Peter’s Soapbox

Fixing Active Directory Replication/FSMO Transfer issues

For several weeks, we’ve had some odd behavior at our internal network here at Paradigm. In typical shoemaker fashion, I have not looked at this issue because we’ve been busy taking care of client issues instead, but I finally decided I’d had enough and today was the day.

One of our domain controllers has been acting up. It would fail to process logons sometimes, not give us the right logon scripts, fail to allow joining to a domain, not deploy software, etc. - very annoying.

Since the first controller was acting up, I decided I would simply strip all of its functions and transfer them to the second one, which was fine, except that it was down to 200MB of free disk space and, as a result, still didn’t have Service Pack 2 installed. (Are you starting to see why I was putting this off?) A new virtual disk and a quick application of partedmagic fixed this issue, so I was able to resume working on the actual problem.

I followed the standard procedure to trasfer the FSMO roles from Microsoft, and everything went well until I tried to transfer the RID Operations Master role. This failed because the current RID master could not be found!

Fortunately, a little Googling revealed this article, which suspected the issue was related to the AD replicas being out of sync - something I had personally observed. I followed the steps and within moments, the AD replicas were again in sync and I was able to transfer all roles from the old server to the new.

Are spam magnet addresses worth it?

It’s a common practice to maintain email addresses such as info@example.com, sales@example.com, support@example.com, etc., addresses for Internet email domains. The theory is that these provide a generic address which can be used to contact a company if the sender doesn’t have a specific address to use.

The problem is that these addresses are what I refer to as “spam magnets.” These, as well as emails which are firstname@example.com, are likely targets for automated spam generators and, in my experience, in excess of 95% of the messages sent to these addresses are junk. Despite using a variety of spam filters, including SpamAssassin, GFI MailEssentials, or GMail’s, Outlook’s, or Thunderbird’s built in junk email filters, they still get swamped.

At the domains I control, we are removing these addresses altogether, and replacing them with “less guessable” replacements (like support-request@example.com, or sales-info@example.com) to make them a little less obvious. Overnight, the difference is noticeable.

What’s your opinion? Is there any value in maintaining these addresses anymore? Do people still blindly send email to these addresses, or has their usefulness fallen by the wayside?

Moving Grub from the MBR to the Install Partition

I realize this is nothing new to experienced Linux users, but I figured I’d document the process I used to move GRUB from the master boot record (MBR) of my notebook’s hard drive to the partition where I had Linux installed. I got the steps straight out of the Ubuntu forums as a result of a Google search for “move grub mbr.” The reason I am moving it is because, as I write this, I am using TrueCrypt to encrypt my entire Windows partition. To be able to boot Linux, I needed to move GRUB to make room for the TrueCrypt boot loader, since the MBR ain’t big enough for the both of them!

So, the process was:

1. Identify the partition in which Linux is installed.
   mount
   Look for the / partition, which, in my case, is /dev/sda2 (as /dev/sda1 is where Windows lives on this machine).
2. sudo grub-install /dev/sda2
   Voila! GRUB now lives in /dev/sda2 (as well as in the MBR).

Of course, there’s no real way to verify that this will work until you overwrite the MBR with something else, as GRUB still lives in the MBR, so effectively nothing has changed. In my case, I installed the TrueCrypt boot loader in the MBR. I then booted and selected my Linux partition from the TrueCrypt boot loader, which brought up my friendly GRUB boot menu! Now assured that things were working and that I could get back into Linux, even if I somehow hosed my Windows partition, I continued on with encrypting the entire partition.

Stop Stealing My Focus!

A few weeks ago, my friend Dave Yates announced in his podcast how he accidentally typed his IRC password into the chat room that he was in. I can easily see how this could happen, while someone was trying to identify themselves to the server. To prevent this, he could have taken a couple of steps to ensure that he was not typing into an active chat window, so that even if he had made the same typo, his password would not be exposed. Alternately, just being careful might have prevented this.

Then again, it might not have… Continue reading Stop Stealing My Focus!…

Installing Ubuntu Netbook Interface

I decided to give the (recently much-ballyhooed) Ubuntu Netbook Remix a try on one of my virtual machines. Here are the steps I followed to get it installed:

sudo su
cat >> /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/netbook-remix-team/ubuntu hardy main
Ctrl-C
apt-get update
apt-get install go-home-applet window-picker-applet maximus human-netbook-theme \ ume-launcher

Once installed, I logged off, then logged back in and wham! I was in the new interface. Except, I wanted to see what it would look like on a small screen. I changed my resolution to 800×480, and it fits great, but the fonts did not scale accordingly, so they were unreadable.

I figured the quick fix might be to uninstall the packages I added, set my resolution to 800×480, then install them, because presumably it would detect and choose the correct font size then.

That didn’t work so well. I was able to remove and re-install the packages, but now the new interface won’t come up, and all I have is a little GNOME desktop.