Smokes your problems, coughs fresh air.

Author: halfgaar (Page 18 of 26)

Halfgaar is Wiebe. Wiebe is a contributing author on this weblog. He also has a lot of stuff (such as long, in-depth articles) on his personal website.

Wiebe's day job is as a senior software developer and system administrator at YTEC.

In his free time, he built the free, open-source FlashMQ software. Together with Jeroen and Rowan, he is now building a managed MQTT hosting business around his open masterpiece.

Adding a quick launch in Windows 7

Windows 7 doesn”t have a quicklaunch by default. Luckily, there is a fix. To enable it, add toolbar, other toolbar and include this as location:

%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch

That site also states you have to save your theme, so do that, to be safe. Just do desktop right mouse, adjust to preference, rightmouse on unsaved theme, etc.

Listing samba users

Newer samba versions no longer have a human readable password file. To see the passwords, use pdbedit. Do “pdbedit -w -L” to get a classic password file layout.

Fixing extremely slow domain logon windows 7

I just installed two Windows 7 machines and both of them take a very long time to logon to the (samba) domain controller. I’ve found several reports on the internet about people with the same issue. This was one of the pages I found. I tried it and it works. It says:

  • Run gpedit.msc.
  • Go to computer configuration.
  • Go to Administrative templates.
  • Go to System.
  • Go to User profiles.
  • Enable “Set maximum wait time for the network if a user has a roaming user profile or remote home directory” and set to 0 seconds

You’d think that this means it can’t logon, because it suggests the wait period was because of network connection problem. However, I tried adding files to the profile on the server and logged in, and the file was synced to the PC. So, it does seem to work.

While I was at it, I also changed the setting not to allow logons with temporary profiles. It’s in the same list as the option above. In Dutch, it’s “gebruikers niet aanmelden met tijdelijke profielen”.

I also found this about slow logons. It’s for Windows XP, but perhaps it’s useful. It sets “Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon” to true. For some reason, the asynchronous loading of the network caused slowdown for that person.

Finally, I also found people who fixed slow logons by setting the desktop to an image, as opposed to solid color. I tested it, and indeed seemed to influence it.

Installing Samba from lenny-backports

With our new Windows 7 machines, we need at least samba 3.3.7. However, our server with Debian stable doesn’t have that in its repository. So, I was forced to install samba with lenny-backports.

I included this line in my /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.backports.org/debian lenny-backports main contrib non-free 

Because backports are disabled by default, I needed to pin all the packages required for samba:

Package: samba
Pin: release a=lenny-backports
Pin-Priority: 999
 
Package: smbclient
Pin: release a=lenny-backports
Pin-Priority: 999
 
Package: smbfs
Pin: release a=lenny-backports
Pin-Priority: 999
 
Package: samba-common
Pin: release a=lenny-backports
Pin-Priority: 999
 
Package: samba-common-bin
Pin: release a=lenny-backports
Pin-Priority: 999
 
Package: libwbclient0
Pin: release a=lenny-backports
Pin-Priority: 999
 
Package: libtalloc2
Pin: release a=lenny-backports
Pin-Priority: 999

I haven’t actually installed it, but I will soon. So I don’t know if it will work or not. Aptitude -s suggests it does.

Creating new MySQL database and user

I often need to make a MySQL database and a user that can do anything in it:

create database bla character set utf8 collate = utf8_general_ci;
use bla
grant all on bla.* to 'jack'@'localhost' identified by 'password';

To drop a user:

drop user ‘jack'@'localhost’;

OpenDNS servers

I’ve had to deal with crappy DNS servers quite a lot; servers that don’t resolve certain sites, servers that take endlessly, etc. Therefore, using OpenDNS can be a good solution. The IP addresses for OpenDNS are (including /etc/resolv.conf directives):

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220

Creating an Unreal Tournament 99 server in Linux

(Post edited to reflect the steps required for the 451 version of the server, which has some crucial bug fixes, among which a working webadmin.)

I created an Unreal Tournament 99 server using this page as a guide (I may update that page myself soon, to help out others). However, I had to do a lot more, so here is the info:

First get and unpack the UT server, the 451 patch and the server utility script:

wget http://ut-files.com/Entire_Server_Download/ut-server-436.tar.gz
tar -zxf ut-server-436.tar.gz ut-server
wget http://www.ut-files.com/Patches/UTPGPatch451LINUX.tar.tar # May be changed to .tar.bz2 by the admins soon
tar xfj UTPGPatch451LINUX.tar.tar
wget http://ut-files.com/Entire_Server_Download/server_scripts/asu-0.6.tar.gz
tar -zxf asu-0.6.tar.gz
chmod +x asu.sh System
ln -s libSDL-1.1.so.0 libSDL-1.2.so.0

Because of some error (as described), map names with ][ in them, like DM-Deck16][, are 0 bytes. So, you have to copy them from some other UT installation. 2399Skillz on the forums said he’ll fix it, so it might be fixed at some point.

Next, you can run the asu.sh script. Choose option “I”, to install. Most important thing is to choose the username it will run under (not nobody as it suggests). The rest is obvious.

The script will have made an ucc.init file. Important to know is, that the path of the server is set in it. So, if you want to move the server to another dir, you have to change that file. The path name is mentioned several times.

Next you want to enable the webadmin. You can do that by opening UnrealTournament.ini, going to the [UWeb.WebServer] section and setting bEnabled=True and choose a port (5080 is standard):

[UWeb.WebServer]
Applications[0]=UTServerAdmin.UTServerAdmin
ApplicationPaths[0]=/ServerAdmin
Applications[1]=UTServerAdmin.UTImageServer
ApplicationPaths[1]=/images
DefaultApplication=0
bEnabled=True
ListenPort=5080 

When going to the webadmin, be sure to include /ServerAdmin/ in your address bar, because otherwise it will try to redirect you to that, using a HTTP redirect, but that will fail because the server has no idea you’re using an internet hostname and therefore it will redirect you to it’s LAN-IP, which obviously won’t work if the server is not in your LAN. Apache has config parameters to set the redirect hostname, but this webadmin doesn’t.

As a security precaution, patch 451 adds brute force protection to the admin login. See the file Releasenotes.htm in the Help dir for more info. In the Engine.Gameinfo section, a few rules should be added/modified (depending on whether they’re already there or not):

[Engine.GameInfo]
(snip)
...
LoginDelaySeconds=1.000000
MaxLoginAttempts=50
ActionToTake=DO_KickBanPlayer

The server (at moment of writing) has special net-textures, to reduce the size of the installation. Problems my occur when clients are using the high-res textures (see aforementioned topic). To solve this, copy the normal CD1 textures to the server dir.

I was under the impression that the asu stuff would take care of setting the environment properly so the files can be found, but when trying to start the server, it complained about not being able to find it’s data directory. It started doing that after applying the 451 patch, so that might be the cause. To fix it, I added this line below MYUSER=User.ini in ucc.init:

UT_DATA_PATH="$MYDIR/System/"

However, it might not be necessary when you apply the patch before you extract the asu scripts. I applied the patch after, so that may have been the difference. Try without this modification first.

You can start the server by “./ucc.init start”. Or stop by “./ucc.init stop”. Or restart by “./ucc.init restart”.

Default e-mail addresses for domains

Sometimes automated services or people need to contact some domain administrator for a certain domain. There are a couple of addresses that should be present by default. Google uses these addresses to notify you when they put you on their malware blocklist:

  1. abuse@
  2. admin@
  3. administrator@
  4. contact@
  5. info@
  6. postmaster@
  7. support@
  8. webmaster@

I think I need these for my domains to be present by default:

  1. abuse@
  2. postmaster@
  3. hostmaster@
  4. webmaster@
  5. root@
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