The tale of a lost domain password
2011/06/09
The setup:
- A Windows 2008 R2 server running Exchange 2010
The problem:
- The Domain Administrator’s Password was changed and then forgotten.
So now we are completely locked out of the system. To make things worse, the Offline Windows Password and Registry Editor could not identify the SCSI controller.
The solution:
I bought Active@ Boot Disk and reset the Local Administrator Password (that was gone to oblivion too). Next I booted into “Directory Restore Mode” and followed Petri’s instructions.
Problem solved.
The story of Server 54
2011/03/05
I’m sure I’ve blogged about this before, but I cannot find it right now. Anyway the following tweet:
Beaker RT @etherealmind: Existential Angst 4 Network Engineers: If a Network Device isn’t Monitored, does it really exist? < Does when it goes down
brought to my attention by @DrInfoSec triggered my memory to recall the story of Server 54. A story that I reproduce here thanks to the Internet Archive:
The University of North Carolina has finally found a network server that, although missing for four years, hasn’t missed a packet in all that time. Try as they might, university administrators couldn’t find the server. Working with Novell Inc. (stock: NOVL), IT workers tracked it down by meticulously following cable until they literally ran into a wall. The server had been mistakenly sealed behind drywall by maintenance workers.
Digging a little bit more, one can find a few more discussions on Server 54.
Όποια πέτρα κι αν σηκώσεις …
2011/01/24
… θα βρεις έναν Έλληνα. Ο Δημήτρης Στάικος, φίλος από τα παλιά, ένα έτος μεγαλύτερος και hacker extraordinaire, αντιπρόεδρος του 1394 Trade Association (Firewire για όποιον δεν τα πάει καλά με τα νούμερα).
“Why did you choose DragonFly?”
2010/09/23
In this thread Samuel J. Greear asks:
What has drawn you to use the DragonFly BSD operating system and/or participate in its development by following this list? Technical features, methodologies, something about the community? I suspect the HAMMER filesystem to be the popular choice, but what other features affect or do you see affecting your day to day life as an administrator, developer, or [insert use case here], now or in the future?
Since I do not follow the mailing list I will answer here: Well it is of BSD origin! The real reason I used DragonFlyBSD years ago, was that we needed to run pf on the machine and DragonFly was the only BSD that installed on it (with some tweaks though). So simple. It also felt a lot like FreeBSD-4 (for some inexplicable reason, I was never really happy with FreeBSD-5, never installed version 6, returning to using it on production systems in versions 7 and 8). Plus, I got to submit a (minor) bug report :)
I really miss not running DragonFly these days.
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bnx2 and Debian
2010/04/27
One way to install Debian on a machine that requires the bnx2 network driver, is to download the firmware, place it on a USB stick and continue as instructed by the Debian Installer. Another quick trick is to use a USB ethernet card and proceed with installing Debian. Then apt-get install firmware-bnx2 and reconfigure the network interfaces appropriately.
tunnelbroker.net and DragonFlyBSD
2010/02/26
If you want to use your tunnelbroker.net interface with a DragonFlyBSD endpoint, the commands are similar to those for FreeBSD:
ifconfig gif0 create gifconfig gif0 inet Client_IPv4_address Server_IPv4_address ifconfig gif0 inet6 Client_IPv6_address Server_IPv6_addrees prefixlen 128 route -n add -inet6 default Server_IPv6_address ifconfig gif0 up
Tested with DragonFlyBSD 2.4.1
Device drivers in Java?
2009/11/01
The following tweet by @DSpinellis:
#USENIX @AnnualTech M. Renzelmann Decaf: Moving Device Drivers to a Modern Language (Java). He says performance impact is 1%
talks about “Decaf: Moving Device Drivers to a Modern Language” which describes a system where large parts of a driver can be written in a better language than C, the example here being Java.
I was certain that this was not the first time I had read about such an idea. This weekend I was able to go through my archive and find out the reference. Back in January 1997 in the NT Insider (Volume 4, Issue 1) Peter Viscarola, while criticizing the multitude of startups founded by anyone who could code a Java applet (this was a pre-dot-boom era remember) wrote:
It’s obvious that we are missing a real opportunity here to capitalize on the convergence of these trends. We need to immediately fund a start-up company to develop a package for writing Windows NT drivers in Java. THINK of it! We could have processor architecture independent device drivers that don’t even need to be recompiled in order to support X86, PPC, and Alpha machines! Amazing! We could create a visual driver development environment, complete with cute animated assistants. And, the drivers could probably have a visual component to them, so you could actually see your toaster-oven driver doing its work. Cool! THEN we could all be challenged, and have fun, and get rich at the same time. Wow! Why didn’t I think of this before?
It would be nice if we could see Peter’s views on the subject 12 years later.
OpenBSD 4.6 released
2009/10/18
Fresh from my INBOX: OpenBSD 4.6 released.
Update: I was impressed by the new installer!
jolicloud
2009/10/12
Although it seems to share a common base with Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Jolicloud feels a lot faster on the same hardware (Acer Aspire One A110L).
Practical Reusable Unix Software
2009/08/11
(I think I bought mine sometime in 1997. The price tag says £26.50 which means that I had UrBaN buy it for me.)
Το βιβλίο γράφτηκε το 1995 και είναι ενδεικτικό των εργαλείων, αλλά και της φιλοσοφίας που επικρατούσε στην AT&T Research εκείνη την εποχή. Χάρη σε αυτό έμαθα για το graphviz (που με βοήθησε να φτιάξω ένα από τους πρώτους χάρτες του 6BONE αλλά και του irc.gr), το UWIN (οπότε και κατάφερα ένα από τα πρώτα native ports του netcat), τη vmalloc (που πάντα ήταν χρήσιμη όταν κάποιο πρόγραμμα είχε προβλήματα memory allocation – π.χ. το CLP(R) με κάποιες GLIBC της εποχής). Το σημαντικότερο όμως που μπορεί να προσφέρει αυτό το βιβλίο ακόμα και σήμερα, 14 χρόνια μετά και με μερικά από τα εργαλεία που παρουσιάζει όχι και τόσο χρήσιμα, είναι ο τρόπος σκέψης: ορισμός προβλήματος, προσέγγιση, αρχιτεκτονική και λύση. Και αυτά in a system administrator’s way.
Το βιβλίο είναι διαθέσιμο σε μορφή PDF και το software που περιγράφει (αλλά και άλλο νεώτερο) βρίσκεται στο http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools
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Filed in Αταξινόμητα
Ετικέτες:Books, Flashback, Operating Systems, Programming, System Administration
