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Archive for the ‘sysadmin’ Category

Installing PHP LDAP (or other) extension after using Web Platform Installer

Thursday, August 12th, 2010


I recently used the web platform installer to install IIS 7.5 and PHP on a Windows 7 machine. I also needed to install the LDAP extension, however after some time struggling to use an extension from the PHP site, or from an old install I discovered the best way to do this

  • Go to control panel, programs and select your PHP install
  • Click on change
  • Click next, then change
  • Select IIS fast CGI
  • Expand the Extensions section and tick the extensions you want to install
  • Complete the install



The extension should now be installed.

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Renew an SSL certificate in IIS using the existing key

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010


I recently needed to renew an SSL certificate on an IIS 7 server. The usual method to do so would be to generate a renewal CSR on the server, go to the SSL provider and generate a certificate, simple. However in this case I was presented with a renewed certificate that had been created using the CSR that had been used to generate the original certificate, so how do I get this into IIS, I can just add it to my certificate store, as the machine doesn’t believe it has the private key for this cert.

The certifcate managment console has an option to renew a cert with an exisiting key, great I though, but this just gives an error about a template.

So, after some research I found a way to deal with this situation, so that I can assign the private key from the old cert, to this cert and therfore use it in IIS.

1. Open up the Certificate Services MMC, and connect to the local computer store

2. Import the new certificate into the Local Computer Personal store.

3. Export the “old” certificate including the private key do NOT set the option to delete the private key on success!

4. Delete the “old” certificate in the MMC

5. Get the the serial number from the new certificate and run this command from an elevated cmd prompt:

certutil –repairstore my “put serial here”

5. Assign the new certificate to the IIS website

Once that is done, the certificate works perfectly, without having to generate a new CSR. Thanks to Andreas Klein for his blog post that lead me to this solution

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VMWare ESX: NFS Error: unable to Mount filesystem: Unable to connect to NFS server

Monday, March 1st, 2010


Recently I was trying to get an ESX blade to connect to a NAS data store. 2 Other blades had happily connected to this data store, and this blade was already connected to a different data store, but when ever I tried to connect to this particular store, I got this error:

NFS Error: unable to Mount filesystem: Unable to connect to NFS server

So I struggled with this problem for quite some time, until I found the solution – Name Resolution. Now firstly, I would like to point out that I was connecting to this blade from ESX by IP, not name, so didn’t think resolution was a problem. However what ended up fixing this was ensuring that the NAS could resolve the ESX blade by name. I’m not sure why this was needed, as the other 2 blades had worked fine without needing proper name resolution setup, as had the connection to the other blade, but I added an entry in DNS for the ESX blade, and hey presto, it work.

So if you come across this issue, ensure your NAS can resolve your ESX server, either in your DNS server or a local host file.

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How Windows Home Server made my life easier

Monday, December 7th, 2009


Like most good geeks, I like to experiment with new technology at home. I have a pretty intricate home network and enjoy adding new things to it and playing with new products. My partner, who also has to share this house, however does not. She doesn’t appreciate it when her files get moved about to accommodate my new SAN, or she has to run some other program to backup her laptop, or has to change the way she gets films off the network and onto the TV.

My partners a teacher and so has limited requirements for the home network – backup her files, let her get on the internet and be able to stream media to the TV, preferably without her having to think about it. I needed something that would do this that would remain constant and let her get on with her stuff, so she doesn’t need to get annoyed with me.

Yes, I could have put together a complicated solution using Windows Server, maybe some sort of network backup, or Acronis solution etc but I thought I’d first take a look at Windows Home Server, which should do everything I need for me. So I setup a new VM, and set it installing. I was dubious at first, there’s been a lot of negative press about WHS, however once it was installed it took me about half an hour to get it configured and start backing up the home machines.

I’m impressed with WHS, it’s primary function of backing up the home PC’s works great, it’ll bring machines out of sleep at night, run a backup and put them back to sleep. I had an occasion a few weeks ago where I needed to restore, I just burned a restore boot CD, booted the PC and connected it to the home server and ran the restore, an hour later the image was restore and the PC was back to normal.

The plugin architecture for WHS is one if its best features. You can get plugins that will do most things you need on your home network. I’m using PS3 Media Server to stream to my PS3, the inbuilt media server will stream using DLNA, however the PS3 won’t play all codecs, so the PS3 plugin encodes the files on the fly so they’ll play properly. I’m using a Jungledisk plugin to ensure all my data is backed up offsite to Amazon S3, the twitter plugin to notify me of any network problems and there are many more plugins i’m going to be looking at.

The biggest benefit of WHS is that it just works. I can just leave it running, assured that backups are working, and it will tell me if there is a problem. It deals with sharing all our files we need on the network and media streaming and so I can just forget about it, and get on with testing Exchange 2010, without disturbing anyone else’s work.

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Sysadvent – The advent calendar for sysadmins

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009


If you’ve not heard about it before, sysadvent is an advent calendar for sysadmins. Each day in December you will find a tasty new blog post to help you on your way to Christmas. The articles cover an array of topics, if you look at last years they range from Powershell to Puppet. Take a look, they might not all be in the area your working in, but they will all be interesting.

The reason that I’m writing about this is not only because it’s a great idea, is that I’m going to be contributing some posts this year, so look out for some potential topics of Active Directory Naming, Exchange 2010 and Linux for Windows Admins.

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Have you heard of ServerFault.com???

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009


If your a sysadmin, network manager, support technician or general server geek and you’ve not been to serverfault.com, I suggest you take a look.

Serverfault is a community Q&A site for sysadmins, its a great site to ask questions about your IT related problems, and get quick, useful answers from the sysadmin community. Its also a great place to share your knowledge with other sysadmins. I’ve been involved with Serverfault since the very begining of it’s beta and truly believe its one of the best IT Q&A sites out there.

Serverfault is designed by the same team that produced StackOverflow.com, a programming Q&A site, lead by Jeff Atwood (of codinghorror.com fame) and Joel Spoolsky(JoelOnSoftware.com) and was designed to be a non-evil alternative to sites like experts-exchange, and it does that job well. These sites provide an clean, intuitive interface for finding the answer to your question and encouragement to answer other peoples questions.

I vehemently believe that sharing knowledge is a good thing for sysadmins to be doing, you can be sure that if your not sure how to do something, someone else out there can help, and the feeling of being able to help someone with your knowledge when their stuck is hard to beat.

So if you’ve not done so yet, take a look at serverfault.com, and its sister sites stackoverflow.com and superuser.com, but be careful, you might find , like me, you become addicted to answering questions.

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