homespun

Mounting CIFS shares in fstab - RHEL5

There's a number of references to mounting cifs shares in /etc/fstab out there. I thought the swerdna article was very helpful. Although the author talks about OpenSuSE, it was close enough for most of my RHEL5 needs.

I ran into the problem of a late-starting network. I tried the techniques in the Troubleshooting section, but none of them seemed to work. Although man mount talked about the _netdev option, it didn't work on my system - RHEL 5.7 - and gave me an error during boot.

I also tried the trick about using a crontab entry - also failed to work. The last workaround was to use after.local to run mount -a. However, RedHat doesn't use after.local. The answer was to put the command in /etc/rc.d/rc.local. This file does the same thing for RedHat that after.local does for OpenSuSE.

Lastly, I needed lighttpd to start using a document root on the CIFS share. In short, the daemon wouldn't start if the mount wasn't present. So, I added service lighttpd restart after the mount command in /etc/rc.d/rc.local. Worked like a charm!

Bonding NICs in RHEL 5.5

I ran into something yesterday. I installed RHEL 5.5, then set about bonding two nics together. When the bond was set to a static IP in a different LAN segment, the server wouldn't finish booting. It was somewhat responsive to keyboard input (Enter caused the screen to advance one line) but that was about it.

I thought the install was bad, so I re-ran the installation. As long as the nics weren't bonded, the server booted fine. I installed updates from the RH repos, etc etc. But as soon as I bonded the nics again, it wouldn't reboot.

I racked the server, plugged the nics into the proper subnet - and the thing booted fine.

Install Raritan Multi-Platform Client on Win 7

New job, new duties, new tools. Here we're using KVMs by Raritan, which can be managed remotely using the Multi-Platform Client. So, I went to the Raritan website and downloaded the latest client. Unzipped the file in C:\Downloads\StandaloneMulti-PlatformClientv6.0.9\

The key to getting this installed is to make sure you are doing it with Administrator privileges. Here's what I did. Click the Start button. Type in cmd, then hit ctrl-shift-enter to start the command line as Administrator. Acknowledge the User Access Control command elevation (press Yes). Using the command line, go to the unzip directory and run the following command:

C:\Downloads\StandaloneMulti-PlatformClientv6.0.9> java -jar mpc-installer.MPC_6.0.9.5.3.jar

and follow the prompts. You should be good to go.

Increasing volume under LVM2

Generally, I like to tell a story when I make a post. Today's story is about running out of space on our production mail server. Here is the background. We're running Novell Groupwise on a SLES10, OES2 server serving a small business. There are about 70 mailboxes in the system. We're also highly virtualized, so the server is a virtual machine running as a guest on VMware ESX.

There are two virtual hard drives. The 1st contains the OS, and the 2nd is in a Logical Volume Group. Turns out that was a lucky choice. The 2nd drive was originally provisioned as 110 GB. I knew the drive was getting full, but the last time I checked it had a few GBs free. Yesterday, some urgent system messages were sent to the administrator email address, informing me that the Quick Index couldn't run because the remaining space was 0000 MB. Oops.

Linksys PSUS4 and Vista printing

UPDATE: well, this only worked once. The next time I rebooted, Vista couldn't find the printer again... What a drag. Looks like I won't be using the PSUS4 any longer...

Well, I had purchased a small Linksys printer server (the PSUS4 ver 1.1) awhile ago and it had worked on my old XP Home PC - although it actually didn't support the all-in-one Epson CX6000 completely. Nonetheless, installation had been painless and XP had readily recognized the network printer.

However, I recently bought a new PC that has Vista Home Premium installed on it. Now the fun begins. I plugged my old HP Deskjet 842C into the PC and Vista installed the drivers right away. Then I installed the print server and plugged the printer into it. I installed the Linksys software that came with the device and the setup utility could see both the device and printer. I gave the print server a static IP address rather than going with the default DHCP setting. However, Vista did not automatically detect a new network printer.

It's always a good plan to reboot a Windows PC when you mess with networking - so that's what I did next. After a reboot, Vista still couldn't "see" the networked printer. So, I did what everyone should do at this point... Search Google.

Here's a solution that worked for me.

1. Open the Control Panel in Vista. Under "Hardware and Sound", click on Printer.
2. Click on "Add a Printer."
3. Click on "Add a Local Printer".
4. Under "Use an existing port:", click on an entry that looks like this: "\\Lk38ce86\p1 (Client Side Rendering Provider)"
5. Click Next and choose your printer manufacturer and model - mine was HP DeskJet 840C/841C/842C/843C.
6. Click Next and Use the driver that's already installed - Remember, I directly attached the printer and installed drivers already.
7. Print the test page to convince yourself it's working and then click Close.

Good luck!

Cleaning viruses from a Dell E510

Recently, I was asked to remove some viruses from a Dell E510. The E510 comes with Windows Media Center installed on it. In addition, the E510 provides a RAID 1 array using technology supplied by Intel. (Intel® Matrix Storage Technology).

In a typical job like this, I take the infected drive and slave it to my PC. Then I scan it with several of the well-known virus and spyware scanners. Occasionally, I'll mount the infected registry on my PC and remove nasty items directly.

But with the array, I was itching to try something different. I am experimenting with antivirus rescue CDs. Turns out that there are free rescue CDs from a lot of vendors. I downloaded free versions from Avira, BitDefender, F-Secure, and AVG. They all are based upon Linux, albeit different flavors. This isn't a review of the rescue disks - maybe I'll do that in some other post.

I booted the PC from the AVG disk and was pleased to see that it recognized the array and was able to mount it. It also configured the NIC card and was able to download updates from the internet. I scanned the PC and AVG recognized 9 viruses and a rootkit! I wasn't expecting that.

I booted the PC from the F-Secure CD and was disappointed to find that it couldn't recognize the array, so I was unable to use this product. The Avira CD also failed to mount the array. However, the BitDefender Cd performed much like the AVG product - it mounted the array, downloaded updates from the internet and scanned the PC.

OK, I said I wasn't going to review the antivirus CDs, but I couldn't resist at least mentioning how they performed with this system.

Back to the AVG scan - AVG said that the rootkit was concealed in the iaStor.sys driver file. This was bad news - remember that I said the Dell E510 uses Intel array technology? Guess what driver controls array access - yes, it's iaStor.sys. So remove the driver and the OS won't boot.

Oh well, there's no hope for it. Using the AVG product, I deleted the iaStor.sys file. However, all is not lost. I took one of the disks out of the Dell and mounted it on my PC. RAID1 is basically drive mirroring, so I found that I could read the single drive. I went to the <drive>:\i386\ folder and extracted a new copy of the iaStor.sys driver and put it back in the \windows\system32\drivers\ folder. Then I mounted the 2nd drive and did the same thing.

I replaced the two drives in the Dell, made sure the array was OK by booting it once, then booted it from the AVG disk for another round of scanning. I deleted all of the infected files reported by the scanner, then rebooted the Dell. I thought I was finished when the array wouldn't boot.

However, I wasn't ready to quit. I mounted one of the drives on my PC and ran CHKDSK /r on it. Two files were recovered, file0001.chk and file0002.chk. Then I attached the other drive and repeated the procedure. The same files were recovered. File0001.chk had a disk size of 0kb. Not too interesting, so I deleted it. File0002.chk was a binary file of some sort. I guessed it had to be a missing driver, which would explain why the PC wouldn't boot.

A search for some hex editors turned up XN Resource Editor. It is a little dated but it worked like a champ. When I used it to open the file fragment, it told me that the original filename was iaStor.sys. Looks like I hadn't quite gotten things right the 1st time around.

I followed the same procedure as above to put new copies of iaStor.sys in the correct system folders. I put both disks back into the Dell and held my breath as it booted.... successfully!! The Dell rebuilt the array this time and I waited until that completed. One last scan confirmed that the PC was now clean.