Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Domain Controllers, NVU & Big Pizza
Man do I hate dealing with windows authentication! As you can probably already tell, I've been dealing in the land of Microsoft for the past few weeks. It has been less than fun. If you log into a *nix machine, and you don't have a .bashrc file, have you ever seen a message saying "I'm sorry we can not find your .bashrc file, a temporary one will be created for you, but it will be removed upon logging out". Those in the crowd now laughing know exactly what I am talking about on windows with user profiles.
First the other samba + LDAP PDC I did a month ago was working fine ... until the building got hit by lightning one day, and everything crashed. Just about the entire LDAP database was missing. And what was there was borked anyways. Running the slapd_db_recover utilities and such. "ERROR, ERROR, ERROR, ERROR, PANIC". Um ... that's not so good. Quick decision time is that there are only a handful of accounts on this one, so lets just recreate them manually. Everyone is good again ... make sure backups are running again. LDIF is useful for things like this. ;-)
So the next Domain Controller was a sweet sweet ride. I spent the weekend working on my auto PDC installation, and had it working perfectly with the windows machine I had. We had a demo on Monday morning which went extremely well. I was quite happy with it. Cudos to the Samba team for everything. I also read awesome things about samba 4. Like an integrated LDAP database, and full AD replacement. The demos of the pre-beta in Australia(?) were crowd inspiring apparently. I can't wait.
The next Domain Controller was a snap to setup, and its ready to go. Enter the windows environment, and some 30+ hours later for myself and another technician ... and the new PDC is still sitting there ready to go. We have no problems with the new PDC ... add users (PHPLDAPAdmin), self add machines, all that works. We can't get the windows network to do what we want first.
We can not get the windows server AD to have roaming profiles, and the local machines push their profiles up to the server. We had all the settings right, Ray followed step by step Microsoft official docs. I sort of got one working. I had to login to a PC, change to my new PDC, logout, login in, then I get a roaming profile on _my_ server, log out, login in as admin, change to workgroup, re-join the original domain, log out, login, log out, log in ... then the original server has a roaming profile pushed up to it.
We figure alright we can copy the profile, and move things to the new server ... well it only half works. Some settings are missing, others are half missing, Outlook is screwed anyways because it is local, and messing with the data file management is not so successful. We spent hours upon hours working with several machines. We had machines now not being able to log into any domain, windows 2000 machines were just broken, It was a mess. We have support calls into Microsoft awaiting responses. All sorts of issues ... and my Linux box is sitting there ... working ... waiting for us to dick around with the windows network and make things work. So I sit and wait now.
In between there I had the task of making some web changes to a site. I managed to get the FTP access, and downloaded the copy of the web site. Lets make a couple of small changes ... and then a couple of navigation panel / menu changes. That when I realize that every page (80) are static, and built with Front Page (also known as the code mangler). ;-) It was going to be insane to make those changes they requested. Even harder since I am a hand code developer.
For something like this ... it just doesn't make sense ... well IMHO Front Page doesn't make sense ... but I understand the need for stupid people to be able to create web sites ... oh wait ... no I don't ... HIRE A WEB DEVELOPER!
So I started searching for an OSS replacement that will let me work with these files spit out by front page. Kontour (KDE) did not work :(, although I did make a KDE attempt before looking elsewhere ... sorry Aaron. I tried Open Office Bluefish ... no go. And then I found NVU (en-view). The project is mostly sponsored by Linspire, and devel headed up by an ex-mozilla guy I believe. I checked for a package , and with a few clicks I had it installed on my kubuntu system.
I must say I was quite impressed. Not to mention it is fully cross platform (Linux, windows, Mac). So I am now recommending this to everyone who ever asks me what to use. It has word editing la Front Page, an HTML code editor, and everything just seems to work. The drop list menus didn't work, but they were also not mangled upon saving. The HTML is relatively clean ... although I am not sure if the code was just so poor from FP that this was the best it could do. The pages I changed turned out good with a few mouse clicks, cut and pasty type things and some table manipulation. All was good.
After some explanation of the time consumption for making menu changes to the client. They looked at my demo of what was added ... and said good enough. No need to waste valuable hours changing navigations unless absolutely necessary. Thank god I don't have to mess with the MS crap from Front Page.
So Marshall and Brooklyn came into town last week. They had a wedding on Sat night. We hung out at my place on Thurs for a while. Then I introduced them to Verns Pizza. We order a momma mia ... It weighs over 10 lbs! One pizza! 10 lbs! Marshall handed it to Brooklyn when we picked it up, and she almost fell over. She had trouble walking with it ... I found it humorous. Marshall was excited about it. The pieces stand about 3 inches high, and they are all toppings. He was even telling people at the bar about it the next night. I'm glad I could make Marshall's trip worth while. Brooklyn just giggled. I miss being in Victoria! Cheers, ¶ 12:49:00 PM
First the other samba + LDAP PDC I did a month ago was working fine ... until the building got hit by lightning one day, and everything crashed. Just about the entire LDAP database was missing. And what was there was borked anyways. Running the slapd_db_recover utilities and such. "ERROR, ERROR, ERROR, ERROR, PANIC". Um ... that's not so good. Quick decision time is that there are only a handful of accounts on this one, so lets just recreate them manually. Everyone is good again ... make sure backups are running again. LDIF is useful for things like this. ;-)
So the next Domain Controller was a sweet sweet ride. I spent the weekend working on my auto PDC installation, and had it working perfectly with the windows machine I had. We had a demo on Monday morning which went extremely well. I was quite happy with it. Cudos to the Samba team for everything. I also read awesome things about samba 4. Like an integrated LDAP database, and full AD replacement. The demos of the pre-beta in Australia(?) were crowd inspiring apparently. I can't wait.
The next Domain Controller was a snap to setup, and its ready to go. Enter the windows environment, and some 30+ hours later for myself and another technician ... and the new PDC is still sitting there ready to go. We have no problems with the new PDC ... add users (PHPLDAPAdmin), self add machines, all that works. We can't get the windows network to do what we want first.
We can not get the windows server AD to have roaming profiles, and the local machines push their profiles up to the server. We had all the settings right, Ray followed step by step Microsoft official docs. I sort of got one working. I had to login to a PC, change to my new PDC, logout, login in, then I get a roaming profile on _my_ server, log out, login in as admin, change to workgroup, re-join the original domain, log out, login, log out, log in ... then the original server has a roaming profile pushed up to it.
We figure alright we can copy the profile, and move things to the new server ... well it only half works. Some settings are missing, others are half missing, Outlook is screwed anyways because it is local, and messing with the data file management is not so successful. We spent hours upon hours working with several machines. We had machines now not being able to log into any domain, windows 2000 machines were just broken, It was a mess. We have support calls into Microsoft awaiting responses. All sorts of issues ... and my Linux box is sitting there ... working ... waiting for us to dick around with the windows network and make things work. So I sit and wait now.
In between there I had the task of making some web changes to a site. I managed to get the FTP access, and downloaded the copy of the web site. Lets make a couple of small changes ... and then a couple of navigation panel / menu changes. That when I realize that every page (80) are static, and built with Front Page (also known as the code mangler). ;-) It was going to be insane to make those changes they requested. Even harder since I am a hand code developer.
For something like this ... it just doesn't make sense ... well IMHO Front Page doesn't make sense ... but I understand the need for stupid people to be able to create web sites ... oh wait ... no I don't ... HIRE A WEB DEVELOPER!
So I started searching for an OSS replacement that will let me work with these files spit out by front page. Kontour (KDE) did not work :(, although I did make a KDE attempt before looking elsewhere ... sorry Aaron. I tried Open Office Bluefish ... no go. And then I found NVU (en-view). The project is mostly sponsored by Linspire, and devel headed up by an ex-mozilla guy I believe. I checked for a package , and with a few clicks I had it installed on my kubuntu system.
I must say I was quite impressed. Not to mention it is fully cross platform (Linux, windows, Mac). So I am now recommending this to everyone who ever asks me what to use. It has word editing la Front Page, an HTML code editor, and everything just seems to work. The drop list menus didn't work, but they were also not mangled upon saving. The HTML is relatively clean ... although I am not sure if the code was just so poor from FP that this was the best it could do. The pages I changed turned out good with a few mouse clicks, cut and pasty type things and some table manipulation. All was good.
After some explanation of the time consumption for making menu changes to the client. They looked at my demo of what was added ... and said good enough. No need to waste valuable hours changing navigations unless absolutely necessary. Thank god I don't have to mess with the MS crap from Front Page.
So Marshall and Brooklyn came into town last week. They had a wedding on Sat night. We hung out at my place on Thurs for a while. Then I introduced them to Verns Pizza. We order a momma mia ... It weighs over 10 lbs! One pizza! 10 lbs! Marshall handed it to Brooklyn when we picked it up, and she almost fell over. She had trouble walking with it ... I found it humorous. Marshall was excited about it. The pieces stand about 3 inches high, and they are all toppings. He was even telling people at the bar about it the next night. I'm glad I could make Marshall's trip worth while. Brooklyn just giggled. I miss being in Victoria! Cheers, ¶ 12:49:00 PM
