How To Team/Bond NICs in Ubuntu

I have really been slacking on blogging lately. I hope that hasn't turned you guys off to Bauer-Power. I have been busy with work and family stuff lately, so I haven't had a lot of time to sit down and write. I promise you though that I am not abandoning the blog, and I will keep posting as often as I can.

With that out of the way, lets jump right in. In this post I will tell you how to team two NICs (Network Interface Cards) using Ubuntu Linux. If you have ever done it in WIndows it is usually pretty easy. Especially if you use an HP server. In Linux, it is actually pretty easy too. You just need to install one extra little package, create a config file for your team and modify your /etc/network/interfaces file. Simple right?

Now for a little back story. The reason I am writing about this is I am setting up an Ubuntu Fog server at work for Windows imaging and software deployment. The server I am building it on has two NICs, so I want to team them for redundancy and throughput.

For NIC teaming, there are 7 modes we can use. Choose whatever suits your environment the best:

• Mode 0 - Balanced Round Robin
• Mode 1 - Active-Backup
• Mode 2 - Balanced XOR
• Mode 3 - Broadcast
• Mode 4 - IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic Link Aggregation
• Mode 5 - Balanced transmit Load balancing
• Mode 6 - Balanced Adaptive Load balancing

For more information on what the different modes do for you, check out this link here: (Ubuntu Bonding)

If you visit the link above, you will see that I do the bonding slightly different. I prefer to do it using the method on the Fog Wiki. It just works best for me and my Fog server. As you will see below, I specified the MAC address of my bond to match that of eth0. I found that if I didn't do that, Fog wouldn't be able to upload images, and would give me an error saying, "Unable to connect to TFTPD Server". Here is how to do it the Fog way:

• Install ifenslave

  sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ifenslave

• Create a file called bonding.conf in /etc/modprobe.d

  sudo touch /etc/modprobe.d/bonding.conf

• Edit /etc/modprobe.d/bonding.conf

  sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/bonding.conf

• Enter the following information and saving the file

  alias bond0 bonding

  options bonding mode=0 miimon=100 downdelay=200 updelay=200

• Find the MAC address of eth0 by running ifconfig
• Edit /etc/network/interfaces

  sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

• Comment out your eth0 section by adding a # before everything.
• Enter the following information replacing the network info to match your network, and the MAC address to match the MAC you found using ifconfig
  
  auto bond0
  iface bond0 inet static
  address 10.1.102.192
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  network 10.1.102.0
  broadcast 10.1.102.255
  gateway 10.1.102.1
  hwaddress ether 00:AA:BB:CC:DD:EE
  post-up ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1
  
  
• Save the file when you are done, and reboot

When your server comes back up make sure you still have good network connectivity, and take a look at ifconfig now. You will see your new bond0 interface and it will now have the same MAC address as eth0 and eth1.

As you can see above, I used mode 0 for my team. You can use whatever you want, for whatever suits your environment the best. You make the call!

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Tech Chop Episode 5 – What is Linux?

So I got an email a little while back from a viewer of Tech Chop who was obviously a computer newbie, and wasn’t sure what Linux was. Don’t laugh, because there apparently are a lot of people who haven’t been properly introduced to the wonder that is Linux, and open source.

So I decided to put together a quick explanation on what Linux was. If you didn’t know, Linux is an open source and usually free operating system that one could use as an alternative to Microsoft Windows or even Mac OSX. I say usually free because, like I mention in the video, there are some proprietary versions of Linux that aren’t free. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an example of that.

So here it is, Tech Chop Episode 5 brought to you by TBC Creative Multimedia Design:

 

 

The Distros mentioned in this episode were:

• Red Hat
• CentOS
• Debian
• Ubuntu

If you are new to Linux, might I suggest my own personal distro? It is called Bauer-Puntu Linux, and is based on Ubuntu except I have pre-packaged it with some helpful computer troubleshooting tools, and a few hacking tools as well.

Are you a Linux newb? Got any questions? Hit me up in the comments.

del.icio.us Tags: what,is,linux,debian,ubuntu,redhat,centos,tech chop

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How To Set a Memory Cap For Microsoft SQL

First of all, I would like to stat this article out saying that I am not a DBA (Database Administrator). I am sure there are plenty of DBA’s out there that know there way around SQL way better than me. Seeing as how my company doesn’t have a dedicated DBA, I am stuck messing with it in order to keep things working.

How many of you have deployed a Microsoft SQL 2005 or 2008 server and after you are done with the initial install and setups you notice that SQL is hogging every little bit of memory you have? How many of you have tried running SQL on VMware? You probably noticed that too right? There is a reason for this, by default Microsoft SQL is designed to take as much memory as you give it up to 2147483647 MB (That is 2 Petabytes of memory!) WTF is that all about Microsoft?

I have one SQL server that only has 8GB of physical memory in it, and it is constantly pegged because of this, so what I did was the following:

• Went into SQL Server Management Studio
• Right Clicked on the SQL Instance Name and selected properties
• Under Memory, I changed the value from 2147483647 MB to 6144 MB (6GB)
• Clicked OK, then rebooted

Once the server came back up, SQL was limited to only 6GB of RAM, leaving 2GB for the operating system. After that, everything ran a little smoother.

Are any of you DBA’s? Any idea on why Microsoft sets the default memory max so high? Let us know in the comments.

del.icio.us Tags: how to,limit,sql,memory,microsoft

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How To Install Additional Drivers in VMware ESXi

Yesterday I ran into an issue I hadn’t before in VMware. I was setting up a new ESXi server to add to a cluster. Like all the other hosts in the cluster, I ordered it two PCI-Express 4-port NIC’s for use as redundant iSCSI and Virtual switch connections. The only problem is that this time I used a different model than before. The other hosts in the cluster had been around for a while, and I wasn’t the one who ordered them expansion NICs. I figured I would just get some HP branded ones, and we should be good because the servers are HP servers.

I thought wrong. When I installed ESXi it didn’t automatically detect the NICs. Every other time I installed ESXi it did. Like any other computer operating system though, the NICs won’t be detected if the proper driver wasn’t installed.

the NICs I bought were HP NC365T 4 Port Gb network adapters. In order to get them to be detected on ESXi, I first had to do a search to see if they were supported. I went to The VMware compatibility guide and did a search in the I/O adapters section for NC365T. There I saw at the bottom that there were two available drivers. I went ahead to the driver download page, and searched for one of those driver numbers. From there I downloaded the ISO with the correct drivers.

Now, I read on the VMguru blog that you can burn the drivers ISO on a CD pop the CD into the server, then run the following command from vCLI:

vihostupdate.pl –server [IP address] –username root –install –bundle [CD/DVD]:\offline-bundle\DRIVER-NAME.zip

For some reason, that command didn’t work for me. It kept erroring out for one reason or another. So what I ended up doing since I always enable SSH on my ESXi boxes was to extract the contents of the ISO file using 7Zip, then renaming the zip file in \offline-bundle to driver.zip (For ease of terminal commands), then I copied driver.zip to the /tmp directory on my ESXi server using WINSCP in SCP mode. I then placed the server in maintenance mode from the viConsole. After that I SSH’d in using Putty, changed into the /tmp directory and ran the following command:

esxupdate --bundle=driver.zip update

After that I rebooted, and like magic my NICs were discovered by ESXi!

Have you ever had to do this in your environment? Can you tell me why my vCLI command might not have worked right? Let us know in the comments.

NOTE: If you have the HP NC365T 4 Port Gb network adapter like me, I recommend using the 2.4.10 driver. I tried the 2.1.10.2 driver, and it cause the ESXi operating system to freeze. Just a suggestion ;-)

del.icio.us Tags: vmware,esxi,how to,install,drivers,esxupdate,vcli,ssh

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Creating Bootable Windows 7 Install USB Keys On The Easy

A few months ago I wrote a post on how to take a Windows 7 ISO image and install it to your USB drive to make a bootable Windows 7 Install USB Flash drive. The process wasn’t that difficult, but for some of you dropping to the command prompt might be a bit scary, or if you are not tech savvy at all, it’s like I was speaking a completely different language!

Microsoft actually made a really cool tool that makes this process easier for the average Joe. Their tool takes you step by step through taking a Windows 7 ISO file, and either using it to burn it to DVD, or to install it directly to USB. It really is so easy, than I’m sure your Grandma could probably do it!

The tool is called the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. There are some system Requirements to run the tool such as:

• Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 (32-bit or 64-bit)

• Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended)

• 50MB of free space on your hard drive

• DVD-R drive or 4GB removable USB flash drive

For Windows XP Users
The following applications must be installed prior to installing the tool:

• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 must be installed. It can be downloaded here.
• Microsoft Image Mastering API v2 must be installed. It can be downloaded here.

Pretty easy right? Just a quick 4 step process, and boom! You can have a bootable Windows 7 USB Installer so you can install Windows 7 on your computer from USB! I’m pretty sure it doesn’t get easier than that!

[Via The Microsoft Store]

del.icio.us Tags: gui,tool,free,install,windows 7,usb,iso

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Uninstalling Exchange? Getting an Error Saying, “Object is Read Only”? Here’s Your Fix!

My company upgraded to Exchange 2010 about a year ago. It is really awesome, and I’m glad we did. We did not, however, ever remove the only Exchange 2007 server we had. It’s just been sitting in our data center, using up power, and expensive Microsoft licensing. I finally decided that since we were in need of more VMware resources, it would be a good time to decommission Exchange 2007 for good, order some more RAM for it, and re-purpose it for VMware.

I started on this last week. You see, in order to remove an Exchange server from your environment, you have to do several things in order to make it go smoothly and cleanly. One of them is to make sure you remove all public folder replicas to your new Exchange server. That can take several days. I set that to go over the weekend, and decided to start back up today.

When I went to uninstall, all the perquisites passed. That meant I moved replicas successfully. However when I proceeded with the uninstall it failed at removing the Mailbox Server Role with the following error:

Object is read only because it was created by a future version of Exchange: 0.10 (14.0.100.0). Current supported version is 0.1 (8.0.535.0).

It turns out that after you move all replicas, you now have to actually remove the public folder database from your Exchange 2007 server. The problem is you can’t really do that from the Exchange 2007 server itself or you will get a similar error. So here is what you have to do.

• On your Exchange 2007 server, open the Exchange Management Shell as administrator
• Get the public folder identity by running this command:
  
  Get-PublicFolderDatabase -Server YOUREXCH2007SERVERNAME | fl name, identity
  
  
• Once you have the identity, open the Exchange Management Shell as administrator on your Exchange 2010 server.
• Remove the 2007 Public Folder database by running the following command:
  
  Remove-PublicFolderDatabase "YOUREXCH2007SERVERNAME\First Storage Group\Public Folder Database"
  
  

Make sure that you don’t just copy and paste what is above! Your environment may be different, so modify the commands above match your environment! Once you run these commands and after everything replicates nicely through your active directory, you can proceed with the uninstall without issue!

del.icio.us Tags: how to,remove,last,exchange 2007,server,Object is read only,mailbox,role

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Tracking Down Account Lockouts in Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2

You have all probably had to troubleshoot account lockouts right. I mean, it comes with the territory for a Windows admin. Sure, some of you may be Help Desk workers, and you unlock the account then send the user on their way. What if a certain user’s account keeps getting locked out though? Like chronic back pain, the user keeps coming to you telling you that their account is locked out again. It sounds like a deeper problem.

Lucky for you then that Microsoft has an old tool to help you look for account lock outs on domain controllers so you can see which computers the accounts are getting locked out on. Then from there you can check for stuff like scheduled tasks with old passwords, viruses using old credentials, hacking attempts, etc. It’s called EventCombMT and comes with the Microsoft Account Lockout Management Tools.

In EventCombMT, there are several built in searches, but the only one I have ever used is the account lockout search. For domain controllers running Windows 2000 or 2003, the default event ID’s for the search work fine. If you are running Windows 2008 or Windows 2008 R2 domain controllers though, you need to add a search for event id 4740, as that is the event ID for lockouts in 2008/2008 R2.

What other tools do you like to use for account lockouts? Any of them work better than EventCombMT? Are they free? Let us know in  the comments!

del.icio.us Tags: eventcombmt,how to,troubleshoot,find,account lockouts,active directory,microsoft,windows,2008,r2

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