Author Archives: Ville Walveranta

Joining domain during Windows logon using VPN

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I didn’t know that this was even possible! I’m setting up a new laptop whose primary user account is also a domain account. I joined the laptop to the domain while at the office, but forgot to log in as the user and hence the user profile had not been created and the login credintials hadn’t been cached.  I needed to install software on the laptop and make it generally ready for use, but I needed the user account ready before then. What to do?

I came across an article in Tech Republic that provided the solution: Joining domain during Windows logon using VPN. Perfect! I got the user account created the logon credintials cached, and subsequently the software installed and the desktop made ready for the user!

CI Host: 40°C and Rising

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I spent most of today dealing with server emergencies. Last night we had severe thunderstorms pummeling through the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area with high winds, even few tornado alerts. No tornadoes were officially spotted in the city area, but winds and the lightning were strong enough to do some damage to the power grid. Servers were still working normally at night (I was up, watching the weather radar at 4am), but by the morning the dedicated servers I manage were unreachable. A quick call to CI Host’s tech support produced no help: a busy tone. Dialing repeatedly for the next half an hour didn’t make any difference, so there didn’t seem to be support available today. According to the recorded “current network status” at the company’s main phone number there were “no current network outages or other issues”. Yeah, right. Being only 20 minutes or so away from the facility I decided to go to investigate.

At the hosting company’s Bedford facility (“CDC-01″) chaos reigned supreme. All the doors were open, diesel generators were spewing fumes into the air (while being cooled by rigged water-hoses), and a mixture of technicians and concerned looking nerds were running around. Being one of the nerds, I joined in. There was no usual security, I strolled in to the lobby and chatted with one of the CI Host’s admins. Mains power was down as I had gathered from the diesel generators running outside of the building. Since I was there, I decided to take a look at the co-located servers on two different floors. Elevators were not working, of course, so it was up the stairs. Approaching the 2nd floor server room the temperature was increasing on every step — the generators were able to provide electricity for the servers, but not for the A/C!. Inside the room, the thermometer on the wall was displaying 90°F (32°C), but someone who had been there for several hours working on their server swore the thermometer was pegged to not go over the 90°F mark. My server’s internal temperature sensors were indicating 43°C for the case temperature.

After a few moments I decided to shut down the servers to prevent hardware damage.. the CPU temperatures were reasonable but the hard drives were running rather hot — normally the server room is some 30-40 degrees (C) cooler.

After shutting down the servers I was ready to leave, and picked up the phone to have someone to come to let me out. Line busy! Was I trapped in the sauna? No… I forgot there was no security today; all the doors were unlocked. So I decided to pay a visit to the third floor co-lo room where the A/C was supposed to be running and where another of the servers I manage is located. Once I made it there (through a staircase), I found just another hot room full of concerned nerds and their baking computers. I switched off the server there, too, and left.

According to the case temperature sensors the A/C started working again around 10:30 in the evening. I switched the servers back online through remote access.

With the dust settled, I’m starting to look for alternative co-lo facilities. While the power outage was not the fault of CI Host, their level (or lack of) disaster preparedness is disheartening. Firstly, it is very irresponsible to let the clients’ servers run in that kind of “torture test” environment — I think they should not provide electricity for the servers if there is no electricity for the A/C. This exact same thing happened few years back after a major storm, but early summer rather than in the spring, so the temperatures were even higher. Clearly there has been no improvement in the emergency power since that time.

The strongest contender at the moment is Colo4Dallas. I’m going to tour their facility in the next few days, and likely start planning a move there.

Farewell qmail, you’ve served well!

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In the fall of 2001 I set up a “general purpose” server (mail, web, database…) that is still in use today. At that time qmail was still a fairly attractive option even though there had already then not been updates from it’s author for about four years. There were no other major players at that time if one didn’t want to venture to the Sendmail realm (which I didn’t). Postfix and exim had major issues at that time while qmail had all the features available though an increasing number were patches written by various skilled programmers other than Dan Bernstein, author of qmail.

Some years passed by with no further updates to qmail, and already around 2004 exodus started from qmail to alternative clients, namely Postfix. And now, in 2008, it has been a decade since the last release (the original release, in fact) of qmail. In the coming months I have the operating system upgrade (to the newly released FreeBSD 7) coming up, and at the same time I’ll move away from qmail. The most likely replacement MTA is Postfix with dovecot. The details are still somewhat fuzzy; instructions to set up exactly what I’m thinking about don’t seem to be available anywhere, so lots of Googling and trial-and-error are to be expected. A how-to document that perhaps comes to closest is “HOWTO: Postfix, Dovecot, Jamm, OpenLDAP, and SASL” by Peter Lacey. But I don’t want to use Jamm. I get hives from using Java-based management tools, so there has to be something better, right? No? Well, I would also like to use MySQL for at least user data storage if not for message storage as well.

If you’re setting up something similar, or have something similar already up and running, I would like to hear about it. I will be posting details and how-to info here as the configuration of the new mail system is progressing.

Network Solutions follow-up

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The last of the two domains I registered on February 14 was finally live on Feb 24th.. after several calls to NSI technical support (and probably total of 2 hours on hold). Even though both of the domains were included in the initial trobule ticket on Feb 17th, only one of them was fixed and operational on the 19th. The second domain took additional five days to get online. Good going, NSI!

One thing I did learn, though: apparently it is possible to have the reservation deleted. In other words, if you or someone else looks up a domain name using NSI’s home page and they “do you a favor” by reserving the name for the next seven days “so that the scalpers can’t register it” (I can’t really see how that improves the situation — they have no way of knowing who checked the availability of the domain name initially), you can call NSI’s tech support and request the name to be removed from the reservation list immediately, thus opening it up for reservation at other registrars.

Stay away from NSI!

Network Solutions — Pay More, Get Less

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The two domains I was forced to register via Network Solutions (see the previous post) are still not live, two days later. I set the name servers correctly immediately after the domains were registered, created the corresponding name server records, and tested them. Then I waited. 24 hours.. no live domains. 48 hours.. no live domains! I called NSI’s technical support and, after about 30 minutes on hold, was told to preferably use their internal managed name servers, or if I really had to use my own name servers, reassign the name servers to the internal, then back to my own. In other words, “flip the switch” few times. Click. Click. Click. And then call them back some hours later if nothing happens. For this I had to pay $20 more per domain per year! Generally at GoDaddy the domains are live instantly, and at latest within an hour or two after registration. No fuss. I’m sure the same is true with many other good registrars out there, Network Solutions is just not one of them.