have messed up an Exchange install. I will go into more depth below. But first, the following steps are required to open up SSH access to your ESXi Machine.
ESXi 3.5 does ship with the ability to run SSH, but this is disabled by default (and is not supported). If you just need to access the console of ESXi, then you only need to perform steps 1 – 3.
1) At the console of the ESXi host, press ALT-F1 to access the console window.
2) Enter unsupported in the console and then press Enter. You will not see the text you type in.
3) If you typed in unsupported correctly, you will see the Tech Support Mode warning and a password prompt. Enter the password for the root login.
4) You should then see the prompt of ~ #. Edit the file inetd.conf (enter the command vi /etc/inetd.conf).
5) Find the line that begins with #ssh and remove the #. Then save the file. If you’re new to using vi, then move the cursor down to #ssh line and then press the Insert key. Move the cursor over one space and then hit backspace to delete the #. Then press ESC and type in :wq to save the file and exit vi. If you make a mistake, you can press the ESC key and then type it :q! to quit vi without saving the file.
6) Once you’ve closed the vi editor, run the command /sbin/services.sh restart to restart the management services. You’ll now be able to connect to the ESXi host with a SSH client.Update for ESXi 3.5 Update 2 – With Update 2 the service.sh command no longer restarts the inetd process which enables SSH access. You can either restart your host or run ps | grep inetd to determine the process ID for the inetd process. The output of the command will be something like 1299 1299 busybox inetd, and the process ID is 1299. Then run kill -HUP <process_id> (kill -HUP 1299 in this example) and you’ll then be able to access the host via SSH.
Credit to the above steps go out to vm-help.com and you can read the above steps and comments on thier site.
The main reason why I required this, is the snapshots provided with VMWare work great. But I had to re-install exchange becuase of a configuration change that couldn’t be reversed. I had created a Active Directory Child Domain on an existing Domain, and then had setup Exchange 2007. But in the long run, this wasn’t required, instead I wanted to use our existing Domain. Removing the new Child Domain and deleting the Domain Controller/Demoting woudl have caused issues with Exchange.
So I decided to use ESXi Snapshot Manager to revert back to when I created a Snapshot after install Windows Server 2003, as it was a clean install. Once I did then and then went on to install Exchange again. Exchange Setup had complained that the server’s role was already installed and setup. Which was not the case, so I don’t know what really happened, either way. I’m going to make backups through SSH from now on.
