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I tried to install Network Monitor 3.3 on one of my 2008 servers today. The install froze and essentially disabled my network connection. I ended up killing the install process and restarting the server. If you need this tool on a production server, I recommend you install it outside of production hours. When using snapshots in VMware it’s not a good idea to leave them running for more than a day or two. This is because a snapshot essentially freezes the disk image of a virtual machine and begins recording changes that are made to that image in a separate file. As changes continue to be made, that file gets larger eventually taking up all free space. I learned this the hard way when I created a snapshot of my company’s medical records server which is in a constant state of change. After about a month, the snapshot had taken up all space on my LUN and the server would no longer start. I was able to login to the VMware Infrastructure Client and open the Snapshot Manager for this particular virtual machine. I clicked Delete which rolls all changes recorded in the snapshot into the main virtual disk and then removes the snapshot file, thus freeing up disk space. However, due to the large size of this file, the operation timed out. I later read that the default time out period for VMware is 15 minutes. So if the operation is taking any longer than that, it will time out even though the operation is still working in the background. If this happens to you, DO NOT click Delete a second time. This will completely bork your server. It can take 1 to 2 hours for the snapshot to be deleted. Just let it go and check back later. If you want visual confirmation that something is happening, get a console on your ESX server (SSH, Telnet, whatever), navigate to the datastore for your virtual machine (cd /vmfs/volumes/yourLUN/yourServer) and enter the following command: watch “ls -Ghtu –full-time *.vmdk” This will display a list of the vmdk files in that directory sorted by the last modified time. If you watch the time on the first file, it will change as the file is updated. This is the snapshot being written into the main virtual disk. Once the operation is complete the “delta” file will disappear. As I said this can take some time depending on how big your snapshot has grown to. After a little over a month mine grew to about 87 gigs. This took just shy of 2 hours to delete. Hope this helps. I went geocaching over the weekend for the first time. I loaded 8 caches onto my AT&T Tilt off of geocaching.com. I used the free program BasicGPS (which isn’t the best piece of software in the world but it’s free and it did it’s job). My son and I set out about noon and found 6 caches before 5 o’clock. Most of them were micro-caches which are a small container (usually a 35mm film tube) that contain nothing but a slip of paper to log your visit. The best one we found was a Thermos brand water jug hanging from a eucalyptus tree by some fishing string. It had some great trade-able items and we really enjoyed searching for it as it was off the beaten path. I’m hoping to do some more this next weekend as it proved to be some quality father-son time. I’ve decided to take the site in a new direction for the new year. Rather than focus entirely on technical articles (for which I have had no material lately) this site will be my general purpose blog. Yes, I’ve given in. I am now a…*shudder*…blogger. Shortly after enabling TLS for exchange I noticed that Outlook Web Access stopped forwarding HTTP requests to the HTTPS page. Internet Explorer displayed a page with “The website declined to show this webpage” and Firefox displayed “Secure Channel Requried: This Virtual Directory requires a browser that supports the configured encryption options.” The fix for this was rather simple. Open IIS on the Exchange server and expand your server, then the Web Sites folder. Right click on Default Web Site and click Properties. Click the Directory Security tab and under Secure Communications click Edit. Uncheck “Require secure channel (SSL).” When this option is checked, any HTTP requests will fail. This includes any requests for pages that simply redirect. Digsby pointed out this morning that in addition to the extra offers during installation, they are able to keep their IM client free due to revenue earned from unused resources on users PCs. When Digsby IM is installed, grid computing software is installed along with it, by default. Previously the only place this was mentioned was on an blog post dating from December 8th, 2008 and in the Terms of Service. Personally I don’t believe this is sufficient notification of a potentially unwanted feature. The terms of service are often lengthy and filled with legal language releasing the publisher of liabilty and restricting the users ability to redistribute or modify the software. A user can’t be expected to read this or the entire archives of a blog in an effort to determine if the software they are installing has unwanted features. In Digsby’s defense, however, the publisher has responded to the feedback from it’s users and will release an update that should make this optional feature known to anyone using the software. This update will apparently include a popup that will link to a page explaining grid computing. Tavis Ormandy and Julien Tinnes of the Google Security Team have discovered a vulnerability in all 2.4 and 2.6 kernels since 2001 that will allow code to be executed with kernel privileges. Successful exploitation leads to an attacker having complete control of a system. Here is the article detailing the vulnerability and here is a patch committed by Linus Torvalds. A vulnerability has been discovered in Wordpress that allows an attacker to remotely reset the password of a user’s blog. All an attacker has to do is point their browser to http://www.targetdomain.com/wp-login.php?action=rp&key[]= and a new password will be sent. This is because key[] is an empty array and Wordpress views this as a valid entry and so resets the password. Of course, if the attacker does not have access to the blogger’s email, this doesn’t allow them access since they don’t know the new password, however, this exploit could be used to potentially deny the blogger access to their own blog, until it is fixed. A temporary fix for this is to edit the wp-login.php file and, depending on what version of Wordpress you have, change line 190 for 2.8.3 or 169 for earlier versions. The line looks like this: if ( empty( $key ) ) and should be changed to this: if ( empty( $key ) || is_array( $key ) ) The reason this works is it tells Wordpress to treat arrays as invalid entries, much the same as it does with null values. If you have a Wordpress blog, get this fix in place as soon as possible.
One of my favorite things to find on the net are free tools for systems administrators and network engineers. There are a plethora of port scanners and IP range scanners out there. One only need to google it. But what about a free tool to backup and store your router and switch configurations? What if you wanted a free tool to monitor the health of your Virtual Machines? That’s where solarwinds steps in. I’m sure if you’ve done any work with routers and switches you may have already used their free TFTP server. But did you know they also offer a number of other useful free tools? Check out their free tools page and see if they don’t have something to make your life easier. This is a Hacker Code. Similar to the Geek Code but shorter Usage is simple. Below are the code values. For the first Examples: -wXd- Typical whitehat, windows xp, leech. aka noob. first digit - hat color second digit - perferred OS third digit - specialty v1.0 (c) Sysninja.com 2009 |
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I’ll be writing about various topics now such as my hobbies and interests. Particularly my involvement in Freemasonry and my newly found hobby of 
