Stephen Reese

Resizing Xen guest parition based filesystems

This post assumes you are running the Xen hypervisor and are using a partitions based filesystems for you Xen guest you would like to re-size. I have previously written on Installing Xen on CentOS 6 from source and another blog entry that describes how to create partition based Xen guests …

Creating Debian guests on Xen using parition based filesystem

This guide describes how to create a filesystem and guest for the Xen hypervisor. This assumes you have a working Xen install with Dom U. I have described setting up a Xen hypervisor from source in another posted titled Installing Xen on CentOS 6 from source. Create a partition to …

Installing Xen on CentOS 6 from source

I recently had a need to install Xen hypervisor on CentOS and most of the guides covered using the package maintainers version. Further, RHEL distributions favor using KVM. I did come across HowTo: Install XEN Dom0 on CentOS 6 from source but the domain was blocked (Google cache made quick …

Creating VMware VMDK files from DD images using Live View

While watching some Florida football today I decide to figure out how to mount/run a DD image in VMware Workstation. My image mounting skills were a little lacking so Google it was. I found a ton of great examples that seemed like they should work but the steps seemed …

Setting up maildrop with Courier MTA

Setting up maildrop with Courier MTA Before I get into the maildrop here are a few notes to myself for setting up Courier. Before running ./configure you should add ssl bin directory to your path To receive local mail indifferent of caps touch {your/etc/courier/dir}locallowercase Account postmaster …

God Mode - Give Windows users an easier way to destory their computers

Windows 7 and Vista (latter can be buggy) has an interesting feature that allows quick access to allow kinds of administrative tools. To create God Mode simply create a new folder on your desktop and name it the following: GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} Now you will have a quicker way to change …

Installing Sun Java on Debian Lenny

The Sun Java JDK is available in the Debian Lenny non-free repository, therefore you must modify /etc/apt/sources.list: $ sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list Add non-free to the Debian Lenny repositories: deb http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ lenny main non-freedeb-src http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ lenny main non-free …

Debian Backup Script

The script is located here. It can update the software repository, backup the file system, and send the backup to another machine via SSH. Feel free to try it out and let me know if you have any issues. Shell script to update Debian system via APT. Backup systems and …

Mounting drives/volumes read-only in Microsoft Windows (Vista)

I needed to analyze a drive for a company that suspects an ex-employee may have taken corporate material (training exercise or else I would use a hardware write blocker and follow a chain of custody). I do not have a write blocker and rather then fire up a copy of …

Converting Microsoft OS to VMWare Guest

A friend had two notebooks running Microsoft XP Home and Professional editions in which the notebooks were no longer functional but the hard drives were in good shape so I recommend running them in a VM guest. I knew I could use VMWare converter tool that was freely available and …

Converting Microsoft Vista from one version to another

A desktop that I had which was used for work recently would not activate because it required connectivity to the companies KMS server which I would connect to via VPN to complete but since I no longer work there that is out of the question. Since the Vista OS was …

Disable fast user switching on Vista

In Vista (unlike Windows XP), Fast User Switching works if you’re on a network domain. To turn off Fast User Switching, choose Start, type gpedit.msc in the Search box, and then press Enter. (If a security prompt appears, type an administrator password or confirm the action.) In the …

Kicking a user off a linux system

This might break something the user is doing. You have been warned. last -i1 baduser | awk '{print $3;exit}' | xargs -p --replace iptables -A INPUT -s {} -j drop if [ "`who | grep $1`" != "" ] ; then sid=`ps -jU $1 | awk '{print $3}' | tail -1`" kill -HUP $sid echo "$1 was logged in …

Authenicating kerberos against active directory

Your /etc/pam.d/system-auth is created with the command “authconfig” on a RHEL5 machine though you may have to manually edit it with other distributions: #%PAM-1.0# This file is auto-generated. # User changes will be destroyed the next time authconfig is run. auth required /lib/security/$ISA/pam_env.so …

Configuring sendmail to accept mail

if you get ( doing a netstat -an more ) tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:25 0.0.0.0:\* LISTEN Then your sendmail server is configured to accept connections from localhost only. To change this behavior, you need to edit /etc/mail/sendmail.mc. Find the line that starts …


Running processes in the background on Linux

If you just want your program to simply run in the background, launch it with a “&” at the end of the command from the shell. However, if it expects to use stdout, stdin, or stderr, it will stop — so these must all be redirected to files or pipes. This will …

Getting Samba to play nicely with SELinux on RHEL

This helpful bit was written by Don Meyer. I am a little too stubborn for a quick fix like this, so I went the route of adding the specific rules needed to allow SMB/Winbindd to run without throwing AVC errors. I am doing this on RHEL4 boxes, which install …