BigSmoke

Smokes your problems, coughs fresh air.

Category: Technology (Page 28 of 48)

Fixing extremely slow domain logon windows 7

March 17, 2010 /

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

March 17, 2010 /

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

March 16, 2010 /

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

March 16, 2010 /

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

MediaWiki thumb.php and rewrite rules

March 7, 2010 /

May, last year, I created an empty draft for this post, because, around that time, I had gone through quite some effort before I got thumbnails for foreign file repos working just right. Now, I’m taking a dive into my MediaWiki working dirs in preparation of the creation of a separate development environment, so it’s a good moment to rehash the past experience (almost as good as when I’d have done it right away).

This is how I configured the foreign file repo to be able to use images uploaded to the English wiki from the Dutch wiki:

$wgHashedUploadDirectory = false;
 
$wgForeignFileRepos[] = array(
    'class' => 'ForeignDBRepo',
    'name' => 'en',
    'url' => "http://wiki.hardwood-investments.net/media",
    'hashLevels' => 0,
    //'thumbScriptUrl' => "http://wiki.hardwood-investments.net/thumb.php",
    'transformVia404' => true,//!$wgGenerateThumbnailOnParse,
    'dbType' => $wgDBtype,
    'dbServer' => $wgDBserver,
    'dbUser' => $wgDBuser,
    'dbPassword' => $wgDBpassword,
    'dbName' => 'hardwood',
    'tablePrefix' => 'mw_',
    'hasSharedCache' => false,
    'descBaseUrl' => 'http://wiki.hardwood-investments.net/Image:',
    'fetchDescription' => false
);

To make thumbnails be generated by thumb.php on request I added the following to my .htaccess at the other end (and visa versa, because the Dutch wiki actually contains most of the images):

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^media/thumb/([^/]+)/([0-9]+)px-.*$ /thumb.php?f=$1&width=$2 [L,QSA]
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