Cupfighter.net

Similar as OpenSSH Authentication Using Kerberos, but now Transparent Kerberos Authentication via Apache against Active Directory using mod_auth_kerb. This enables SSO from IE and Firefox on Apache, IE and Firefox configurations to enable this are also described in the document.

Abstract:  The Apache authentication module mod_auth_kerb allows Apache to authenticate users against a Kerberos KDC including one from ActiveDirectory. Kerberos itself can be fairly complex to set up. This guide will attempt to show the specific steps required to make this possible as well as discuss security limitations specific to the interoperability matters. This guide assumes a basic understanding of Kerberos V and that the Active Directory domain controller is properly configured prior to starting this process.

Technical Analysis: Apache with mod_auth_kerb and Windows Server

An interesting paper on how to authenticate against Active Directory using Kerberos and OpenSSH. This will enable SSO capabilities between Linux and windows, if used in combination with an Kerberos enabled SSH. And maybe even 2-factor authentication if combined with smartcards, haven’t tested this but should be working in theory if you use an SSH client from windows at least.

Components used:

On linux:

• openssh
• openssh-server
• samba-common
• samba-client
• krb5-workstation
• krb5-libs

On Windows:

• Windows Support Tools

OpenSSH on Linux using Windows/Kerberos for Authentication

Putty With Kerberos

Equallogic’s are very nice boxes; fast, robust and very scalable (linear!; adding an enclosure adds processing power spindles and cache!). They don’t have licenses to enable features, WYSIWG!.
But sometimes a bit of a “blackbox”. This has been greatly enhanced by the release of the Equallogic SAN HQ Software.
It would be nice however if they would support synchronous replication between two groups, they do support a-synchronous replication though. And if they were a bit more flexible on the networking side by supporting VLAN tagging for example.

For the people who want to have a bit more insights:

SSH into your Equallogic group, login and enter “support”.

Be aware of the following message!

You are running a support command, which is normally restricted to PS Series Technical Support personnel. Do not use without instruction from Technical Support.

When running “cachetool”:

When running “netstat -i”:

IP Statistics:
4137170846 total packets received
183707 total bad packets drop
0 bad header checksums
0 with size smaller than minimum
0 with data size < data length
0 with length > max ip packet size
0 with header length < data size
0 with data length < header length
0 with bad options
0 with incorrect version number
0 fragments received
0 fragments dropped (dup or out of space)
0 malformed fragments dropped
0 fragments dropped after timeout
0 packets reassembled ok
4136987139 packets for this host
0 packets for unknown/unsupported protocol
0 packets forwarded (0 packets fast forwarded)
183707 packets not forwardable
0 redirects sent
5530887305 packets sent from this host
0 packets sent with fabricated ip header
0 output packets dropped due to no bufs, etc.
47 output packets discarded due to no route
0 output datagrams fragmented
0 fragments created
0 datagrams that can’t be fragmented

There are more commands to discover. Try TAB completion and mind the difference between “Bad Command” & “Ambigious command”. These commands are not shown when using “help” and most have a -? or -h option.

AGAIN: ONLY DO THIS ON TEST SYSTEMS AND WHEN YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’R DOING ONLY!… Don’t come whining here if stuff breaks…

The full version of Windows 7 Home Premium is priced at $199, with an upgrade from Vista or XP costing $119. The full version of Windows 7 Professional is $299, with upgrades going for $199. Windows 7 Ultimate is priced at $319, with the upgrade version at $219. In what’s perhaps a nod to the recession and increased competition in the software market, the prices are about 10% less than what Microsoft charged for the corresponding versions of Windows Vista when that product shipped in January of 2007.

More here: http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218101310&subSection=All+Stories

From: http://bink.nu/news/windows-7-windows-server-2008-rtm-set-for-july-13th.aspx

4 days earlier then I had in my previous schedule, Microsoft has now set July 13th for RTM “sign-off”

Sign off is the process where all divisions sign that they agree on the final code, which means the actual RTM build will be created a few days earlier, which is targeted on July 10th.

The general availability (GA) is set to October 22nd, this is when you can buy it in stores in a box or on new PC’s (OEM).

We can expect the RTM much earlier on MSDN, Technet and Volume Licensing download sites, probably a few days after July 13th.

This is not so new news, but still want to drop some frustrations here…
While trying to record audio from my system for a screencast I discovered that I was unable to select sound from my speakers (waveout mix, stereo mix or sometimes called “What you hear”). At first I thought this was a Windows 7 issue with my drivers. But upgrading my drivers from the ones supplied by Microsoft to the ones supplied by Lenovo for my T500 did not help either.  So I contacted my buddy Google.

Soon I found some discussion on this topic on several forums including the Lenovo support forums.

Lenovo has an official kb article on this:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-70822&selectarea=SUPPORT&tempselected=5

The solution according to Lenovo:

Symptoms #1 and #2 were caused by a design change agreement between Microsoft and the audio chip hardware supplier. The new change drops the support of mixed-stereo function and direct playback of microphone. The change in design calls to have these function implemented in application level in future. The goal of this design change is to begin standardizing the audio industry. The design change affected all PC vendors worldwide. In the future, Microsoft and audio vendors expect individual applications developers pick up these functions.

The industry has been trying to protect digital rights for ages without much luck so far. And consumers are fighting this with all sorts of workarounds.
So I started looking for workarounds on this one…  since I am not trying to workaround DRM, but just want to create a webcast using sound from my PC. (In this case a demo of the Flash HDX Experience Tech preview of Citrix).

Some Workarounds I found but did not work for my T500 with Windows 7:

• Change driver inf file from crippled drivers
• Stick a cable between headphones out and mic… does not sound like a very good idea…mic-input is mono and will give you terrible sound.. and maybe even blowing up your soundcard (mic’s are passive devices)
• Buy an external Audio card, USB or PCMCIA… but we did not buy quite expensive notebooks to buy extra soundcards…
• Use Virtual Audio Cable

I tried the last without luck either because. The installation went OK but after the installation I got this pop-up:

Mmm, wonder if this kind of driver ever gets digitally signed. This also counts for Vista X64 versions.

Apparently other major vendors, like Dell and Packard Bell introduced the same issues. Dell however fixed it with an driver updated, since they only crippled the driver. But with Lenovo however it seems to be hard coded in the chip (In my case a Conexant High Definition SmartAudio 221).

Rumors go that this was done under the pressure of the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America).

For now I can only record my microphone sound… yeah! I wonder where this goes in the future… and if you have a solution to workaround this issue… please drop a comment, thanks.

The only workaround I found to record “what you hear” is to use Total Recorder Pro, which installs a signed kernel driver to record all sounds. I installed a trial which seems to really work on Windows 7, but I haven’t figured out on how to use this kernel driver to record Audio in other applications. Or use the Physical Cable solution…

More info here:
Lenovo Support forum thread
Ripten on Dell Stereomix issue

While troubleshooting some DFSR today, I came across this very nice and detailed post from the Directory Services Team.

From: http://blogs.technet.com/askds/archive/2009/03/23/understanding-dfsr-debug-logging-part-1-logging-levels-log-format-guid-s.aspx

Ned here again. Today begins a 21-part series on using the DFSR debug logs to further your understanding of Distributed File System Replication. While there are specific troubleshooting scenarios that will be covered, the most important part of understanding any products logging is making sure you are comfortable with it before you have errors. That way you have some point of reference if things go wrong.

As you can probably guess, these posts were a long time in development. They are based on an internal DFSR whitepaper I have worked on for six months, and which went through review by a number of excellent folks here in Support, Field Engineering, and the Product Group itself. Except for the removal of all private source code references, this series is otherwise unchanged.

I’ll start with a couple posts on the logs themselves, how they are formatted, how they can be controlled, etc. Then I’ll dig into scenarios in detail, for both Windows Server 2003 R2 and Windows Server 2008. Don’t feel like you have to read and memorize everything – this series is a reference guide as well.

Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 1: Logging Levels, Log Format, GUID’s)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 2: Nested Fields, Module ID’s)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 3: The Log Scenario Format, File Added to Replicated Folder on Windows Server 2008)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 4: A Very Small File Added to Replicated Folder on Windows Server 2008)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 5: File Modified on Windows Server 2003 R2)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 6: Microsoft Office Word 97-2003 File Modified on Windows Server 2008)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 7: Microsoft Office Word 2007 File Modified on Windows Server 2008)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 8: File Deleted from Windows Server 2003 R2)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 9: File is Renamed on Windows Server 2003 R2)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 10: File Conflicted between two Windows Server 2008)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 11: Directory created on Windows Server 2003 R2)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 12: Domain Controller Bind and Config Polling on Windows Server 2008)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (part 13: A New Replication Group and Replicated Folder between two Windows Server 2008 members)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 14: A sharing violation due to a file locked upstream between two Windows Server 2008)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 15: Pre-Seeded Data Usage during Initial Sync)
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 16: File modification with RDC in very granular detail (uses debug severity 5))
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 17: Replication failing because of blocked RPC ports (uses debug severity 5))
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 18: LDAP queries failing due to network (uses debug severity 5))
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 19: File Blocked Inbound by a File Screen Filter Driver (uses debug severity 5))
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 20: Skipped temporary and filtered files (uses debug severity 5))
Understanding DFSR debug logging (Part 21: File replication performance from throttling (uses debug severity 5))

So you have performance troubles on Windows, you probably already pulled the sysinternals from the shelve. But did you already know the Windows Performance toolkit for hardcore performance troubleshooting?

This toolkit has three tools;

xperf.exe – Captures traces, post-processes them for use on any machine, and supports command-line (action-based) trace analysis.

xperfview.exe – Visual Trace Analysis Tool – Presents trace content in the form of interactive graphs and summary tables

xbootmgr.exe – Automates on/off state transitions and captures traces during these transitions.

So what do these tools do?

Performance Analyzer is built on top of the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) infrastructure. ETW enables Windows and applications to efficiently generate events, which can be enabled and disabled at any time without requiring system or process restarts. ETW collects requested kernel events and saves them to one or more files referred to as “trace files” or “traces.” These kernel events provide extensive details about the operation of the system. Some of the most important and useful kernel events available for capture and analysis are context switches, interrupts, deferred procedure calls, process and thread creation and destruction, disk I/Os, hard faults, processor P-State transitions, and registry operations, though there are many others.

One of the great features of ETW, supported in WPT, is the support of symbol decoding, sample profiling, and capture of call stacks on kernel events. These features provide very rich and detailed views into the system operation. WPT also supports automated perf testing. Specifically, xperf is designed for scripting from the command line and can be employed in automated performance gating infrastructures (it is the core of Windows PerfGates). xperf can also dump the trace data to an ANSI text file, which allows you to write your own trace processing tools that can look for performance problems and regressions from previous tests.

More info:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ntdebugging/archive/2008/04/03/windows-performance-toolkit-xperf.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance/cc825801.aspx
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/E/6/5E66B27B-988B-4F50-AF3A-C2FF1E62180F/COR-T594_WH08.pptx

Download the tools here:

• WPT Kit v.4.1.1 x86 version (4.4MB)
• WPT Kit v.4.1.1 x64 version (4.8MB)
• WPT Kit v.4.1.1 ia64 version (7.0MB)

From: http://www.virtualization.info/2009/06/vmware-apologies-for-hyper-v-crashes.html

When we look at the competition in the IT industry there’s nothing that beats the marketing guerrilla we are experiencing in the virtualization space.

This is perfectly understandable considering that the vendor in control of the hypervisor is able to influence and in many ways able to control all the other companies that provide other pieces of the computing stack.
For the first time ever the absolute domain of the OS vendor is threatened by the hypervisor vendor so that the former tries to turn virtualization into a platform feature while the latter tries to impose the technology as absolutely independent.

It’s also true that compared to ten years ago the vendors have new tools to spread fear, uncertainty and doubts (FUD) against their competitors: paid bloggers, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and so much more are available to influence the prospects and build armies of fanboys that are ready to overreact and defend their beloved products no matter what.

Nowadays is becoming increasingly common that marketing departments cross the line.
It’s much more uncommon to see a company that publicly apologies for a bad marketing action.

It’s the case of VMware which apologized for distributing a video of Microsoft Hyper-V crashing when its virtual machines were running a certain version of the proprietary VMmark benchmark platform.

The video, which was available here, was realized by the VMware Performance Team and uploaded on YouTube by Scott Drummonds, Technical Marketing Manager at the company.
Despite Drummonds is in the VMware Performance Team, where every aspect of the virtual infrastructure is taken deadly seriously, he didn’t publish any technical information about the test environment.

The lack of details unleashed a number of negative comments obliging Bruce Herndon, Senior Manager of R&D at VMware, to unveil that VMmark was executed inside Hyper-V virtual machines with unsupported configurations.

At the end of the saga Drummonds had to apology and Herndon had to admit that:

One of the more interesting emails I received pointed out that it unreasonable to blame Hyper-V for the collapse of these very large and very busy websites. Hyper-V’s stability issues would bring down individual VMs or small groups when the parent partition blue screened. I think that this is a reasonable observation, so its worth including here. I can’t say that Hyper-V was responsible for the MSDN and TechNet crashes. That would be for Microsoft to say, when and if they choose to expose the issue behind the outage.

Of course Microsoft couldn’t be happier to overreact: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5.

From http://www.virtualization.info/2009/06/microsoft-launches-visual-studio-lab.html

The few vendors busy in the virtual lab automation space (which include VMware, Surgient, VMLogix, Skytap and the almost died StackSafe) may soon have a big, big problem called Microsoft.

After wasting years not leveraging its huge developers community to spread virtualization in every corner of the world, the company is finally moving on.

Announced in November 2008, the integration between Visual Studio 2010, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 and Hyper-V 1.0/2.0 for virtual lab automation scenarios is now a reality called Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management.

The product just entered the beta 1 phase and has the potential to become a huge hit in the .NET world.

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