Integrating BIND with AD-integrated Microsoft DNS
I recently set up BIND9 to run secondary zones for an ActiveDirectory-integrated DNS server (the reason being that I hated effectively losing internet access when I rebooted my W2k8R2 server). While...
View ArticleActive PA speaker systems
During my high school time, I did a lot of work as a sound technician and lighting designer at all kinds of events, both as a volunteer at school and outside of school. Recently someone from the school...
View ArticleCreate a bootable Mac OS X Lion Server USB drive
Download Lion from the Mac App Store. Use Disk Utility to restore /Applications/Install Mac OS X Lion.app/Contents/SharedSupport to a USB flash drive. Download Lion Server from the Mac App Store. Grab...
View ArticleTroubleshooting Apple Software Update Server
We are currently in the process of migrating towards a thin imaging approach for the Macs I manage at my university. One of the things we needed was an Apple Software Update Server, which is pretty...
View ArticleHashing and verifying LDAP passwords in PHP
I recently migrated a PHP web application that used LDAP for authentication and MySQL for data to something entirely MySQL based. I needed the users to be able to continue using their old LDAP...
View ArticleInstalling Apple Remote Desktop 3.6.1 without first installing the boxed version
Apple Remote Desktop 3.0 was released in 2006. The current version is 3.6.1, and as such your six year old boxed copy license still entitles you to run it. ARD has undergone some major changes during...
View ArticleMac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review
So I finally upgraded to Mountain Lion. I completely skipped over Lion because I didn’t like how Apple was iOS-ifying everything and had just stayed on Snow Leopard until a few days ago. Personally, I...
View ArticleConverting Xen Linux VMs to VMWare
A year ago I wrote about how to convert from Xen to VMWare (which is a similar process to a Xen virtual-to-physical or V2P conversion). Now I found a much simpler solution, thanks to...
View ArticleFixing Microsoft Office 2011 SP2 Volume licensing
UPDATE 2012-11-15: The 14.2.5 installer no longer has this weird behavior (it does not include removables.txt files at all, however the postinstall script would still process them if they were there)....
View ArticleVMWare ESXi 5.1.0 breaks PCI Passthrough (Update: fixed in ESXi510-201212001)
After I upgraded to VMWare ESXi 5.1.0, my server crashed with a purple screen of death as soon as I fired up a VM that was using a passed-through PCI device (1244:0e00, an AVM GmbH Fritz!Card PCI v2.0...
View ArticleOpenVPN for iOS
Today, OpenVPN Technologies released OpenVPN Connect for iOS. Finally, we can use OpenVPN on all major platforms. I know many of my blog readers have been waiting for this: my article on the iOS VPN...
View ArticleUsing C++11 on Mac OS X 10.8
Recent Xcode versions for Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8 ship with Clang, a modern compiler for C/C++/ObjC based on LLVM. It fully supports C++11: simply add -std=c++0x or -std=c++11 to your CXXFLAGS. This...
View ArticleXserve RAID and Atto Thunderlink FC 1082 are incompatible if used without an...
We’re running a 2006 Xserve RAID at the university. Our old server was a 2006 Xserve with an Apple 2 Gbit Fibre Channel card. When we recently got a new Mac mini server to replace, we ordered an Atto...
View ArticleOpenWRT hardware recommendation: TP-Link TL-WDR3600
I recently replaced my WiFi access point, an ancient Linksys WRT54G v3.1. I was looking for something that supported simultaneous dualband, multiple SSIDs, and VLANs. I also wanted something that could...
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Two-legged OAuth between PHP and JIRA
If you want to use the JIRA REST API without storing plain-text passwords in your application, you need to use OAuth. If you want the application to directly talk to JIRA without binding it to a JIRA...
View ArticleTracking DHL Freight packages
I recently got a shipment notification with a tracking number starting with JND and followed by 17 digits, half of them zero. After searching around for a while, I figured it was shipped by DHL...
View ArticleHP StorageWorks P2000 G3 and ATTO Thunderlink FC 1082
Hardware To replace a 2006 Xserve and a 7TB Xserve RAID at the university, we recently got a Mac mini server, an ATTO ThunderLink FC 1082 Thunderbolt to 8Gbit Fibre Channel adapter, and a HP...
View ArticleOpenWRT on TP-Link TL-WDR3600: enabling Wifi channel 12+13 and higher power...
A few months ago I recommended the TP-Link TL-WDR3600 as an OpenWRT router. I did complain that it unnecessarily limits me to 50 mW in the 5 GHz. After I discovered that it also prevents me from using...
View ArticleUsing Serva with an existing PXE server
A long time ago, I set up a PXE server on my network from which I can boot all kinds of Linux tools. It uses the PXELinux boot loader to provide a menu etc. When I came across an article on how to PXE...
View ArticlePXE-booting Knoppix 7.2
I have a PXE server on my network so I can easily boot Linux live images and tools when fixing computers. Knoppix 7.2 however is unable to load a network driver on most PCs (it only works with Intel...
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