Sysadmin Ramblings

Symptom: iPod is blinking “Do Not Disconnect” even after you’ve umounted the filesystem. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a partition formated vfat on my laptop so that I can access it from both Linux and Windows. I store my iTunes music there, so some of the directories have UTF8 characters. Read the rest of this entry »

We installed a new Microsoft Windows 2003 Server with Citrix Presentation Server 4.0. Administrators could login remotely, but regular users were denied with:

“The desktop you are trying to open is currently available only to administrators. Contact your administrator to confirm that the correct settings are in place for your client connection” Read the rest of this entry »

You can do this with rdist, but I prefer the rsync method.

You wish to backup a directory on machine A by making a copy on machine B. (In our case, machine B is a netapp, so we get further backup for free). Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve wasted enough time with these seemingly simple tasks to warrant a quick post. The problem is that you’ve created keys, put the relevant files all over the place, but nothing seems to be working.

• Permissions
  

  authorized_keys and authorized_keys2	600
  .ssh	700
  Home Directory	711
  Keys (id_dsa,id_rsa)	600
  Public Keys (id_dsa.pub,id_rsa.pub)	644

  The permissions shown are the maximum, you could put less…
• Account locked.
  You created an account, created a key, got everything in the right location but you cannot ssh in using the key.
  If you used useradd and didn’t set a password, then the acount is locked. Edit /etc/shadow and change
  user:!!: to user:*:
• SSH Permit
  You forgot that you have an AllowUsers in /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  Add the user to AllowUsers
  AllowUsers previous users this user
  Note: this allows the users: previous; users; this; and user access to the machine
  You forgot that you have a DenyUsers in /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  Remove the user from DenyUsers
  Note: if this is your issue, you’ve been smoking too much weed
• Still doesn’t work, you get key-error or protocol mismatch.
  
  • You are using an rsa1 key on a host that supports only ssh2 (rsa and dsa keys).
    Note to self: Get with it buddy, ssh1, “what’s with you man?”
  • You are using a dsa or rsa key on a host that supports only ssh1 (rsa1).