Author Archives: Hoosier

Active Directory upgrade

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The student sites are now running on a Windows 2003 Server Active Directory. I learned a few things along the way:

  • Don’t try to reuse an existing server name if it is staticly mapped in your WINS database. The Windows Server 2003 upgrade process will think there is a name collision and use some randomly generated name for the server, UNIVERSI-2345a8 for example.
  • If you have messed around with the User Rights on your NT4 domain, you’d best find the defaults for Windows 2003 and reset them. Updates and other things just don’t install correctly until they are reset. (The Threats and Countermeasures Guide came in pretty handy here too.)
  • Until the workstations DNS server and the default DNS domain name is changed, they keep working right along as if the domain is still NT4 based. Dynamic DNS doesn’t start working until then either.

I still need to move all the FSMO roles off the temporary DC, but that doesn’t need to happen any time soon. I may put any more changes off until winter break.

1 year blog-aversary?

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Is this thing on?

Yes, I’ve had the blog for a year now, and contrary to my own predictions, it isn’t neglected or dead.

I’ve got pictures and stories to post about tearing into my parents old house and the Windows NT4 to 2003 Active Directory upgrade at work, but I really don’t feel like writing up either of them right now.

Lots of portscans this morning

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Looks like there’s a new worm afoot on campus this morning, lots of probes at port 445 and 135 to our portsentry hosts. Maybe this new RBot variant or this Agobot variant.

And we were down to less than 60 open tickets.

Update (11/18/2004): Looks like at least some of these were recently reinstalled Windows XP without all the patches. Most commonly found virus was Korgo.worm.v. But, this mini-outbreak reinforces the usefulness of being proactive with network monitoring and using the quarantine vlan.

The sad state of the Democratic party

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When former party honchos turned gasbag talking heads are smashing eggs on their faces and making cracks about gay governors on national television, something is wrong. I just hope that no one was actually watching the sunday morning gasbag shows.

And, isn’t it suprising that the rats are running off the ship like it’s sinking? Hmm, can anyone say “lucrative consulting jobs with goverment contractors and think tanks”? Maybe Gen. Powell is just looking for a way to get his self respect back.

Josh Marshall, over at talkingpointsmemo has some good thoughts on all this.

gentoo profile updates

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Taking my brain away from the election boondoggle this morning, after an emerge --sync, I was greeted with this:

!!! Your current profile is deprecated and not supported anymore.
!!! Please upgrade to the following profile if possible:
        default-linux/x86/2004.0
To upgrade do the following steps:
# emerge -n '>=sys-apps/portage-2.0.51'
# cd /etc/
# rm make.profile
# ln -s ../usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2004.0 make.profile

Searching the forums led to one post in german about this. Since I’ve got the luxury of more than one non-production test machine, I went ahead and followed the instructions. All seems to be fine.
A little more poking around in the gentoo documentation, and I found some pretty good advice on this upgrade, seems to be just a file system layout/naming convention change.