Category Archives: Sysadmin

Authenticating Windows against Open Directory

Posted on June 30, 2008 by Kamil Kisiel

First of all, apologies to everyone for the long time between posts, I’ve been suffering from a slight shortage of inspiration lately. However, today I figured out something quite cool. It is possible to authenticate Windows (2000, XP, and possibly … Continue reading →

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An exchange analogy

Posted on April 16, 2008 by Kamil Kisiel

A funny analogy posted on slashdot. If the same method that exchange/outlook uses to store email were used in the real world as a paper filing system: Every document is translated into Greek, and the original is burned. Then they … Continue reading →

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HOWTO: Make a Nagios Dashboard widget in 50 seconds.

Posted on April 7, 2008 by Kamil Kisiel

Do you use Nagios to monitor your network? Do you use a mac? Do you think it would be handy to have a Dashboard widget showing your Nagios overview panel? Well, it’s quite easy to do. Check out this screencast … Continue reading →

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Why Gentoo?

Posted on April 6, 2008 by Kamil Kisiel

Prompted by the editor of DistroWatch.com Gentoo developer Ben de Groot recently appealed to the Gentoo community to post their reasons for using Gentoo. As a big Gentoo fan and long time I user, I feel inclined to respond. I … Continue reading →

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Leopard AFP: Not production ready

Posted on April 3, 2008 by Kamil Kisiel

The other day we downgraded our Leopard file server back to Tiger. Luckily we had a spare XServe available for this purpose. For a detailed description of the problem, see my previous post. I can offer this additional information: The … Continue reading →

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AFP + Directory Services on Leopard = Disaster

Posted on March 30, 2008 by Kamil Kisiel

All it takes is a cursory search on some Apple discussion boards or mailing lists for “AFP crash” or “DirectoryService crash” to turn up a load of discussions on the topic. The summary of the problem is basically this: The … Continue reading →

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Mounting an HFS+ volume from Linux

Posted on March 7, 2008 by Kamil Kisiel

Yesterday I spent some time figuring out how to mount a snapshot of one of our Mac server’s HFS+ volumes from our iSCSI SAN.There doesn’t appear to be any clear instructions for how to use an HFS+ formatted device in … Continue reading →

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Forcing a zone retransfer in Bind on OS X Leopard Server

Posted on February 14, 2008 by Kamil Kisiel

Recently we started migrating to OS X 10.5. Of course the process is fraught with many challenges, and lots of things are done differently. For example, now views are used by default in DNS. This makes some things a bit … Continue reading →

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VMWare Linux Guest Clock Synchronization

Posted on January 31, 2008 by Kamil Kisiel

One thing many home users of VMWare might not know or care much about is clock synchronization. However, in a networked environment, clock synchronization is an essential fact of life. In particular, some protocols such as Kerberos pretty much depend … Continue reading →

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Installing VMWare Tools on Kernel 2.6.22

Posted on November 19, 2007 by Kamil Kisiel

If you’re trying to install VMWare Tools on a Linux machine with a recent kernel (I was using 2.6.22, but this affects a couple revisions below as well), some kernel API changes prevent the tools from installing. You’ll end up … Continue reading →

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