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Vista: Defective By Design

April 27th, 2008 · · Random One comment - Tags: ,

After ten months, I’ve had a reasonably pleasant experience with Windows Vista. But I recently had a series of problems that really made me consider switching back to Linux on my desktop.

I came home from work Monday to find that my computer had restarted after seventy-two days uptime. I had been in the middle of a project the night before so I already wasn’t happy when I sat down. I tried to launch the Event Viewer to see what had caused the reboot, but got this error:

“Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have appropriate permissions to access the item.”

Now, I’m running as a least-privileged administrator with UAC enabled. I was never prompted to elevate. In fact, forcing it to elevate did nothing. And because the local administrator account is disabled, by default, I was out of luck.

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CLAWS Lives!

March 29th, 2008 · · Projects No comments - Tags: , , ,

Well I finally did it. Last summer I set out to build and run CLAWS in my own environment. I was able to get parts of it running, but there were a few problems I was stuck on. I haven’t had much time to work on it since then, but over spring break I managed to get everything built and installed.

My goal was to get CLAWS running the way RIT uses it, and then write patches to the main codebase. If certain people in high places liked the changes I made, they could take the patches and apply them upstream. Even if that doesn’t happen, I could always fork the project and continue development on my own. For political reasons, I’d have to wait to do this until after I graduate.

The OpenCLAWS Project is aimed at taking what is now a very RIT-centric software system and transforming it into something the general public can use. Much to the chagrin of some un-named information security officials, CLAWS is open source and so I can (at very least) develop from the r2977 snapshot.

In the coming few months I plan to have my documentation finished for building and installing CLAWS. I should have a lighter schedule this summer, so I’m hoping to get most of my development work done then.

RIT Grows Some CLAWS

October 5th, 2006 · · Projects No comments - Tags: , , , ,

Managing thousands of user accounts in a heterogeneous computing environment can be a nightmare. Then throw in the need to manage user identities and network access to over forty-thousand network devices. What is a systems administrator to do? Enter CLAWS, RIT’s new open-source enterprise account, identity, and computer management tool.

The CLAWS central server manages communications between the various clients and back-end systems. A self-help tool allows students to activate an account and edit identity and mail preferences. The Help Desk client provides account management functions for staff that streamlines account creation and maintenance across the multiple systems.

Right now, CLAWS is used in production by both students and Help Desk staff. We are presently working to integrate IPEdit functionality into CLAWS. Visit the project homepage for more information.

HOW TO: Samba as an AD Domain Member

October 4th, 2006 · · How To No comments - Tags: , , , ,

There are probably a million and one articles about how to make Samba 3 an Active Directory domain member. But with all of that, this process still seems to require hours of research. So I’ve decided to compile my latest experiences here.

The domain member box is running Gentoo Linux. So you may need to adjust the steps to fit your flavor. Make sure the USE flags kerberos, ldap, samba, ssl, and winbind are set. Start by installing an NTP client.

# emerge ntp

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Playing with SQL Server 2005

June 28th, 2006 · · Random No comments - Tags:

I recently setup a SQL server, running Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition. Installation was smooth, with a prettier interface than SQL 2000. The disk space requirement was a bit high, but not unreasonable.

The suite now includes a special management studio that uses the VS IDE. In the past, developers needed to use an MMC snap-in to manage databases. It was usable, but generic. Features weren’t obvious and the interface was clumsy. The new feature-rich interface is much more friendly and intuitive.

But the IDE does, however, carry the same massive footprint as Visual Studio. I would have preferred it if they had kept the MMC snap-in for server use. Needing to install the IDE on the server seems silly, considering the amount of use it would get. Overall, though, I’m impressed with the software.