People, Technology, Connected

One of my biggest peaves about Vista has been the lack of support for managing existing Server 03 servers. Well, Microsoft finally released the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Vista SP1 yesterday. After almost a year of suffering through unstable beta’s and oddities in release candidates, the RSAT finally appears ready. Though primarily designed to remotely manage Server 08, several core tools for Server 03 management are resolved, such as no longer needing to register the management dll’s, DHCP scopes resolution, and the now infamous Vista SP1 removal of the GPMC.
You can find the requisite versions here:

x64 RSAT

x86 RSAT

This was just so funny I had to post it here. My work (K-12 Education) is pretty much a Macintosh shop as far as the desktops go (6:1 Mac/PC). There are a couple Win heads running around the shop and they decided to use the WDS server I brought online last year to image a brand new iMac with Vista to see if it would work. To their amazement (and mine), WDS dropped an image of Vista Business onto the iMac and it runs natively. With a few simple steps, you can turn your iMac into a Vista box, without the use of boot camp or other virtualization technology. I am not sure why you would want to do this to a brand new iMac, but nonetheless it works! The following is the process they followed… continue reading…

I have been meaning to write this little snippet about portsnap for some time. I think it was around the first of the year when my CVSup cron quit working and after digging into it a bit, noticed some major problems in the CVSup snapshot. In search of a different method to update and upgrade the FreeBSD ports tree, I found the portsnap utility. continue reading…

I recently began running Vista at work and much to my chagrin, discovered some real drawbacks from a systems administrator perspective. The very first thing a typical sysadmin adds to their workstation to work in an active directory (AD) environment are the tools enabled by installing adminpak.msi. I always create a custom Microsoft Management Console (mmc) to manage AD and add things like DHCP, DNS, ADUC, and GPMC because those are the tools I use every day. After adding the adminpak, nothing worked. So after a little research, I found folks had already discovered this and managed to find a script that would re-register all of the .dll files. Re-registering all of the adminpak dll’s is necessary to use the admin tools under Vista. continue reading…

At work recently I ran across one more reason why sysprep is such a valuable tool for the deployment of Win2k and WinXP boxes on a network. If you use an imaging tool such as Ghost to create base images for your deployment, make sure to run sysprep before you save the image. If you don’t use sysprep, you may still be able to add machines (duplicated from your base image) to a domain, however, other problems may occur. continue reading…

I recently rebuilt our main proxy server at work and decided to get some sort of authentication mechanism installed. With Squid version 2.5 and above they have built-in external “helper” programs, one of which is msnt_auth which is far easier to get to work against an active directory domain than ntlm_auth. CAVEAT, this does not work with transparent proxying, however, this works very well if you autoconfig browsers or use group policy to point the machines on your network to the squid box. The following steps are what I did to get it to work. continue reading…

I recently ran across this ridiculously cool software package called “Splunk >”. If you work in an IT department and want to centralize your viewing of log files for Solaris, Linux, BSD, and Windows, Splunk> is the way to go. I manage several FreeBSD servers at my work and viewing log files gets time consuming and cumbersome at best. Splunk> indexes all log files from your designated hosts and gives you a nice web front end that is clean looking and functional for viewing those log files.

Splunk> is expensive for the professional version, but because I have only half a dozen BSD boxes and an equal number of Windows boxes, the free version suits my environment just fine. The maximum indexing for the free version is 500 MB/day –That’s a lot of log files! In less than an hour I had splunk up and running on one of my higher-end BSD boxes. Yes, you will need a beast of a machine to run Splunk >. They state a minimum of 1x 1.4 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, but recommend 2x 2.8 GHz CPU, 4 GB RAM and 1.5 x the maximum amount of log files for disk space.

I have two servers that are getting logs indexed by Splunk > and so far, so good. My next step is to add the Windows boxes and get those piped into Splunk > as well. One interface for viewing all log files, Splunk > just made my life a lot easier!