Hashing out Samba

I just recently wrestled with my little smb setup here to tighten the grip on who might be accessing my share. My intention is to simply share my own smb share I have running in VmWare with my XP host. My XP host is logged into a domain server not to the local machine. The Linux I have installed in VmWare is FC5 running from USB drive and using the NAT networking setting. My company has blocked DHCP to only those machines authenticated with by the domain server. I originally used the KDE Control Center to setup my smb sharing homes. However I felt a bit uncomfortable with the possibility of people with remote desktop access being able to drop into my share. So I created a new share with access to only part of my /home space. I had great difficulty with the KDE Control Center giving access to this new share. For some reason I was simply not able to authenticate into it.

So I prefer/suggest using swat to configure SAMBA. Starting with a clean slate, I removed the homes share and printers. Prior to all this I added my user via the terminal console: ‘smbpasswd -a johndoe’. This is very similar to adding a new system user. Also I used the same user as my existing system user; not sure why but it doesn’t like non system users being added, go figure.

Some non SAMBA defaults from the stock FC5 samba RPM I am using are depicted in my smb.conf file below:

# Samba config file created using SWAT
# from 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1)
# Date: 2007/03/02 13:56:48

[global]
        workgroup = WD
        netbios name = USB
        server string =
        username map = /etc/samba/smbusers
        log level = 1
        server signing = auto
        preferred master = No
        domain master = No
        ldap ssl = no

[USB2]
        path = /home/warren/software/Xfer
        read only = No

Also I am not using the same workgroup as my windows xp pro domain host is using. In xp, I browse the network neighborhood and into my WD workgroup I find the USB share and browsing to it pops up the authentication window. I choose not to save password. I also don’t map to this share. What I do is create a shortcut to the \\WD\USB\usb2 share and have it on my Desktop or quick links toolbar. In the morning I click it and it asks for authentication and am set for the day. No worries about IP address or XP home or XP pro here at work or at home; it all just works.

Who’s DOSing Me Now?

Finally getting around to posting today. Was meaning to do all kinds of things the past couple days but time keeps slipping by.

Loading up my usual tabs in Mozilla, I noticed my family photo gallery site was running rather slow. Then I notice that there was 8 guests on the site! My poor little server! The load was rather low tho around 0.37 at times. It was my upload on the cable modem that was the bottleneck. Turns out that some web forum was on to a couple of my photos of the World Trade Center and Baghdad. They were not my photos for sure… I had run into them while carousing through someone’s FTP site. One is 14MB and the other is 16MB. The density of the 14MB photo of the WTC is rather packed. It takes a good CPU to process this size of image. So this forum post was mostly about how their computers either gulped it up or died in the process. Some did complain about how slow it was not really knowing it was from a cable modem. They wrote it off to all of them hitting at once. There was easier ways of finding who the referrence was but I just noticed a ref when I was tailing the access log. So I jumped on their forum and posted a question as to “where the heck did you find these photos?” The poster responded that he noticed it from another forum. They were all rather nice folks… a DSL forum from the UK. The easier less fun way I found the original forum was form the httprefs log from the PostNuke CMS I use. This turns out less posts but more hits. Actually I should recalculate. The second forum seemed to pop in with several different ref pages so I would have to say today’s did make a bigger presence. The first forum hits came yesterday. I didn’t even notice. The fun part was that I discover that the guy who posted the original post yesterday happens to live here in Billings! Now I did show this at our last LUG meeting in January or maybe December. This guy had a birthday on January 14th turning 18. I only know one guy who could have been there but it seemed rather strange from the quality of his posts. Seemed to be Windows type questions and this guy is a hard core Linux guy. So I hesitate to place my bets on him. Will have to update later.

This same guy showed us a cool thing to do with SAMBA clients; smbclient -M . I was going to email him to ask what that was but another friend I had been talking with for most of the day via ysm (ICQ) informed me. What this does after executing the command is lets you type a message then ctrl-d to end and send to a Windows PC. So I popped one off to our receptionist and said “I know what you did last summer!” She immediately ran over knowing it was me since it does say who it was from. She thought it was pretty funny. So I sent the same to our backup receptionist only I added “All your bases are belong to us!” She didn’t respond much to that. However after I confessed, our receptionist remembered that phrase when they both started work there. I sent a couple test faxes to our main fax machine via fax software. The former receptionist seemed a little frazzled so I didn’t want to freak them out too bad. Anyway the receptionist caught onto it and I fessed up to that. So now they probably think I’m really some kind of hack prankster.

Earlier in the day I had been bouncing back and forth between a few projects that for the life of me don’t know what kept me going back and forth. I was troubleshooting that Quickbooks deal and trying to get the wireless connection on the secure AP working. Also trying to get this Orinoco antennae converted to use a SMA connector. I first needed to figure which of the hundreds of connectors I needed. Not sure that will be too easy since I’m sure it will require a special order and some way to crimp it. I think I’ll just get another Linksys card. They seem to have bigger antennae. The Quickbooks deal may be at an end sadly. The install to my bosses laptop failed too. So this means the data is messed up. So unless I can get it wittled down to something like the last 6 months of data, I don’t know if I can help much. However I did find that a new CD for his broken 2003 version could be replaced for $20. I also found some error logs that showed more detail about what errors were repaired during the upgrade. None however show failed attempts to fix the data. Like most of the day went, this paragraph is depicting how I bounced around so much. The wireless AP WEP I had been using before was incomplete. I am male! It was right in from of me when I wrote it down the first time. The dang thing was word wrapped! Who would ever think they would word wrap a 26 double digit form box screen? Linksys.

Well it seems another new virus hit today. Got the first couple form the Boulder LUG list then later they started coming into the company system. Our scanner calls it Worm.YoursID but Symantec calls it by several names W32.Beagle.B@mm mainly. This one seems rather wicked for forging addresses like I have ever seen so not sure what it’s purpose is yet. My guess is that this one was poorly written because they have less random points. You can ban about 4 domains and a handful of known attachments.

Getting Back to Normal

Life is getting back to normal. Had a great weekend. Most ppl might not think it was so great. But knowing how good it had been, my family is getting back to its better days again! I do need to get out of my dead-beat Sundays. The past few weeks I have neglected to shower, shave, or brush my teeth on Sundays. Just hanging around the house in my pj’s or previous days clothing. Total laziness! Of course the kids get that way too, but they do that even on the weekdays.

Worked on a friends PC Saturday most of the day. Didn’t need the bootleg Quickbooks CD after all. Turns out his 2004 CD is a full version. I thought this might be an easy one and just uninstall, clean up the directory and reinstall a fresh copy. He did have a working 2003 version on another PC and I got his backed up data restored into this so he at least has that as his backup. There was some bad data integrity found and fixed. I also attempted to condense the data that stretched back to 1998 or so! That was the kicker that took most of the day. But even with the fixed data 2004 wold not work. So I need to do some online forum chatting to find another solution. I also plan to barrow another XP box to test on. Seems he may have had some Windows updates needing to be done as well. However he being on dial-up left me setting it up and leaving for the day.

The bosses 21″ CRT monitor started making strange flickering a couple times this morning. Turns out we got his PC in December of 2000. I think it just went out of warranty. It had an extended warranty even. So a replacement is looking like $450-500. So I talked him into getting a flat panel and putting his PC upright on the floor. Suggesting a 17″ for about $430-450 he opted for a 19″ at $680! Sometimes I think he just waits for others to suggest getting things fixed or upgraded before he does something for himself. He has this old crappy cheap office chair and the arms were all broken up. He finally went out to get a new one and it turned out something was wrong with it. So he returned it and our purchaser ordered a replacement arm for the chair. I assume it was free as they probably send this stuff out as missing parts all the time. So he still has this crappy chair! Don’t know how he does things at home. I think his wife must handle all that kind of detail. It wouldn’t fly with her! Maybe this is a humbling part I need to learn.

Bresnan came with the new cable modem. So I had to run over and get the server refreshed with this. The guy that set it up said he was able to register it with them. But he seemed to insist that I needed to reboot. After I couldn’t get my Linux server to connect outside I humoured him and restarted the server. Still not connecting. By this time another tech came and had me point the browser to their modem and I went through their registration process and all was well. So I’m guessing that there might be some time-out issue that occurs after registering you need to have a connection process happen. Although I have no idea what he did while I was driving over. So now I have USA Digitals cable modem and called their corp. office up to check for any history on them ever replacing our modem. Turns out this is the third modem they have ever registered for us. Now I just hope they will be honest about identifying one of those other two MAC addresses as not theirs. I don’t think we need one anyway, but I just don’t like being ripped off any more. The lesson learned now is that you either be present at all times of tech services or write down all your serial numbers when you purchase these types of equipment. After a couple calls back and forth with USA Digital, we have come to a conclusion! It seems that modem models ending in “R” are retail models. It just so happens that the one we have does have the “R”. A call back later and they concede it must be ours then. Hey at least they had been pretty honest the whole time and not trying to be evil. They probably now have a task at hand to get a db going on their units vs. customer units.

Spent the afternoon creating DNS records for several known big ad trackers such as doubleclick.net and fastclick.net. The zones I have created now point to the machines themselves. By that I mean they point to themselves instead of the real site. Seems to be working. Will have to make sure no error logs are filling up somewhere tho later tomorrow.

A Weeks Worth

What a busy week! Just now got a chance to begin posting this weeks goings on. On Monday I got the call to fix the CNC shop server. Coincidentally the power supply was discovered dead the same day Bresnan was to come in and install their Internet service. Luckily I already had a power supply from a clone of the same PC I had refurbished last year. Plus I grabbed some RAM for this. Although it only recognized half of it’s capacity, I installed 256 to get 128 out of it. Oh well… it won’t be in service too long. It only had 32MB previously, so still much farther ahead. Bresnan was amazed at what they’d have to do to get their service into the building. Being so tall and on the opposite side of it’s destination. They ended up doing what I had suggested even! Crossing the ally two times and enter through the phone conduit. They got it running and we’re happy with the speeds so far!

Tuesday through Thursday I spent troubleshooting the AS400 connection going to our second “Building B”. They manufacture shipping containers there for exporting. So they have one node over there to our main office. Coincidentally when they have trouble we have trouble with our packing slip printer. The beauty of serial networked connections. I think it’s called twin-ax? So I spent most of my time building a PC from old parts to connect the modern way. Last summer I installed a wireless connection between the buildings using two access points with boosters mounted inside PVC boxes outside both buildings. Started with putting Windows 2000 on this PII 300MHz box using a Dell by proxy. You see we only had it on a restore CD so… well we won’t get into that here okay. Anyway… plopping the HD back into the destination box and booting up, it freezes during boot up. So I figured there must have been some difference with the HD parameters between the two boxes. I then put it back into the Dell and installed Windows 98 but this time putting in in the Dell just for speed. Again back in the other box it freezes but only after some new devices are installed. I discovered something was corrupting the registery. This was fixed by removing some of the Windows updates and skipping the loading of the registry. I get into Windows and reinstall the updates. This seems to smooth out the flawed registry! You would think it was smooth sailing after this, but then I get keyboard problems. Switching keyboards doesn’t help. Some combination of removing the keyboard and booting, failing, rebooting with keyboard does the trick. BTW this is an old IBM tower. Okay so once in the Building B more troubles including boot failures, bad monitor and tight network security. Geez Louise! Needless to say I am working on a different, hopefully not so possessed PC for them. For the time being they are running.

On and off through the week I have had to attempt getting another PC for our QC dept. It has been ready for them for weeks but was just waiting for the chance for them to accept it. They have been too busy to let me set it up that is. Two troubles cropped up here. Wireless network and COM1 problems with some ancient DOS application. As of yesterday I have gotten the COM port working but now have software problems… possibly OS incompatibility. I need to call to find out and then maybe just upgrade! For now I have two wireless networks for him to choose from: one is secure and the other is open but farther away. Yeah yeah… it’s open! Working on it! So the secure AP is closer but seems that every time this exterior door opens I loose connection. Strange but also I’m not getting DHCP to move through either. Seems to be working fine for the mentioned IBM box in the Building B warehouse. For the time being it’s just using the farther but open AP.

Made2Manage sent their customization consultant Wednesday and Thursday. I feel it was a good visit. However my co heart data analyst seems to be showing truer colors now. I am suspecting she is contributing to some failure in the process of our migration. At times the boss wants to just fork out the money to get this show rolling but she consistently steps in and makes show stopping issues and then blames it on money. Next would be the training issues. These ppl have been trained over 2 and a half years ago and have had a bad experience during this training due to technical difficulties. I had a ton of training a couple summers ago and a lot has changed to that point even. My experience was rather smooth. Problem is we have some flunkies that can’t handle being in a class scenario where you have to pay attention and try to lean something new. We also have such a flexible system now that they don’t want to tie themselves down to one way of doing things. There is a pride issue at play too. Our way is the only way! What does it hurt to see how others in the industry are doing things? Then of course nobody wants to be doing it the M2M way because it’s their way and not any one way. Our ppl don’t want to learn with some bogus test company. They want to train with our own part numbers. Waah Waah! A bunch of whining basket cases. I say model with the damn test company data, learn what works and doesn’t, customize and then maybe model again with our data. It’s all very time consuming and may require hiring a consultant to model with, but we’d be moving forward. We’re into something like our third year migrating!

Tonight will be a fun one! Our babysitter finally called last night to agree to watch the kids this evening. We were wondering if she was avoiding us. Anyway our community group will be rehearsing for this weekends sermons at church. One of the pastors asked if we would do a skit for all four services. It’s probably only for the first few minutes of the services. I chose to take care of the kids early on so not to worry about what to do with them. I wanted Kassie to do the skit because she used to do this stuff in high school drama class/club. She needed to get more involved in the group anyway. She has taken care of the kids too many other times like this. Then after the rehearsal we head to our normal biweekly community group meeting. Our community group has a passion for serving. So many of us do little things for the church and community, I feel that the church picks on us to be examples. This is our second group we have joined. The first was with an older group but we were there because our mentors were apprenticing with them. They moved to Laurel and thus giving up leading a group so we needed to get with a group more of our age and with kids. We are still a bit younger than most and so are our kids but we are getting some younger. We have sort of a love/hate feeling about our group too. We hate making preparations to go but love the fact that we did go. I keep thinking it’ll get better but I really should expect it to get worse. You see Satan attacks you most when he sees that you are getting out of his grasp. How’s that for making sense? I have to share one quote from someone I chat with often. He has a major lacking of moral values and he was getting upset with me for my lack of political involvement. He wrote “I encourage you to get involved with me in politics… because I think it has more of an impact on people than a church visit every Sunday.” You draw your own conclusion. I chose to ignore what he said. At that moment I couldn’t respond while my blood pressure was cooking. The truth of the matter is that what he says may have an immediate point but my purpose is not for my future life but goes much further than that. I choose to do the things in my temporary life for eternities sake not just the here and now.

I had a nice surprise yesterday. One of my mentors called for lunch unplanned. I just so happened to be available. This week was so busy that I hadn’t had time to eat much but to work during the chow. I let him know about how I was feeling down from the previous Thursday morning with my accountability partners news. I was happy to hear that I wasn’t far off key for feeling this way. He too thought it was not a very cool thing. I’m so happy that he is always honest with giving it to me straight. I informed him about how God has been so good to us over the past couple months. Not that he never is… it’s just that we have grown to put such faith in God and he has shown faith in us.

Hey Good look’n!

Starting to wonder what I had left to wear for pants this morning. I had some slacks and a couple hand-me-downs left. I didn’t care for the gray aircraft pants or whatever you call them, so I chose the white painter style pants. Chose one of my nice blue button up shirts that I had pressed earlier this week. Get to work and right away both receptionists pay me compliments! Neither was at the same time nor were they both together at the time. They seemed genuine. Made me feel pretty good. I always thought i looked good in red. I placing bets on the white pants tho! :p

I decided to move some computer equipment into the newly empty server room. Empty by means of not occupied by an employee. It is nice to be able to spread out some work. I had to setup a PC the boss had me get for his daughter. Thought I’d better get this to her before he got back form a couple weeks stay down in South America.

So now that my M2M upgrade is out of the way I can focus a bit on why I can no longer remote into the Windows box. All those ports are being filtered by external networks. Thought it was the Cisco router but now think it may be that damn defunct 48 port switch from Dell. This thing has been a pain since it was installed. Got it primarily for the GB ports, but when enabled they run slower than a 10 base! So they are being used but tamed down to a 100 base. This problem will be the next todo on the list. So I’m going to get the old HP Pro Curve switch out and find the incoming Internet cat5 and put this switch before the Dell switch.

Seems to be a rather slow afternoon. Email is quiet and ysm msgs are down to zero today… Got the bosses PC ready, maybe it’s time to deliver. Then I need to install their HP all-in-one. That is a bit trick since it needs to be local to the PC for the install. Then I can use it over the network there.

Getting multiple community group emails today. One original and a couple minutes later the same person forwards it to what seems to be the same ppl again!?! Hmm… maybe I should get a list server going? Some ppl just don’t get email. I don’t just mean receiving them either!

Was feeling a bit down yesterday. My accountability partner informed me that he couldn’t commit to meeting anymore. He was attending a men’s camp/seminar last week and a few of them agreed to start up a accountability group. He was honest about informing me at least. Anyway I think it’s good to have an accountability partner. So for the time being I will just do some mentoring. I know of a couple guys I need to contact more often.

Indianapolis or bust!

Hello from Indianapolis! Will be here for four days at a Made2Manage conference. M2M for short. This is a business software that my work is currently migrating to. My first time east of North Dakota! Making lots of contacts… not too many Linux users here, but did find a couple. One who has used Linux and one who does use it daily on SuSe. M2M is not Linux friendly… very much a follower of the Microsoft movement. One of the sessions I was in asked the crowd if they would rather see them follow Microsoft’s API or not. Most would like them to, I didn’t comment. I don’t like to see independent companies such as M2M follow the coat-tails of another golopogus. Nothing wrong with that if the golopogus would listen to others and not force their new ideas down your throat. I mean that because you have no right nor ability to change their API. End of discussion there.

So here at the Marriott Hotel down town Indy., they have a LAN access in the Business Center; it is connected to many of these Golden Tree connection box. Seems to be for hotel networks. Don’t have time to find out what it does exactly, but it does start your browsing with a GO screen then their Hotel web site. From then on you can go to other sites. I haven’t had too much of a problem connecting my Linux laptop from work on it. I can’t seem to get mail from my IMAP server at work, but can get mail from my IMAPS accounts. It may be the iptables setting I suppose but doubtful. Note: A week late but got it posted anyway…

A new beginning

Lets see… what’s new since Friday?… Been tinkering with my new machine in the basement; planning to migrate my existing P200MMX box to this Athlon 900. I had installed RH8.0 on it via RedHat Install Server/NFS. I then rsynced the /home data over and migrated the groups and passwords and shadow files. All is well with the users! Now… once again… I’m having trouble with some lock down of the firewalling. I have since opened it all up and restarted. I was getting connected via ssh and http just fine… this morning I try logging in ssh remotely and no route! I have a feeling it may have something to do with lokkit but not totally sure. Anyway I may not mess with it too much since I’m now pulling RH9 iso’s down as I type this.

Purchased an entitlement for $60 today! This is primarily for work since they paid for it but I juggle a couple entitlements around freely now without high load error 50 spitting in my face. Of course to get the new iso’s too!

My workstation here at work is just about all configured to my liking again. Still haven’t gotten my old /home back. I did however get a new 80GB drive to install Linux to. I am hoping some time in the not so distant future I might find a way to recover my lost data. It’s only one years worth of stuff, but some personal stuff got lost too. Yeah I am backing it up to tape now… so spare me the lecture!

During my many re installations of the same non-RH stock apps previously used, I discovered that RH8.0 still didn’t fix the video bug with ATI Rage 128 cards. What happens is with some types of apps (don’t ask), such as rdesktop you may experience a full X lockup by moving or scrolling a remote window. In RH7.3, it turns out to be the enabled DRI setting in the xconfig file. Disabled this again solved my problem.

Saturday I got a postcard from Dell telling me they “…did not receive a packing slip with…” my rebate request. I got a flat panel monitor with my latest purchase back in January and it was with a $100 rebate. Instructions were to send in the rebate form with the packing slip which I did not get. I had to go online and reissue that and in the mean time I had via snail-mail, another piece of paper I thought was the packing slip and it showed the info they were looking for. Now I’m thinking this was the invoice rather than the packing slip. So now yesterday I could not even get their site to find my orders online! Called them up and they tell me after 30 days you can’t reissue these. So they had me fax this postcard back and they’d manually reissue it. We’ll see :-\

The rough beginning

Yesterday I had attempted to start my blog but after writing it all afternoon, I had to open a second tab in Mozilla to do some admin stuff to get this going. In the process of doing that I had closed the tab and tried continuing my writing on the original tab. Well I suddenly lost the data probably due to the closing of all cache related to this site when closing the previous tab.

I don’t plan to re-write it. All it was about is past and future projects I have. As it is anyway, it’s my nature to go into too much detail as it is when talking about something. But then again it’s my nature to not give enough detail at times too. Never a happy medium.

So this blog is about my daily doings in the computer world. It may include what I have been doing with Windows boxes too. But for the most part my daily work is structured around Linux.

Today started off at the bosses house at 8am. His son called last night with major computer problems. No mouse and huge fonts and icons. Come to find out that something hosed his registry so I needed to take it into the office. It had ME on it and I put 98SE on it this afternoon. Almost had to ax the whole windows directory as it took several tries to install and it kept pulling in data from the corrupt OS.

I plan to install a Linux VPN server (FreeS/WAN) at the bosses house so while I was there I took a peak at their cable modem setup. The new home (mansion) has a hidden network control panel so I couldn’t see everything. I got the info I needed anyway by finding the Linksys DSL/Cable router. Next is to call them up to make plans to incorporate it.

Got a used HP lj5 from another Linux user in Colorado today. We got it for $250 and it has 109580 pages, so I hope that is considered low mileage. It was a nightmare to get it shipped because UPS thought we were going to print the labels her and mail it to them to affix then call UPS back up to pick the box up. What we wanted was for them to supply the label, have the driver affix the label and have the driver bring it to us and have them bill our account for this. It’s called a “one time pick up”. I thought the USPS was bad!

The boss had another guy pull some old equipment down from the loft about a week ago and placed them on pallets in the shop getting them ready for the dumpster. I had gone through testing the PC monitors for good/bad. Also want to get rid of all the IBM terminals from our old setup. Ironically I got a call from Computer Management International asking for used equipment to buy or sell. Had to call them back up today to light a fire under them so I could get rid of these! Everyone thinks this is my mess I drug out into the shop as the bullets fly.