The March Server SIG meeting continued the install of Windows Server 2003. Sometime last month, Microsoft changed the name from Windows .NET Server2003, removing the ".NET" part. This started a flurry of speculation in the trade press that Microsoft was abandoning .NET. It must have been a slow day in the news room.
As a meeting topic, the install was also a slow day. I had intended to get the setup program past all the file copying so we could spend the time configuring the server, but such was not the case. Instead we talked and watched the install run, and talked, and watched the install run. Our topics included things like CVS (the open source change management system for source code), VPN (virtual private networks), routers (hardware firewalls and building a firewall/router using Linux.
The next Server and Networking SIG meeting will be Thursday, April 10th at 7 p.m. in the DACS Resource Center. Our topic will be X-windows and running programs remotely on both Linux and Windows. This will be fun! Bring your laptop and a network card and you can download and install Cygwin/XFree86 X-windows on your Windows machine
We had another great time at the February meeting of the Server SIG. Discussion covered two main topics – the problems using SCSI tape on a laptop, and beginning a review of Windows Server 2003.
My research over the last month had not made any further progress on using a SCSI tap drive – or any SCSI device – on a laptop. I believe the problem stems from the fact that SCSI support is limited in the kernel installed on my laptop and the PCMCIA subsystem cannot activate the SCSI card prior to booting the operating system as is the case with a regular SCSI adapter plugged into the system bus of a desktop or server PC. If you have experience compiling the Linux kernel and can come to a Server SIG meeting, please let me know.
We then turned our attention to Windows Server 2003, the new version of Microsoft’s server operating system due out later this year. Microsoft had kindly provided us with brand new CD’s with the Release Candidate 2 version to try. This is a 120-day evaluation (trial) copy of the last pre-release version. Microsoft made news a couple weeks back by quietly changing the name of this product from Windows .NET Server 2003 – dropping the .NET part. The news media jumped on this as an abandonment of the .NET concept by Microsoft. This is certainly not the case as the .NET Framework ships with the new OS. Microsoft claims the new server product to be more secure. Time will tell but the major change I have seen so far is that fewer services are installed by default and when a service, such as the Internet Information Server (IIS) web server is installed, it is installed with everything set as securely as possible. Microsoft’s philosophy in the past has been to make things as easy to get working as possible. As more networks are connected to the Internet, and the world has become more a more hostile place, ease of use and security are opposite ends of the spectrum. The new installation procedures may help make it easier to setup and deploy a server that is as secure as is practical.
The next Server SIG meeting will be Thursday March 13th at 7pm in the DACS Resource Center. We’ll complete the installation of Windows Server 2003 and set up IIS to display a simple web site. Who knows, we might even find a solution to the SCSI problem. See you there!
As promised, the January meeting attacked the problem of backing up a Linux machine (Red Hat 8, in this case) to a SCSI tape drive. At the December meeting I had recounted how I could not find a program to rewind the tape. Well, little did I know! This month with the machine and the tape drive all sitting on the table, we found that the problem was really with the driver for the tape drive. Debugging this situation was made more difficult by the fact that this is a laptop and the SCSI adapter is a PC-Card (PCMCIA card). By the end of the meeting we were all bloodied in defeat. No one (and we had some knowledgeable people) knew how to get the driver to load and talk to the tape drive. Successful or not, this was a fun meeting. Next month we will either try this again or return to the Linux server project and work on configuring Samba for file and printer sharing.
The next meeting of the Server SIG will be Thursday, February 13th at 7pm in the DACS Resource Center.
We had an uproarious meeting and finally got DNS working – really! Once you go thru this type of a debugging project, you really start to understand networking. This journey has taken many months of meetings
It still takes me a while to find things in Linux and once I find something it can take a while to figure out how to install/fix/update/tweak it, but once you do, the pieces begin to fit together. This became all to clear when the DNS running on my laptop (Red Hat 7.2) refused to work correctly using configuration files virtually identical to ones that work on my network at home. The mystery was that BIND did not put any error messages in the log complaining about errors in the configuration files. The symptom was a failure to find the machine’s own IP address in DNS. It could find other machines’ addresses but not its own. This meant that the zone in my example (Scheef-family.com) was not loading but the other zone (rc.dacs.org) was loading. The clue came when I did an ‘ifconfig’ and noticed that the domain names were not correct in /etc/resolv.conf (as a result of the IP configuration received from the DHCP server). As soon as this was corrected, the lookup results were correct.
During this process, we looked at the configuration files used by BIND (Berkley Internet Name Domain). BIND is the program used for DNS on Linux. The Microsoft DNS server used on Windows NT and 2000 are derived from BIND. These are typically cryptic in UNIX fashion, but are human-readable.
We also discussed the ‘nslookup’ command which is used to query the DNS system. I prefer this tool as it is also provided on Windows 2000, but newer tools like ‘dig’ and ‘host’ often provide more information.
You can buy any book you want on DNS but you will eventually buy DNS and BIND (currently in 4th Edition) by Albitz and Liu (O’Reilly, 2001-1992). I also like Windows 2000 DNS by Abell, Knief, et al (New Riders, 2000).
The next Server and Networking SIG meeting will be January 9th at 7pm in the DACS Resource Center. The program will be on tape backups and, time permitting, cross-platform communications tools like SSH, rdesktop, and running X-windows on Windows.