The last few years have seen increased pressure on the existing network infrastructure and this has exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, as millions of people work and study from home. This brings up the need for networks to use robust strategies such as load balancing, the ability to scale resources dynamically, and to implement superior […]
Testing for Packet Loss On Windows
Sending and receiving data from the Internet has become such an integral part of our lives that we don’t even think about the nitty-gritty details of how it is transported, until a problem comes up in the form of slow connections, dropped calls, or no response to your requests. When these problems occur, you’d want […]
Troubleshooting RAS with Device and PPP logs
Two files can be used to troubleshoot RAS problems: device.log and ppp.log. These files need to be enabled in the registry. For device.log, set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RasMan\Parameters\Logging to 1. (default is 0) This will show you the communication between the server and the modem. For ppp.log, set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RasMan\PPP\Logging to 1. (default is 0) This will help you […]
LDAP / Palm OS integration
One problem we’ve always had here at NetAdminTools is the management of our various contacts databases. For the most part we use our Palm OS databases. The problem is that it is difficult to synchronize between various Palm OS databases. An even more nasty problem is that it is quite difficult under Linux to synchronize […]
Configuring Windows 2000 Telnet Service For Non-MS Clients
In this article we discussed how to install the telnet service on NT 4. Windows 2000 comes with a telnet service. Now, telnet is nasty, because it does not provide encryption like SSH does. One cool thing about telnet, though, is that it is great for testing layer 4 stuff. We will use this in […]
Using Network Load Balancing With Terminal Services
In this article we showed how to set up the Network Load Balancing service on Windows 2000 Advanced Server. In this article, we will show how to set up Terminal Services to use Network Load Balancing. One big limitation with running Terminal Services with network load balacing on Windows 2000 Advanced Server is that the […]
Importing Palm PDB files into SquirrelMail
In LDAP / Palm OS integration, we struggled with one of our favorite problems: integrating our Palm OS address database with email. Well, since then, we have been using SquirrelMail for most everything. We still do use our Palms as well. SquirrelMail can be configured to share the address book simply by creating a symbolic […]
Installing and Configuring SnipSnap
SnipSnap is a multi-purpose tool for collaborating. What attracts us to this particular Wiki implementation is the ease in which it deals with code snippets. It is also written in Java. For a couple awesome demos of how this can work in collaborative dev environments, see: expTaskDemo_v2 SnipSnap_Project_Demo Let’s install it and run it: u-1@srv-1 […]
Configuring Vsftpd
Vsftpd is claimed to be,”Probably the most secure and fastest FTP server for UNIX-like systems.” Well. That makes us want to look at it. What we need in this case, is for users with accounts on our system to have the ability to upload and download files without any other required client utilities; however, we […]
Windows Server Simple TCP/IP Services
Have you ever wondered just what the Simple TCP/IP Services did? Well, we did. On Windows Server 2003, you can add this service under Control Panel, Add or Remove programs, Windows Components, Networking Services: Here are the associated RFCs for the services: Quote of the Day Protocol Daytime Protocol Character Generator Protocol Echo Protocol Discard […]
Configuring Root Access for SSH
Most systems these days disable root access for good reasons. To change this setting, look in: /etc/ssh/sshd_config Of course, your location may be different. To enable root access change this line: PermitRootLogin yes To disable root access change this line: PermitRootLogin no For the changes to take effect, restart sshd: [root@srv-1 ssh]# /etc/init.d/sshd restart Stopping […]
Determining 5 Flexible Single Master Operations (FSMO) Roles for Active Directory Domain Controller
Most domain controller functions replicate among the domain controllers in an Active Directory domain. There are five functions, though, that are not replicated. What this means is if you lose the domain controller that has the FSMO roles, then you need to do some recovery steps before your domain controllers replicate properly again. To determine […]
Removing the EXIFS Service
If you have remnants of Exchange 2000 on Windows Server 2003, even after an uninstall of Exchange, you may get warnings about the IFS driver. The Exchange Installable File System (ExIFS) exposes bits of the Exchange information store via the file system. Running Exchange 2000 on Windows Server 2003 is not supported by Microsoft and […]
Chef, Systems Center 2012, and Cloud
Microsoft is starting to get it with Systems Center 2012, but if you haven’t followed Chef, check out this concise perspective by the folks that blazed this trail: Now, one might *think* that this is a structural fork in the road, and Microsoft is on a different (but similar) road, but this isn”t necessarily so. […]
Ports Used For Active Directory Authentication and Resource Access
We wondered just exactly what ports were being used by Active Directory and associated resource access. This can be monitored using TCPDump. If we run the following commands: [root@srv-34 root]# kinit administrator@SIGNALQINT.COM Password for administrator@SIGNALQINT.COM: [root@srv-34 root]# smbclient //10.50.100.36/public -k added interface ip=10.50.100.53 bcast=10.50.100.255 nmask=255.255.255.0 Doing spnego session setup (blob length=106) Doing kerberos session setup […]
