So for the record… (Part 1)

Yesterday was a very very bad day on the sysadmin front.  A mistake which I made during the setting up and configuration of an iMac, the day before, resulted in one of the longest system downtimes I had ever to get myself out of, the very next day.

What follows is a description of events in chronological order, of the cause, effect and resolution of one of the most difficult to solve problems I ever encountered.  Starting with:-

• The iMac.  We have acquired a bunch of iMacs for use in the company and one of the customisations we are implementing on every unit is the integration into our own Windows Server Active Directory setup.  The setup on the iMac in question was no different from all the others, except for one particular detail: by mistake I entered the Domain Controller’s name in the place where you should set the workstation’s NetBios name. This happened at about 1600HRS.  It’s also fair to note that no side-effects were noticed at first.  In fact I could still normally and users were unaware of any problems.
• Tuesday Morning. Also known as the ‘day when all hell broke loose’.  Coming to work I found that users couldn’t connect to the shares on the server.  Said server was behaving erratically.  Shares were offline, logging into it took ages, DNS service installed on machine was offline too.
• Issues affecting resolution. A major problem was the server’s login time.  It was literally taking ages – about 40 minutes from the moment you enter the admin password to the time you actually see the desktop.  This meant that every reboot and continuation of problem solving practices where taking longer than usual.

It is interesting to note that one of the symptoms that was encountered had to do with DNS forward lookup zones stored in AD.  These were not accessible throughout the whole problem.  A noted bug in Windows, specifically this one here mentions this and even the long login times as symptoms.  It had thrown me off track completely until I realised it was not the solution I was looking for.

Anyway, to cut the long story short, the iMac had replaced the server’s SID with it’s own, thereby causing an endless source of problems for the Active Directory’s authentication and replication mechanisms.

Eventually most of these problems were resolved by removing the offending iMac from AD, and re-establishing the DC’s as the owner of the SID.  This was accomplished by logging into the server and running the netdom.exe and changing the Kerberos password for the machine’s domain account.

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Got a load of new iMacs at work, and…

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Lately..

Been doing some serious tutoring on C#.  Why? I have this idea of one day making my way to development fame and richness, and after trying out most programming mainstream languages, I’ve finally zoned in on C#.  It’s nice, fast and up to now I’ve managed to get it.

For anyone interested, Microsoft has been generous enough to release a free version of C# here.  It’s the works.  Got everything you want to get you up and started.  And if C# does not really tickle your fancy, there’s also free versions of Visual Basic, C++ and even Web Developer.

As to actually learning C#, I have been following a book from SAMS called Teach Yourself Visual C# 2008 in 24 Hours: Complete Starter Kit which I recommend wholeheartedly.  The author is excellent at explaining the language with valid and useful examples.  It’s also the first book I encountered where the ‘Hello World’ exercise is not even considered except in a passing comment!

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OpenID

Trying to get openID to work with a website.. Somehow, it's not as easy as it's purported to be...

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So many languages, so little time!

SQL, Java, VB, C#, Python, Ruby… and then HTML, PHP, CSS, XML, XHTML Jeez!!!! The list goes on and on and on.  Is it possible that in this day and age of Interconnected Systems, compatibility and standard compliance there cannot be one simple uniform way of doing things?

I’m currently trying to juggle my Sysadmin work with trying to learn at least 2 of the above.  I need to become SQL savvy in order to start helping out the DBA at least in the more mundane tasks.  At the same time, I wish to learn a language to be able to automate at least some of MY more mundane tasks.

That is where the problem starts.  I like C#, but the need for the Dot.Net framework on every pc that needs to run the executable creates more management issues.  CLI scripting is fast and ubiquitous.  Alas!  The standard Windows CLI will never as powerful as even the most basic of Linux Shells.

Enter the new Powershell app created on purpose for use on Windows PCs.  Ah! but someone decided - for security purposes, mind! – that Powershell scripts cannot be just executed ad hoc. No no, there certificates to be dealt with, or else you have to force Powershell to run unsigned scripts.

And so on and so forth…  Java is really a universe of its own – the apps you create with it somehow feel different; VB: same issues as C#; Python – I’m actually trying to give it a good go: looks promising.

In the meantime, it’s back to the SQL tutorials for me.

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Well what do you know!

I'm typing this from my Nokia N95. Finally found a way to post from my mobile, so now I really have no excuse not to post. :) let's see if this thingy actually works, after all.

Sent from my phone using trutap

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Thought for the day

How come 90% of the people I have on Twitter are all New-media entrepreneurs?  What IS a New-media Entrepreneur!?

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