First, you need to add Oracle to your MyUW.

1. Browse to MyUW: http://myuw.washington.edu/
2. Log in.
3. Click the ‘Change Content’ link in the upper right corner of ‘MyFrontPage’
4. Click ‘Browse & Choose’
5. Check the box for: ‘Other Calendars - Requires an account on C&C managed Oracle Calendar server.’
6. Click ‘Save Your Changes’
7. Click the ‘MyFrontPage Tab’ link in the upper left.
8. Click the ‘Oracle Calendar’ link under the ‘Other Calendars’ Heading.

You are now viewing your personal calendar. To add the group schedule, follow these directions:

1. In the top row of icons, click the icon that looks like a little person standing next to a purple calendar. If you hover the mouse cursor over this icon, you’ll notice that it says ‘View Agendas’.
2. Click the radio button next to ‘Resource search’
3. In the ‘Search’ box, in our case its ‘coecee’
4. Click ‘Find’
5. Click the Shed-Transnow in the box on the left, then click ‘Add to Favorites’
6. Click ‘Ok’ in the upper right
7. In the drop down at the top of the page, select your group agenda to view the group calendar.

Next time, just log into MyUW, click the ‘Oracle Calendar’ link, and select the group agenda from the drop down box.

The problem: NT AUTHORITY will shutdown your computer in one minute, because services.exe has crashed.

You can halt the shutdown, if you are an administrator, by clicking Start/Run, and typing ’shutdown -a’, but the computer is basically hosed at this point and won’t let you do anything anyway.

If you check the event viewer, you’ll see events 1085 and 1202:

Source: Userenv
Event ID: 1085

The Group Policy client-side extension Security failed to execute. Please look for any errors reported earlier by that extension.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Source: SceCli
Event ID: 1202

Security policies were propagated with warning. 0×428 : An exception occurred in the service when handling the control request.

For best results in resolving this event, log on with a non-administrative account and search http://support.microsoft.com for “Troubleshooting Event 1202’s”.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

You’ll probably also see this message:

The Cause: This started happening on about 60% of Windows XP Machines that I had completely removed from a Windows Server 2003 AD Domain. I believe the shutdown issue is occurring because the workstations are mistakenly trying to update their group policy from the domain, which they are no longer in contact with. This causes services.exe to crash, which instructs the computer to shutdown.

The Fix!

1. Click Start/Run. Type ‘regedit’ and press enter.
2. Browse to the following folder: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Group Policy\History.
3. Delete the Key: DCName. It is probably pointing at one of the old domain controllers.
4. Also delete any sub-folder under History. There will probably be one to four folders, and they will all be named a really long string of seemingly random letters.
5. Close RegEdit.
6. Click Start/Run. Type ‘cmd’ and press enter.
7. Type: ‘gpupdate /force’ The computer not locking up right now is a good start.
8. To verify that this worked correctly, go into the event viewer and clear the application logs, then restart. View the application log, and the two errors which I’ve forwarded to you will not appear.

There are gui’s for configuration, but you have to find them and install them, when you could just edit the files in half the time. These instructions are for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) but will probably work on most distros with IPTables, on which you wish to host Samba (SMB) shares. Yay for Windows Fileserving!

The ports you need to open are 137:udp, 138:udp, 139:tcp.

Edit the IPTables config file with:

sudo vi /etc/sysconfig/iptables

Then add these lines, the ruleset name to match your other rules

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state –state NEW -m udp -p udp –dport 137 -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state –state NEW -m udp -p udp –dport 138 -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state –state NEW -m tcp -p tcp –dport 139 -j ACCEPT

Save the file and exit, then restart your firewall to load the new rules with:

sudo /etc/init.d/iptables restart

Done!

Well I installed and updated Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) AS, and installed PHPMyAdmin.

But wait! PHPMyAdmin says:

The mbstring PHP extension was not found and you seem to be using a multibyte charset. Without the mbstring extension phpMyAdmin is unable to split strings correctly and it may result in unexpected results.

I need this mbstring package. How do I get it? Well it’s apparently really simple. People in the I-net’s say: “Just install the php-mbstring’s package”. Well that sounds easy, but where can I download the rpm? I tried a bunch of rpm’s, to no avail. I tried to find an apt rpm, so that I could use apt-get to install it on RHEL, but NO. I went into the up2date gui a few times, pleading with it to install this package, as it surely knows where to get it. But it doesn’t let you search for packages.

The solution, use up2date from RHEL’s command line to download the php-mbstring package. Open a terminal, and run:

up2date -i php-mbstring

Now open up PHPMyAdmin again, and it won’t complain.

Apparently Red Hat Enterprise Linux is free to use at the University of Washington! The only cavat being that you must use UW’s Servers to get updates using up2date. The setup isn’t too bad if you follow the Instructions. CAC even says they might help you out if you have Linux problems, and they’re more likely to help you if you use RHEL, as that’s what they use in house.

That’s right, I use VI, not EMACS! Here’s my .vimrc:

set nocompatible
set tabstop=2
set visualbell

That tabstop bit is magic.

My department uses Symantec Ghost 8.0 to remotely Image client computers.

The console is on our domain controller, and each computer needs a client installed. The client is transparent to the user, the only way to see it is to go to add/remove programs.

Install the Ghost Client on the Computer to Image

1. Log into the client machine as Administrator
2. Put the Ghost 8.0 disk in the client machine
3. Click ‘Install Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition’
4. Click ‘Install Console Client’
5. Click Next, accept the license agreement, etc
6. Name of the Ghost Server: I used the short windows name for my domain controller, and it worked.
7. Click Next, Install, Next, Next, Finish. It detects the network card, and asks you to restart
8. Somewhat amazingly, you are now done. Let the PC restart. You can log in, or leave it logged out, but do make sure it’s turned on.

I said that it’s amazing the client installed so easily because the process to actually create an image is not at all intuitive. Or I just don’t have the right backing up paradigm. You’ll see in a moment.

Using the Ghost Console to Create an Image

1. Log in to the computer with the console installed. In this case it’s my domain controller.
2. Click Start, Programs, Symantec Ghost, Ghost Console
3. If you double-click ‘Machine Groups’, then ‘Default’, you should notice that your client PC is in this list. Life is good.

Creating an Image Definition

1. Now you need to Create an Image Definition. Double-Click ‘Configuration Resources’, then ‘Images’
2. Right-Click the background on the right and click ‘New Image’
3. Type a name for this image. Try to label it with the Make and Model of the computer, something meaningful to you.
4. Make sure ‘Image is located on the Client Machine’ is unchecked
5. Click ‘Browse’, and select a location for the actual image file. I select the Data Server, so ghost doesn’t save huge stuff to our domain controller.
6. type in a filename, including .gho at the end. Hit ok
7. Image File definition created!

You are not done YET! Incredably, you still have to:

Create a New Image Create Task

1. Double Click ‘Tasks’ on the left.
2. Right-Click the white background on the right
3. Click ‘New Image Create Task’
4. Click ‘Execute Immediately’. Because you know, you want to do it right away.
5. Click ‘Browse’ in the ‘Source Machine’ box.
6. Double-Click ‘Default’, then single-click the name of the PC you previously installed the Client on.
7. Click ‘OK’
8. Click ‘Browse’ in the ‘Image Name’ Box.
9. Double-click ‘Images’, single-click the image you just created
10. Click ‘OK’
11. Check ‘Remove machine from Domain…’ at the bottom. If you are on a Domain
12. Click ‘OK’
13. Done! Now wait a long time; things should be getting underway. Your client PC will shut itself down and restart into this ghost client deal. It requires no intervention, just let it do it’s thing.

If you are like me, you tend to click things just to see how they work. Sometimes they don’t work. At all. If you’ve mucked up the IP, vlan, etc settings and the Cisco ASDM can’t get into the device, it’s time for more desparate measures.

There is a button on the back of the device that says ‘Reset’. This button appears to be entirely for looks. I think will help you fix the problem as much as this button will:

Instead, you’ll need to use the Console Port!

1. hook up the blue console cable to your serial port, plugging the other end into ‘Console’ port on the ASA 5505. The console port looks like a network jack, but it’s above the usb ports.
2. Use hyperterminal, click Start, Programs, Accessories, Communications, Hyperterminal, create a connection on Com1 using the terminal settings:
• Bits per second: 9600
• Data bits: 8
• Parity: None
• Stop bits: 1
• Flow control: None
3. After you open your connection, press enter a couple times, and you should get a prompt like: ‘ciscoasa>’, or ‘nameofyourdevice>’
4. type ‘ena’ to go to enable mode. Enter the password, or just press enter if there is no password set.
5. type ‘config t’
6. type ‘config factory-default’
7. hit spacebar when the ‘more’ thing happens. You want to get back to the prompt that looks like: ‘ciscoasa(config)#’
8. type ‘reload save-config noconfirm’
9. make sure that the outside line is plugged into port zero, and your pc is plugged into any of the ports 1-7.
10. The Cisco ASA has been reset to factory settings. DHCP is enabled on the cisco device, and it’s internal IP address is now 192.168.1.1!

If you’ve never used Plone before, the easiest way to get started is to install it on your windows desktop. Plone installs it’s own webserver, which can be confusing if you’re trying to install it on a server which already has Apache or IIS running.

1. Download Plone for Windows.
2. Make sure you are logged in as the Administrator.
3. Run the installer. The installer asks you to create a username and password. This will be used to access Plone, it is not creating a Windows User.
4. Done! Now find Plone in your start menu, and run it.
5. Click the ‘Start’ button to start Plone
6. Now you should be able to browse to localhost to see your Plone install
7. You can log in with the user you created during the installation process.

After I installed, I tried to create a user and found that I couldn’t because Plone could not send any email. There is two problems here: first, I needed to tell it what to use for an outgoing mail server, and I you’ll also need to set the email address of the administrator.

To set Plone’s ‘From’ email address

1. Log in using the user you created during the installation.
2. Click ‘Preferences’ in the upper right.
3. Click ‘Portal Settings’ on the left.
4. Enter an email address.

Setting Plone to send Email

1. Log in using the user you created during the installation.
2. Click ‘Preferences’ in the upper right.
3. Click ‘Mail Settings’ on the left.
4. Fill in the outgoing mail server. Sometimes you must use the mail server of your internet provider, like: ’smtp.charter.net’, and you won’t need to use a username and password. For the UW, ’smtp.washington.edu’ is the mail server, and you have to use your UWNetID username and password to authenticate to the mail server.

“I need the number of hits to our website from date x to date y.”

Two problems. I’ve never used IIS, and I’ve used remote tools like Google Analytics to find hits in the past.

Since Google Analytics is not set up on this site, I need to analyize the webserver logs to find the hits.

Where are the logs?

IIS web server logs on my system are stored in:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\LogFiles\W3SVC1

What do I use to analyize the logs?

Barry Welford suggested:
I use Funnel Web Analyzer to analyze such files (either text or zipped log files) and this is a free download from:
Qwest’s Funnel Web Analyzer.

I found Funnel Web a little confusing, but I clicked like three buttons and it spit out reports. You’ll probably want to install Funnel Web on your desktop, and copy the webserver logs there to be analyized.

I went to the month report and tallied up the unique visitor collumn because this is more accurate than ‘hits’. A visitor viewing several webpages will generate several hits. Even so this number is a little inflated. Using log analysis means that I’m also counting ‘bot hits’, automated programs that surf the web. Google Analytics claims to ignore bot hits.