Unflappings

This tutorial will show you how to manage your computers remotely while on the go with your Droid. This is helpful especially while on the go. You can now monitor your active torrents or grab an important file your forgot to sync while on the move and while at the office. Speaking of monitoring torrents from your device, a new lightweight option is to use this guide of monitoring and downloading torrents directly on the go. If you need help setting up a VPN on your home network, stay tuned to this site as a follow up article will be written soon.

On you Motorola Droid (Android 2.0 and 2.1)
1. Navigate to the menu and click “Settings”
2. Click “Wireless and Networks”
3. Click “VPN Settings” and click “Add VPN”
4. For this example we will be using a PPTP vpn. If you have another type of VPN set up at school, work or home, the directions will differ slightly.
5. After clicking “PPTP VPN”, give the VPN a name, this can be anything
6. In the box that says “set VPN server”, this is where you are going to inset a dns name or an ip. If you are unsure what the name is, contact your work or school to see if their is some kind of document. If this is a home VPN, you can get a DNS name through dynamic DNS.

http://www.dyndns.com/

7. For this example, I will use “MytestVPNname.selfip.com”
8. If encryption is enabled on the VPN, be sure to check the next box
9. Make sure you have cell service (3G not required but recomended) and click connect. The droid should bring up a notification stating that you are successfully connected.

So now that you are connected to the VPN, you can access any computer remotely on that network in which you have credentials for. The best way to do this is to head to the marketplace on your Droid and download the free version of Remote Desktop. This will allow you to RDC into any machine on the VPN network as stated before, allowing you to monitor your torrents, stream music, or grab an important file from work while on the go. The RDC program I have been using is “Remote RDP Demo”.

There are many applications out there to help you create the perfect ring tone from mp3′s already on your phone but that takes a little too much effort. In addition, you can use free tools to clip your sounds and simply copy them to your Android phone via USB cable. All these alternatives are easy but can take too much time.

Mabilo Ringtone is a free application on the marketplace that is very quick to download. You can download all the ring tones you want. The good part is the files on the application are updated daily by a user base of over 30,000 users. You can download the tones, set them specifically to certain callers. However, If you phone crashes for some reason or you feel you need to uninstall the application, all the ringers go with it.

Follow these easy steps to take those downloaded ringtones and place them in a more secure location.

1. Plug in your usb cable to the phone and computer.
2. On your phone, initiate the USB connection
3. On the computer, navigate to your phone’s SD card drive and find the folder named ” com -> mabilo”
4. Copy your ring tones in that folder to the directory “media -> audio -> ringtones” (NOTE: be sure to leave the tmp_preview file in the mabilo directory”

That is it! Now you can stream and download new ringtones as they are released and back them up so you never lose them. You can also download a free file explorer utility and do all this from your phone, instead of hooking it up to the usb cable.

This guide is mainly helpful for when you need to lock down a computer using GPO’s and Active Directory. The situation here is a group of users which need to be locked down to the bare minimum usability features. In addition, the computers in which these users sign on are in highly sensitive areas, requiring only certain user’s access to log in.  For example: You have 10 computers in an area in which you only want certain lucked down accounts access to log in. If an account is compromised that has greater privileges such as a more powerful user, they will not be able to log into the restricted machines.

• Create an Organizational Unit which holds all of the machines that need to be restricted. Mine is named ‘Lockdown Computers’
• Create a GPO and link it to the ‘Lockdown Computers’ OU.  This can be done by right clicking OU in Group Policy Management and selecting “Create and Link a GPO Here….”
• Right click on the newly created GPO and select “Edit…..”
  

  

  

  
  
• Under Computer Configuration, navigate to  Windows Settings –> Security Settings –> Local Policies –>User Rights Assignment
• In the Right Pane, find the policy that says “Allow Log on Locally” and “Allow Log on Through Terminal Services”
• In each Policy, under the “Security Policy Setting” tab, click on Add User or Group.
• The easiest method is to create a user group in Active Directory which contains the users you want to be able to log into the given machine. It usually is best to only select the accounts which will be working on the computer in the future, as well as the limited user log in. In addition, for both the policies, the Administrators group for the Domain Controller must be selected. Be careful which users  you select, you do not want to lock yourself out of a machine completely.
• Close out the Group Policy Editor, and navigate to the GPO which was just edited.
• Right click the GPO, and select “Enable”
• Next, open a command prompt on the server and enter “gpupdate /force”

Came across the issue of having to install Server 2008 R2 (Windows 7 kernel, NOT Windows Server 2008 SP2) on a Dell PoweEdge 2950.  Server 2008 R2 wouldn’t proceed with the installation and was asking for a nonspecific driver.  After a large amount of trial and error, I finally decided to go about upgrading the firmware of the Dell Remote Administration Controller (DRAC)  to the latest revision. This then allowed the installation to continue without a problem, and all other drivers were found flawlessly.

So if you have a Dell PowerEdge 2950 with a DRAC version 5 controller card, give this a try when installing Windows Server 2008 R2.

Bold indicates a button clicked or key pressed.
“quotes” indicates a value which has been entered.

Grey block quote is a command typed directly into the console.

Manual Backup of Zimbra

1.Gain root shell access to the Zimbra box

#su

#’Your Password’

Stop Zimbra Services from running in order to perform a cold backup. This is necessary so the database and ZCS stay synced. Depending on your installation size,  your server may be down for up to 10 minutes. Generally, for a decent sized install with approximately 150 users, the server will only be down for 4-6 minutes.

#sudo -u zimbra /opt/zimbra/bin/zmcontrol stop

3.Make a backup directory and Sync Zimbra Directory to backup directoy

#cd /
#mkdir backup
#cd backup
#mkdir zimbra
#rsync -avHK /opt/zimbra/ /backup/zimbra

4.Restart Zimbra services

#sudo -u zimbra /opt/zimbra/bin/zmcontrol start

5.Create archived backup for offsite transfer via FTP

#tar -zcvf /tmp/mail.backup.gz -C /backup/zimbra .

6.Finally, send the archive backup to an FTP backup server. The username and password should be entered without any quotes.  In addition, replace IPADDRESS with your ftp server.

#ncftpput -u ’username -p ’password’ IPADDRESS /mail /tmp/mail.backup.gz

Bold indicates a button clicked or key pressed.
“quotes” indicates a value which has been entered.

Grey block quote is a command typed directly into the console.

Purpose

To keep track of the rate and frequency which processes use resources, enabling accounting is a good simple solution. It is very effective and can tell you were performance bottlenecks are in your machine.

Procedures

#touch /var/account/acct
#accton /var/account/acct
#echo ‘accounting_enable=”YES”‘ >> /etc/rc.conf
#lastcomm

The “lastcomm” command will allow you to view process accounting information.

Bold indicates a button clicked or key pressed.
“quotes” indicates a value which has been entered.

Grey block quote is a command typed directly into the console.

1. Edit /etc/inetd.conf and ensure that the following lines are commented out:

telnet stream tcp nowait root /usr/libexec/telnetd telnetd

telnet stream tcp6 nowait root /usr/libexec/telnetd telnetd