Hi Everyone,
When I went on parental leave last year it roughly coincided with the upgrade of the user managed webservers to a new version of ubuntu. It took me a while to figure out the correct way to get apache to recognize the location for the wordpress blog. I may post about it, after I consult with the cs core staff to figure exactly what happened and why so I know what problems were caused by the wordpress config and the local apache config.
I’ve made IPP printing available to users on the dgp network. Instructions can be found on the dgpwiki:
www.dgp.toronto.edu/dgpwiki/PrintersandFax
under “Printing Via HTTP” . I’ve tried this out on windows, linux and mac clients. It appears that the postscript errors linux used to receive
on some pdfs files don’t occur with the new system.
I was doing some testing of ssl on iis web servers and I needed to generate an certificate using a certifcate authority I had set up on a windows server. I got an error when I tried to use the gui, the cause of which microsoft explains here
Here’s the error:
Certificate Request Processor
The request contains no certificate template information. 0x80094801 (-2146875391)
Denied by Policy Module 0x80094801, the request does not contain a certificate template extension or the Certificate Template request attribute.
The solution is to use the command line tool certreq and specify the template to use (in this case, WebServer). Here is the command:
certreq -submit -attrib “CertificateTemplate: WebServer” certreq.txt
Thanks to Davidr for the original post.
There’s seems to be a problem with the way the Err object in asp handles some of the data it receives from Xerox Phaser 6250 printers. This prevents it from being able to display snmp information using the “Device Status” page in windows IPP . I found a work around by editing the ipp_0000.inc file in c:\windows\web\printers . Here’s the original code:
hrPrintDetectedState = objSNMP.GetAsByte (“25.3.5.1.2.” & StrDevice)
If Err Then Exit Function
This works fine for an hp2430 printer, but gives an invalid argument error when run against a xerox phaser 6250 without any error conditions. Using an MIB browser, I checked 1.3.6.1.2.1.25.3.5.1.2.1 to see what each return for the hrPrinterDetectedErrorState.1 when there wasn’t an error. The hp printer returns nothing, but the Xerox Phaser returned an octet string of 00-0x00-0x00-0x00 which possibly caused some time of error for the GetAsByte function.
As a work around, I did this:
hrPrintDetectedState = objSNMP.GetAsByte (“25.3.5.1.2.” & StrDevice)
If Err Then Err.Clear
The rpm package “file” conflicted with the dependencies for httpd on all the nodes except neuron-0-24, which had been recently re-installed. I ran yum clean metadata and was able to get the other nodes to update correctly.
While I was experimenting with IPP printing last week, I found a link to a great site that explained how to fully customize the printer setup on mac os x clients. Here is a link to the article. The important thing is knowing that you have to add the “Advanced” Icon to the toolbar in the print options in order to add a printer with an arbitrary string (i.e. that starts with http, or includes username:password in the printer location). Instead of setting up a samba printer, I used it to add the http printer (which is what windows sets up instead of an ipp printer). It looks like it would also be possible to do smb authentication this way, with a string like the following:
smb://username:password@corman/Mom
I haven’t tried this out, but I will be trying this along with other options to see what the best print solution would be. Once I’ve finished I’ll add some instructions to the wiki.
A few of the software packages I use have a good enough silent installer to allow me to build a vbscript to install them. I’ve also tried to include an “upgrade” function which uninstalls the previous version of the software at the same time, using the win32_product class to find and uninstall it. The problem that occurs with this system is that 64 bit systems do not use the win32_Product class, and I haven’t found an equivalent wmi object to do this. Instead, I’ve resorted to including the uninstall command string the registry uses. There are some problems with this, notably that the uninstall may not have a silent installer string available for it.
I found a neat way to get bios/service tag info about a computer without using a dell utility.
Linux
dmidecode -q | grep -E ‘System Info|Serial’ | grep -n1 System | tail -n1 | awk ‘{print $4;}’
(mileage may vary depending on BIOS – better to try dmidecode -q | less to see the whole output if the above doesn’t work)
Windows XP:
wmic bios get serialnumber
UPDATE (Feb 4 2011): Alan (our linux sysadmin) found another tool which will give you hardware info on linux servers, including the serial number. It is called lshw (you can use lshw -html or -xml to output into either format). It is available for installation on ubuntu and debian.
In yum-fastestmirror-1.1.16-13.el5.centos, I discovered a bug involving the exclude option in fastestmirror.conf . If you exclude two mirrors that are adjacent in the mirror repository array used by fastestmirror.py to search for excluded mirrors, the second one will not be removed from the list of possible mirrors.
The reason this occurs is because the for loop which iterates through the array skips the next value after an entry is removed from the array. I was able to fix it by changing line 195 from:
for mirror in repomirrors[str(repo)]:
to
for mirror in repomirrors[str(repo)][:]:
Now it uses a copy of the array to search, and can delete the entry from the original array without effecting the next value in the for loop.
It appears that this bug has been resolved in yum-utils-1.1.18 and higher, by using the filter command to go through each mirror and test it against the exclude list. I’m learning all sorts of neat python tricks today!
Most of the software in our lab is managed via group policy through our active directory server, which means I can patch software by applying the .msp file (if it exists) to the network installation or by simplying adding a new network install point and having it upgrade the previous version of the software.
However, some software pacakges, for licensing or performance reasons, have to be installed on individual machines. Our licenses for Adobe Acrobat mean that we have different versions installed on different machines throughout the lab. Every computer has reader, but some also have Acrobat 7 or 8. To patch these machines, I did the following:
Downloaded the updates from the adobe site:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=1&platform=Windows
Use the ADMIN$ share on machines with Acrobat installed to store the patches, and run psexec from a control machine to install them.
For Acrobat 7, I only to install 2 updates on a couple of machines and I used the command line options I found on AppDeploy to run them.
msiexec /p c:\windows\temp\AcPr710.msp;c:\windows\temp\ AcroUpd711_all_incr.msp REINSTALLMODE=OMUS RINSTALL=All REBOOT=ReallySuppress /qn
For 8, I wrote a batch file to apply several updates in order, with the following format:
msiexec /p c:\windows\temp\AcrobatUpd814_all_incr.msp /q
AppDeploy Acrobat Pages:
http://www.appdeploy.com/packages/detail.asp?id=545
http://www.appdeploy.com/packages/detail.asp?id=431
http://www.appdeploy.com/packages/detail.asp?id=937