The I.T. Nerve Center

The Bottom Line: make sure your Exchange security solution/anti-virus is operating properly. Details below.

Here's an oddball issue we had this morning.

Have you been pulling your hair out trying to get a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine deployed from a vCenter template to join a Windows Active Directory domain? Fear not, the solution is at hand and is realtively simple.

After reading the following thread on the VMware Communities site:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/251925

I found out that one needs to use the FQDN of the AD domain and NOT the NetBIOS name of the domain, and also the user principal name for a user with proper permissions to join computers to the domain.

We were having some weird DNS issues recently with our DNS servers at work. We recently upgrade one of our internal domain controllers with Active Directory-integrated DNS services to Windows Server 2008 R2. After the upgrade we found that DNS queries for some hosts did not resolve while others worked just fine. Another domain controller running non-R2 Windows Server 2008 would resolve the queries just fine.

One of our network engineers stumbled across a Microsoft KB article describing our exact problem:


http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832223


With the release of Fedora 13 about a week ago, I decided that my Fedora 11 workstation was getting a little long in the tooth and was due for an upgrade (not to mention the fact that Fedora 11 will go End-Of-Life [EOL] in about 2 weeks.).

I have a separate /home parition so I wasn't too worried about losing stuff, but I opted for an upgrade instead of a clean install. I backed up /etc just in case and dropped to runlevel 3 and ran the preupgrade-cli client that Fedora provides for upgrading. That process ran smoothly and it prompted me to reboot to being the upgrade.

Well I've been banging my head against the wall trying to get the Simplenews module for Drupal working properly after having to move hosting providers.

The issue was partly of my own desire to run PHP 5.2 on CentOS 5.x. After moving providers I wanted to get my new VPS ready to run Drupal 7 when it's released and it requires PHP 5.2.

UPDATE - May 25, 2010 - It appears that our Dell DSET problem is hardware-related. We seem to have some hardware problems which are causing the DSET utility to reboot our ESX host. If you are having this issue, you should call Dell and let them know (you probably are already in contact with Dell if you're running DSET).

We'll let you know what we find out with regard to our hardware.

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A friend of mine uses Samba and winbind on his CentOS Linux boxes for user and group information and Kerberos for authentication. He upgraded his domain controllers recently to Windows Server 2008 R2 and suddenly his winbind authentication broke.