Ohjeah!

As a continuation of my previous WDS post located here, these are the steps I follow for creating my WDS images.

• Install OS, drivers, service packs, software, updates, and everything else to master system.
• Copy Windows installation media to local drive: xcopy /H /E D:\* C:\windows\options\cabs\
• Copy deploy.cab from recent installation media, extract to sysprep folder located on the administrator’s desktop.
• From a Windows command prompt, browse to sysprep folder and run:  sysprep.exe -mini -reseal (with optional flags) 
• Wait for system to shutdown..  start system back up, ensure PXE or network boot is enabled.
• Boot from PXE/WDS, select Windows PE from options menu. 
• At Windows PE command prompt, run: wdscapture
• Follow Windows Image Capture wizard.

After installing .NET 3.0 on one of my test servers, I could no longer connect over RDP.  From the client, the connection would just terminate with no errors.  After looking at the Windows Event Log on the server, I found:

Event ID: 26
Application popup:  : \SystemRoot\System32\RDPDD.dll failed to load

After looking around, this appears to be an issue with the installed nVidia driver, though ATI users have experienced this as well.  Adding the following registry value and rebooting, I was able to RDP again.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"SessionImageSize"=dword:00000020

I reinstalled Vista today and misplaced my Hilgraeve HyperTerminal installer, which was publicly available for download until recently.  My alternate client has always been Tera Term, which is very effective, and lightweight.

Here is a list of some random software I use for the majority of things I deal with:

Zenoss – Open Source Network Monitoring, takes nagios and cacti to another level.  Very customizable, but takes a while to become familiar with the system.  The more I play with Zenoss, I constantly come across new features and advanced functions.

Monitoring Terminal Services sessions:

Monitoring SQL locks:

Monitoring Apache:

Monitoring MySQL:

Dekiwiki – Open source WIKI, with very good media integration and built-in support for Active Directory.  I prefer it over MediaWIKI.

Jing – Free desktop screen capture utility, also creates flash videos on the fly.  Has its own file sharing service screencast.com for sharing your screenshots/videos.  Great for making tutorials.

For our access layers we primarily use Linksys/Cisco SRW2048 managed switches.  They run around $800 bucks and aside from being very reliable, have the features we need (Link Aggregation, VLAN, GB, miniGBIC).  We had an issue last week where an unknown staff member (I have an idea who), created a loop along our access layer, causing our core switches (Procurve 2848 series) to block the uplink port dropping a good portion of the network.  Thus, I decided to disable all inactive switch ports to prevent random IT staff from plugging stuff in.

While doing this I came across a switch that had not been configured for IP management, so I needed to console in to configure it.  After trying 10 different serial cables and 100 different terminal settings, I found out that the Linksys console cable (normally included with new switches) is not a null-modem or straight through serial cable.  After much searching, it appears the pins are mapped directly across:

1 – 1
2 – 2
3 – 3
4 – 4
and so on..

So I called Linksys sales, which informed me they do not sell said cable and could not send me another for free.  After hanging up I contemplated a way of building my own version and looking to see what parts I had, found 2 RJ45 to DB9 adapters.  Cutting off a 5′ chunk of Cat5 and wiring it straight through, I made my own pin to pin serial cable for the Linksys SRW2048.

If anyone is interested, the terminal settings are as followed:

Bits per second: 38400
Data bits: 8
Parity: None
Stop Bits: 1
Flow Control: None

Just going to make this short and simple, there are many places, including Microsoft documentation, which state you can set the event log size up to 4GB.  While this is true, it will never get remotely close to reaching that size, or 1GB even.  Due to some very bad design, the event log uses memory mapped files under the services.exe process, which due to another very bad design, is limited to 1GB pool.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/guidance/serversecurity/tcg/tcgch06n.mspx

This apparently is not an issue in 2003 64bit, and is resolved in 2008.

I found Subversion (svn) over HTTP to be very easy to deploy on top of our existing setup, and only took about 15 minutes.  It simplifies user management by allowing us to manage users through Active Directory, and makes it easier on staff by using URLs for access.  Here is a quick demonstration on a Fedora 9 box, assuming you have already performed a basic or default apache install. Read the rest of this entry »

Was documenting our color scheme today and figured I’d share, with the amount of colors available these days coloring is easy!

Black – Data Links

Blue - Phone Links

Grey - Switch Links

Orange – Server Links

Purple - Monitoring/LiLo Links

Red - SAN/Network Storage

Yellow - WAN/Internet Links

You can check out some of the pictures in my preivous post.

Today I decided to setup automated installations for Linux distros (RHEL, Fedora, CentOS), similar to how we deploy our Windows installations via PXE.  Since we already had WDS running for installing Windows, it was just a matter of reconfiguring WDS, setting up the necessary structure and kickstart files for our automated Linux installations.  While I do not cover the initial WDS installation process, I will attempt to go over the steps performed after the basic WDS install (native or mixed).  Read the rest of this entry »

Often I find my self working in a department where the skill sets of individuals varies significantly, and my current position is no different.  While there is nothing wrong with this, there have been several occasions (like being on vacation), where help desk personnel or other less savvy users are called upon to perform basic functions .  Read the rest of this entry »