Archive for September, 2012

Visual Studio slow with network shares

Sunday, September 16th, 2012

I saw an email exchange about issues surrounding visual studio 2010 and using network shares for work. Previously, there wasn’t an issue with 2005. Microsoft was contacted and they basically said it’s a “feature.”

I did some searching on the Net and found an interesting discussion on a similar problem. As it’s explained; Microsoft .NET framework is not fully trusted but you can modify it. One person explained he followed the directions from another post.

It’s an interesting approach and it kind of makes sense depending how often visual studio does security checks.

In my situation, I passed on this information but the users thought it would not address their problem. Even if it doesn’t; this was interesting to read so I will keep it for future reference.

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Posted in Visual Studio, Windows | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

DsGetSiteName failed: Status = 1919 0x77f ERROR_NO_SITENAME

Sunday, September 16th, 2012

A user reported this error when he attempted to check the site name on a terminal server via the command: nltest /dsgetsite

A rather odd error as it usually appears on domain controllers and exchange servers. DNS was in order and there wasn’t an obvious error in the logs.

I checked which logon server was handling authentication for the terminal server via echo %LOGONSERVER% and found domain controllers in other countries were handling the authentication. I checked a couple other windows boxes and found the same errors.

This suggested the subnet for Active Directory was not configured or had a typo. I was not able to immediately verify this as AD is controlled by another group. I opened a trouble ticket and will wait for an answer.

I needed to solve the problem for the users who spotted this error. I found a registry entry would handle this issue.

From regedit; drill down the following:

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Netlogon\Parameters

Once you click Parameters, add a string word called “SiteName”

Add the current site name to the entry and exit regedit.

nltest /dsgetsite will now function as expected.

Not the best of solutions; but it at least it solved the user’s problem while the AD people figure out what is going on.

If I get an answer, I will update this post.

-update-

As suspected; a subnet range was missing from the AD configuration.  It was added and the correct site and logonservers were appearing.

 

Posted in Active Directory, Terminal Server, Windows | Tagged , | 2 Comments

How to lock a remote desktop session.

Friday, September 14th, 2012

An annoying little ritual we must all follow is the periodic password change. I had to change mine and I had a remote desktop session which of course wanted a session lock and password entry to update the credentials.

To lock a local session, you simply enter: windows+L

It works great with local sessions but it does nothing for remote desktop sessions.

For remote desktop; you can enter:  CTRL+ALT+INS but this may not work as it requires you to configure remote desktop for it to work.

* Open the Remote Desktop Connection utility and click Options.
* Open the Local Resources tab
* Change the value for Apply Windows key combinations option under 
  Keyboard to On the remote computer.
* This will send all key combinations to the remote desktop connection; 
  including Ctrl-Alt-Ins.

There is one more way which doesn’t require configuration changes.

Simply, enter: rundll32 user32.dll,LockWorkStation

After that a quick unlock and the credentials are updated.

Posted in Remote Desktop, Windows | Leave a comment

My Laptop display is upside down!

Thursday, September 13th, 2012

I was working on a virtual machine and while “wrestling” with a problem I found my display now showed my desktop upside down!  Really strange.

After playing around with a few key combinations, I found that ctrl-alt and the up arrow key corrected the problem.

Never knew this could happen.  Playing around with the arrow keys showed the display would go in all directions.

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What is the size of the drives on a Redhat computer.

Thursday, September 13th, 2012

I had to do an audit of several machines for possible inclusion to a compute farm. There was a requirement as to the physical size of the disks installed.

To find this information, you can use the fdisk command which will list the physical size and partition information. I had to use root to get this information.

# /sbin/fdisk -l

Disk /dev/cciss/c0d0: 146.7 GB, 146778685440 bytes
255 heads, 32 sectors/track, 35132 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8160 * 512 = 4177920 bytes

           Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/cciss/c0d0p1   *           1          64      261104   83  Linux
/dev/cciss/c0d0p2              65       20624    83884800   82  Linux 
swap / Solaris
/dev/cciss/c0d0p3           20625       35132    59192640   83  Linux

Disk /dev/cciss/c0d1: 146.7 GB, 146778685440 bytes
255 heads, 32 sectors/track, 35132 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 8160 * 512 = 4177920 bytes

           Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/cciss/c0d1p1   *           1       35132   143338544   83  Linux
#

As you can see in this example; there are two drives which are 146.7 GB in size.

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What version of Redhat am I running?

Thursday, September 13th, 2012

Every once in awhile I find myself asking the question of what version of Redhat is installed?

The login prompt tells you but if you access several systems, this information gets ignored.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client release 5.7 (Tikanga)
Kernel 2.6.18-274.el5 on an x86_64
login:

Rather then logging off and back in, you can review a file which will have the version information.

$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client release 5.7 (Tikanga)
$

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How to rename a Redhat system.

Thursday, September 13th, 2012

Every once in awhile there is a need to rename a Redhat box.  Normally, I would prefer to reload them but there are times where the setup must be retained or the setup is relatively clean and reusable.

Renaming a Redhat box is easy.

1) vi /etc/sysconfig/network

NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=computername
GATEWAY=xxx.xxx.xxx.254
NISDOMAIN=domain.com

2) change the entry for HOSTNAME= to the new hostname.

NETWORKING=yes 
HOSTNAME=newcomputername
GATEWAY=xxx.xxx.xxx.254 
NISDOMAIN=domain.com

3) change the system names in /etc/hosts

There have been times where the hosts file remains unchanged.  Edit the file for the new names.

4) reboot the system and the new name should take effect.

Don’t forget to update DNS and NIS!

 
 

Posted in Linux | Leave a comment

How to check physical RAM size with Redhat

Tuesday, September 11th, 2012

Company acquisitions always create “fun” when it comes to incorporating their usable equipment into the network.  The question of RAM will always get asked as small companies don’t always purchase large amounts of RAM for workstations and servers.

If you have a Redhat system and need to know the amount of physical ram, you can always look at meminfo.

Simply log into the system in question and enter : cat /proc/meminfo

The first two lines will answer your memory questions.

$ cat /proc/meminfo

 MemTotal:      16407060 kB
 MemFree:       12975592 kB
 Buffers:         228412 kB
 Cached:         2772496 kB
 SwapCached:           0 kB
 Active:         1248472 kB
 Inactive:       1927324 kB
 HighTotal:            0 kB
 HighFree:             0 kB
 LowTotal:      16407060 kB
 LowFree:       12975592 kB
 SwapTotal:      8385920 kB
 SwapFree:       8385920 kB
 Dirty:              236 kB
 Writeback:            0 kB
 Mapped:          203428 kB
 Slab:            221056 kB
 CommitLimit:   16589448 kB
 Committed_AS:    343556 kB
 PageTables:        7692 kB
 VmallocTotal: 536870911 kB
 VmallocUsed:     267100 kB
 VmallocChunk: 536603263 kB
 HugePages_Total:      0 kB
 HugePages_Free:       0 kB
 Hugepagesize:      2048 kB

$

Posted in Linux | 1 Comment