With Samba4 becoming more relevant everyday as a drop in replacement for AD, I am regularly fielding questions regarding password management. Below I will describe the basics of password management in Samba4 using the samba-tool. The following code shows the commands dealing with passwords and account expiration.
I recently had a customer in an absolute panic because their Exchange Server was stuck at the screen “Preparing to Configure Windows” and had been for several hours. This server is running Windows 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010, my fist step was turning to my trusty old friend “Google“. A brief search led me to… Read More
Below is a complete list of all VMware ESXi Server 5.5 Releases and Build Numbers. Build numbers prior to version 5.5 will no longer be tracked in this post. ESXi 5.5 Releases Name Version Released Build ESXi 5.5 Update 3 ESXi 5.5 Update 3 2015-09-16 3029944 ESXi550-201505002 ESXi 5.5 Patch 5 2015-05-08 2718055 ESXi550-201504001 ESXi… Read More
Google Chrome for Windows has long been plagued by font rendering problems. From fonts that appear slightly “off” compared to other platforms, to flat out rendering errors, text simply doesn’t look that good in Chrome. Fortunately, a new feature of the browser (version 35+) has finally brought support for DirectWrite. DirectWrite is Microsoft’s text rendering API… Read More
If you are running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Servers, you may have found over the last week that the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Release is now being offered. That message is a part of the “Message Of The Day” (MOTD) system. If you have a system that will not be updated, below we will outline the steps… Read More
I am going to preface this article with a brief explanation of why I am sold on one Microsoft product – Microsoft Security Essentials(MSE) or Windows Defender. I say one because these products are essentially the same thing. I can tell you that I have used nearly every anti-virus product under the sun, but I… Read More
Recently after installing a fresh new copy of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, I found that root ssh access was set to without-password by default now. What that means to you is that if you are trying to ssh to your server with your root account and password, you will receive an access denied error. In order… Read More
Recently I ran into an issue with upgrading a Dell PowerEdge 4400 BIOS. This specific server is currently running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and I needed an easy way to update the bios while in Ubuntu or Debian. The official option from Dell consist of a windows based bios update tool. Obviously that is not going… Read More
As of late, I have had several clients receiving Hewlett Packard Critical Advisory’s concerning a manufacturing defect with certain hard drives. This specific advisory states that the customer must run an ADU Disk Report in order determine whether or not their drives are affected. With that said, most if not all of my clients are… Read More
Previously I wrote and article detailing how to Monitor HP RAID Array on Debian, unfortunately since that writing I have found a fatal flaw in it’s methodology. While our automated monitoring system using cciss-vol-status will in fact report a failed drive/array, it’s flaw lies in not reporting a predictive drive failure. The hpacucli tool is… Read More