To allow users in an NT domain to use resources on a Windows 2003 domain, you need to set up a one way external trust. In NT-style language, this means that the Windows 2003 domain (trusting) trusts the NT domain (trusted). In User Manager for the NT domain, select policies->trust relationships, and add a trusting […]

Getting Started sar (System Activity Reporter) is an oldy but a goody that should be in your bag of tricks and installed on every *nix system you administer. It collects and logs system data at regular intervals, allowing analysis of system actity historically, trending, baselining and much much more. It comes as part of the […]

Use the pstree command to list processes in a tree format. It will show the process owners. Default is to start the root of the tree at init: u-1@srv-1 u-1 $ pstree init-+-3*[agetty] |-ahc_dv_0 |-bdflush |-crond—2*[sh—perl—sh-+-grep] | `-iget-quote] |-cupsd |-devfsd |-keventd |-khubd |-kjournald |-kscand |-ksoftirqd_CPU0 |-kswapd |-kupdated |-lockd |-login—bash—startx—xinit-+-X | `-sh-+-icewm-+-Eterm—bash—ssh | | |-Eterm—bash—pstree | […]

Using sar Part 2 – Making it Play In Part 1 of this article, we looked at basic invocation of sar and how it works. In Part 2 of this article, we’ll use sar to look at disk, network, and CPU activity. In Part 3, we’ll look at the options available to report on the […]

We have some Windows 2000 servers we administer that are authenticating against some NT domain controllers. You can set up your Windows 2000 servers to synchronize time with an outside source: C:\>net time /querysntp This computer is not currently configured to use a specific SNTP server. The command completed successfully. For a list of NTP […]

Have you ever had a user call you, and the thought of guiding them through running ipconfig or winver is daunting? Hail Support is a program that users can run to submit a support request. The program runs identically on MacOS X (Intel and PowerPC), Windows (NT and 2000+), and GNU/Linux (GTK 2) systems, and […]

A couple things that really annoy me are the default vim settings where words get chopped in the middle and paragraphs don’t display correctly. I’m sure there is a reason for the defaults, but here is how you change this while in vim: :set linebreak :set display+=lastline If you put this in .vimrc in your […]

Slipstreaming is the application of service pack files into the original install files from the distribution media so that you can point to one location when adding components to Windows Server 2003. The command with Service Pack 2, and probably others is: sp2 /integrate:c:\win2003std\ sp2 is the name of the service pack .exe, and win2003std […]

Beware! Make sure you have a backup of the registry and are 100% confident of the syntax of the entries before you change anything. If you mess up, your NT system may never boot again, and you will have to reinstall NT. Try to tweak the registry indirectly whenever you can through control panel/services, system […]

We were recently configuring AIDE, and didn’t pay attention to the defaults in the configuration when we compiled it, and didn’t know where aide.db.new was going to after running aide initially. Sure, lsof would work while to porgram is running; however, we needed to know what files were open while the program was running. Strace […]

Your servers are all monitored with Nagios. Splunk is constantly eating your logs, hence why we’ve added some alternative to splunk here. You’ve got your EPO switch, your UPS, your temperature sensors and surveillance camera. The cables are tied up as neat as a Mouseketeer’s pigtails, remote management interfaces are quietly waiting for a server […]