Interesting Tid Bit from Microsoft... (paraphrased)

Antivirus software is required for all client computers, no matter what. Even when you don't have a budget for it, find an antivirus solution.

Tony Northrup, "70-298 Designing Security for a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network" © 2005, Microsoft Press.

This is so very true. It's not everything though. Five years ago, I had my own web site running on a little Dimension L933r machine under Windows 2000 Pro and IIS 5 (I believe it was) -- all via a cable modem and IP address for the URL. It hosted a simple website and that was it. I didn't keep it running for very long, since when I moved up to college, hosting a web site was not permitted.

So, I disabled IIS, but left it installed. That way, when I went home for break, I could just start up my website again. Within a month of living on campus, I was hit with some virus (Code Red or Nimda... It's hard to remember anymore, but it as some big name virus/worm at the time). The "virus" got on to my system, which was regularly updated with a virus scanner at the time. The school itself was protected by a firewall or two, but the computers had registered IP addresses (in the 158.x.y.z range).

The virus I got was contained by my antivirus (Norton, I believe it was at the time) - but it got into the system because of some aspect of IIS -- since it was still installed, just not running. So, I uninstalled it, keeping my IIS folders, including the "wwwroot" folder - so I could install IIS later, and just resume my website activities.

Over two years later, several HDDs, and transportation to a different computer - I was hit with another virus! This one infected some of my IIS scripts that were saved when I uninstalled IIS -- and got past my new antivirus software and my firewall. After getting rid of the virus, I went and deleted all non-website related files that I didn't really need installed. So far, so good. But even with antivirus software installed, a running client side firewall, a corporate firewall, and all the Windows Updates - it was still quite easy to get infected.

Now - I run Linux. Less updates, less viruses. Gotta love the good life.

Now, I just need to figure out what to talk about for my security class "midterm presentation" that I have to do.

This is Confusing...
My last post was regarding groups in the forest...
A
D
-----U----forest line
GL
P

But my book says:
A
G
-----U----forest line
DL
P

I'm a little confused about this now... I'm hoping that I just wrote it down wrong, but it may be that my instructor did, and then his entire explanation may have been skewed because of that! And that would suck having to re-go through all of that again.

BTW: My MCSE instructor canceled Thursday's (tomorrow) class already - yesterday evening he told us that he had to go to Florida to fix an AD network that was destroyed in the recent hurricane... And this happens so close to exam week too.

Start of the Week Catch-Up
Alright, since the start of the weekend with filled with OS troubles, I forgot to post an Acronym Update...

A
D
----U----forest boundry----
GL
P

Accounts
Domain Local
Universal Groups
Global Groups
Permissions

The Universal group has a copy in each forest (on each side of the line)

Now, I could get into the arrows that Tim put on the board, but then this would look like some sort of football game plan (yes, it was that bad).... Besides, arrows would mean an image file, and I don't want to go there today. For now, it's just the acronym.

Miracles Do Happen
Snipbit from My LiveJournal Entry: "Oops, ya broke it"

I attempted to install VMWare - but, during the configuration, it asked where my kernel source files were located at, since it couldn't find them in the usual directory. Well, I didn't install them when I installed SUSE 9.3 a few months ago, so I decided to install it now.

This is where I found out what a mess my system really was. YaST was running like it usually does, and asked me for the CD that had the installation file on it that it needed. When I inserted the CD, the program didn't recognize it as being inserted. The operating system saw the disc, but YaST didn't.

That's when I checked "Installation Source" in YaST - which said "cd:///;devices=/dev/sr0" sr0!?! sr0 was changed ages ago to hda! It doesn't even see the CD drive because it's looking at a different mount point. But no matter how many times I tried to edit it, or add a second source location, it wouldn't let me. So I decided to try something stupid... Delete the entry and create a new one. Each time, the same error would pop up: unable to access protocol 'cd:///' - so, now I've got a SUSE 9.3 system with no installation media able to attach to it, many different applications and services broken because of the change from /dev/sr0 to /dev/hda, and a stack of recently downloaded SUSE 10.0 cds just laying around.

What do you think I did? YUP, installed SUSE 10.0 OSS (Open Source Software only) on my main system without ever testing it. Now, I had used SUSE 10.0 RC1 before, which sucked, but I needed to get my system up and running correctly again, and doing a fresh install was going to be the best way to do that.

Unfortunately, there was some problems with the installer. First, my attempt at upgrading the system yielded some broken packages during the installer, so I had to abort. I decided to try again - this time doing a clean install (formatting the necessary partitions and installing SUSE 10 with no previous operating system installed) - which seems to have worked.

I've had a few problems though - which are causing me to think that SUSE 10 may have been a bad idea. My most notable is the fact that I have no audio on the system anymore. I'm getting the same driver issue that I had in SUSE 10.0 RC1 - when I go into YaST, it will say that the IO or IRQ Address is not set correctly- it just started happening after I did the YOU critical updates. But, I can't tell which one screwed over the sound drivers. This may be of some relevance: I didn't have sound before - it's just now that it is accompanied by an error message.

To make this already horrendously long story a little shorter, I believe that I shall install 9.3 again... Maybe one of these days Novell will release a version of SUSE (above 9.3) that will work with my sound card. I'll probably still work with 10 on Experiment 8 here eventually.

Well, that was quite the mess. And now the conclusion...
I went to bed early that morning, leaving SUSE 9.3 running install-apt4suse and some YaST updates. When I got up, I checked the system, and everything seemed fine, but when I logged into KDE, the GUI was totally distorted: this is a screen shot I tried to take of my desktop... It was actually a look at Konqueror displaying a directory with a severely distorted background making GUI navigation impossible. Unfortunately, the display errors also seemed to have caused issues with KSnapShot. After working with the system for a few hours, and using YaST, YOU, and apt-get (using apt, since I forgot to install KPackage - which I couldn't find on the installation CD or in apt-get itself) I noticed that I had forgot to install some software when I did the initial install of the operating system, and some of these not-installed items may be causing some of the system's problems.

So, after really deliberating on the topic, I decided that it was time to try to reinstall the operating system: for the third time in less than 24 hours. The debate was, should I go with 9.3 - which was currently causing me some problems, making it impossible to use, or should I go with 10, and try to fix the audio issues. I decided that I had loved my 9.3 installation, so I decided to give it another chance (especially since I believe that it was user error that cause the installation to fail last time). This time, the install went on perfectly. Like my previous installation of 9.3, I used YOU to get the critical updates and installed install-apt4suse without logging in. By the time everything was done, and I decided to log in, it was now just a matter of getting everything back to the way it was before I broke everything... Which was actually a simple process...

Sometimes, it just doesn't feel like I "formatted" the partition
In Windows, doing a format of the partition and then installing Windows will load up a "vanilla" version of the OS - and the user has to configure every-little-thing... Well, in Linux (SUSE 9.3 specifically) I mounted my /home on a separate partition from / - which was a good idea. With each install of a different version of SUSE, it would always remember the oddest things... Where my K-bar was located at, if I had amaroK running (and what was in my playlist), it even remember my icon positions!

The only issue was that some of the applications that the system was pointing to were long gone. Sunbird and Thunderbird (both from Mozilla Foundation) weren't installed, but their application links that I had were still there. It only took me an hour or so to update all the software to get the system back to running like it did before all my troubles occurred.

And the soure of my insanity: "'cd:///;devices=/dev/sr0' sr0!?! sr0 was changed ages ago to hda! It doesn't even see the CD drive because it's looking at a different mount point! I should just install the newest SUSE to fix this!"

--Well, that's one way to get the job done... I just didn't think that I'd end up right back with SUSE 9.3

A Bit Belated...
but I found out today that SUSE released 10.0 official on October 6. I'm downloading it now and I plan on testing it out on Experiment8 here soon. I decided to download it in my Linux box, and working with wget is a bit different... I spent a good deal of time reading up the man page for it, but I finally got the command set the way I wanted it... First, the URLs that I needed for download: I put them into a text file, each one on a separate line. This was more of an assumption than knowledge obtained from the man file. Second, I chose the following command:
wget -i /home/jake/SUSE_10_OSS/iso_urls -w 300 -P /home/jake/SUSE_10_OSS/iso (all on one line)

• the "-i" is to load up a file that contails the URLs (one on each line) that I want to download.
  
• the "-w" is the wait period, in seconds. 300 = 5 minutes
  
• -P is the path to download the files to.

Either way, getting the SUSE 10 full release is going to be quite interesting. I intend on doing an upgrade and testing that out and then doing a full wipe and install to see how the operating system does in each situation... Doing an upgrade is convenient because there would be less backups to be made, but it really can cause the OS to have some serious operating troubles... So, I usually prefer the wipe and install.

The Miracle of BIOS
Alright, I don't remember if I mentioned this in my previous post, but at one point, I decided to check some settings in BIOS - I believe it was just the power cycle statistics (specifically, my total uptime and the number of hard power-downs the system has done)... Well, while I was in there, I decided to test out an idea I had...

My motherboard has four SATA150 ports and 1 IDE port (which supports 2 devices). By default (and the recommended configuration in BIOS is to leave the system set to auto-detect which systems to enable:

• Just IDE
  
• Just SATA
  
• IDE + 2 SATA
  
• IDE + 4 SATA
  
• Auto - System detects what is in use and makes a selection based on the number of devices and what interface they are hooked to.

I don't understand why the system doesn't just load everything, I guess there may be a support issue... But it seems odd to me, especially with how much of a pain it's been... I'd reboot, and the system wouldn't see my SATA drive... Leaving me without any operating system to boot, since it would only see my DVD drive.

So, even though I only have one IDE and one SATA device, I decided to configure the system to be statically set to IDE + 4 SATA (Enhanced mode) - which simulates 6 IDE devices:
0 - Primary + Slave
1 - Primary + Slave ...

Once I did this change, Linux changed a bit... First, I said that it had detected a new IDE controller and a new SATA controller - I configured each to load at boot in initrd. Doing that may have been a bad idea. Now, my HDD activity light won't turn off... It's glowing yellow as soon as linux loads. The second thing I noticed was that my DVD RW drive changed from /dev/sr0 to /dev/hda - notice that there is no number for the DVD RW this time around.

In Windows XP - the change was very transparent... When I booted, the system said that it had detected a new IDE controller and a new SATA controller and that was about it. Nothing else change in Windows. I guess that was a nice little thing that XP did for me... Even though I usually have severe problems in that operating system.

Side Note
Yesterday, while battling with Windows to install and then run the Sims 2 (with the University and Night Life expansion) was a chore - I prefer to run my games from images, but the damn thing wasn't letting me! But, I digress... While working between Windows XP (Suzi-XP) and Windows 2000 (Miki-ni) all of a sudden I lost my mouse. I was really quite annoyed with the operating system, but when switching to Miki-ni didn't fix the problem and a reboot didn't fix the problem - I decided to unhook my mouse and hook up my old Microsoft mouse - that worked instantly. Grrr, another mouse bites the dust. It's actually surprising, considering that I'm not all that hard on my mice/mouses.

However, the mouse I was using was just something that some roommate had left with my stuff ages ago and had just sat in my collection waiting for someone to claim it. The mouse was also cheap and off-brand - a KINO optical mouse. I've always prefered the more traditional mouse, but I must say that having an optical was kind of nice... I'm kind of going to miss that mouse... But, for now it's in my "To be tested" pile of mice - I'll eventually hook it into another computer directly to test it.

After Nearly A Month, "Loading... Windows XP"
It started with playing around a little with Wine in SUSE, but I've been unable to get it working. I was just tinkering with it, so when I need to use some Windows program, at least I can try to install it in Linux. I had a lot of trouble using winetools which seems to have issues installing DCOM98.exe - a critical component that I really have to have installed before anything else.

I'm wondering if Wine is working at all really... When I start going through the basic setup, it'll say "creating virtual windows drive in ~/.wine" which ~/.wine doesn't exist. I even tried running it as root, with the same trouble. A directory called "winetools" exists, but it only has the files that WineTools downloaded. ~sigh. It's going to be a while before I get Wine to work. I've heard somethings about WineX, but I haven't looked into that yet - but I believe that it is not free.

So, I can't use Windows apps in Linux, at least not yet. Well, last night, while most of my roommates were at the campus LAN party, I decided that I wanted to play "The Sims 2" - after all, one of my reasons for buying this computer was the fact that I couldn't play most games anymore because the CPU just couldn't keep up with it.

Well, finally I got the urge to play it again. So, I decided to boot into Windows to play it....
modified from my livejournal post regarding the subject...
First, I had to boot into Windows XP - I wanted to install "The Sims 2" and play that… That was one of the reasons that I got a P4 3.0 Ghz HT processor with a gig of RAM. It would be able to play most of the games that I'm interested in without a problem. So, I boot into XP. I put the first CD (of four) into the drive and install the Sims 2. It took a while to install, since it's such a large game, but I finally finished CD 4. Once it was done, I tried playing it, but it crashed itself. The second time out, it crashed the video card - first showing a black screen with my Windows mouse pointer in the middle, refusing to allow me to ctrl + alt + del and eventually the LCD just powered off. The third time out, as it was loading, the screen powered off again; however, this time all of a sudden my POST screen for my ABIT board displays.

So, I decided that I would try mounting the ISO I keep of the game… Maybe it was just having trouble loading the CD. This is where it gets complex. I couldn't find my copy of Alcohol 120 - I figured that I had it saved to 迷宮 (Meikyuu - my 250 GB ATA150 harddrive)… And I wasn't about to shutdown Miki (my Windows 2000 machine) and hook up that other harddrive just to get a single installation file. Besides, I knew that DaemonTools was available out there for free. So, I downloaded that.

OOOhhh, but wait! My ISO file is on 迷宮!! Damn… What to do… What to do… Oh, Nero! I'll just make another ISO… Or so I thought. Nero wasn't installed. Another thing that I forgot to put on my "to-do ASAP after installing XP" list… So, I got out my Nero CD and installed that. w00t… I can almost see the finish line now, or so I thought.

I had one heck of a time with Nero… It wanted to do anything accept make an ISO. I tried setting the burner to burn from the NEC DVD-RW to the Nero Image Drive… But it just didn't work. It kept saying that the medium was blank and each time the burn failed, it would eject the CDROM and when I reinserted it, it would autoload Sims 2, which would take quite some time, so I would have to either wait a good 2/3 minutes or use task manager to kill Sims2.exe. I did the latter.

Eventually, I got so frustrated with Nero that I just gave up on it. I ended up switching over to Miki and shutting it down; so I could hookup 迷宮. Once 迷宮 was up, I was able to grab the ISO file for Sims 2 and Alcohol 120 - just in case DaemonTools was part of the problem.

Oh, and now for the joys of networking. I just couldn't get Windows XP to allow me to log on to it over the network… I just wanted to grab the files (from Miki) and send them across the network to Suzi-XP. But no… Something was stopping me, probably the Windows Firewall or something in the Local Security Policy. So, I did a quick fix… I switched over to Suzi-XP and connected to Miki to pull the files off it. That worked, easy as pie.

Then, I installed Alcohol 120 --it's similar to DaemonTools, but I've used Al120 more than DT, so I thought this might help clear things up… but, it didn't. Out of frustration, I uninstalled Sims 2 and reinstalled it, this time using Al120 to mount CD1 and then going on with the rest of the installer through the CDROM. It installed just fine, but when I would start the game, it would do the same damn thing over again. Grrr. The worst part about it, was all that rebooting I had to do! That part took forever, especially if I missed choosing "Windows XP" in the Grub (the bootloader)… If I missed it, Grub would start up SUSE Linux… And I'd have to wait for that to load before I could choose to restart into Windows XP.

By the tenth reboot (for one reason or another) I was really frustrated… I wasn't sure what exactly I was going to do at that point… The Windows XP would crash or have some other problem each time I tried to use the game… I was to the point where I thought that the only thing left for me to do was to uninstall the game and give up on it. That's when I started thinking, "What if it's not the game that's crashing?" BINGO!!

I decided to check the nVidia site for possible updates to the nVidia software… I wasn't able to tell if what I had installed was the latest or if what they had on their website was more recent, but going with the logic that if there was an update in the past two or three months, I wouldn't have it yet - so I should just download the driver and try installing it.

After installing it, I had to do another reboot. Go figure. Once I was back up and running, I decided to check a few of the settings out… I noticed that my refresh rate (not that it really matters on an LCD, but it still may have some affect on the video card) was set to 75 hz… I decided to down it a little to 72. I also noticed that my colors were set to 32-bit, so I downed that one level to 16-bit. Leaving the resolution of the screen at 1280x1024.

Then I tried booting the game. And it work on the first try!! I'm not sure if the updated nVidia driver fixed it or if it was something to do with the settings that I adjusted. The game did work in Windows 2000, using a much older version of the nVidia software (and a much older machine), so I'd say that it's likely that it was something with the settings… I just wish that the game had said something about that earlier.
end livejournal modified quote

Recovering in 30 Minutes
is good time if you're recovering from a systems failure, but what about recovering from a browser failure?

THEN, it would be horrible time! And that's what it was.

Trouble with the Fox: Ending the Application
I noticed (on Suzi-LNX: KDE 3.4 under SUSE 9.3) that Firefox was taking a honking amount of RAM... Right around 600 MB - yup, .6 GB of RAM... My Dual DDRii 533 sweet like cotton candy ram. My disk cache was down to 13% and SWAP was being used at right around 25%... Bad Mojo.

So, I decided that the thing to do would be to restart Firefox. Simply close it down and restart it. Simple, right? Well, moving right along...

So, while closing 'Fox, KDE reported that it wasn't able to get a response from one of the Firefox windows, and asked to terminate it or wait. Well, I was impatient, so I clicked terminate. That may have been a mistake, but it shouldn't have been. Firefox did close right then and there, but the next thing that happened was when I tired to start Firefox again...

Please Wait While We Load Your *cough*broken*cough* Browser
I was prompted with a screen to choose a profile or create a new one. I've seen this before in Windows 2000 - it would happen when Firefox was closed and started to leave memory, but didn't completely exit... Leaving a small portion of Firefox in memory. When I would restart 'fox, it would ask which profile to use. If I chose the only one there, "Default" it would say that the profile is already in use. I would have to exit the Firefox profile screen use task manager to close the other firefox that was in memory (it would be the one in there that was only taking up less than 5 megabytes of RAM). Then I could restart Firefox without any trouble.

In Linux, however, when I got the profiles screen, I would exit the screen and use KSysGuard, but when I did that, I wouldn't see Firefox mentioned anywhere. I tried logging off and back on, with no change... I even restarted the machine, but the problem persisted.

I was so annoyed by all of this, that I decided to uninstall and reinstall Firefox (I didn't want to deal with having multiple profiles for Firefox). That did fix that problem, but it cost me all of my bookmarks (which I had most of them backed up).

Wrapping it up... After half an hour
I'm not sure why this problem occurred in Linux... I figure that there was some small potion of Firefox that would start up with KDE that I just wasn't realizing. That may have been fixed by doing some creative solution that would load KDE without loading all the "remembered applications" but I didn't end up researching it.

I am a little concerned about problems like this... I've seen it a few times in Windows, but that was with a version of Firefox (in the 1.0.x range) that was shitty and another update was released just days later. Well, I guess alls well that ends well. However, it did take a good chunk out of my day.

---> Dying Here! <---
says the power supply...

I've got two computers that are suffering from power supply issues in my dorm room... Experiment8 can't start up without a little bit of a charge.

Status of Experiment8's PS:
200-220 W
Unknown age.
First sign of trouble: Three Months Ago: wouldn't power on for an hour.

I'm probably going to have to replace it to get it going again.

Miki is also showing PS troubles... That's why I bought Suzi (with the 400 W supply) anyway. Miki suddenly made a horrible grinding sound that I couldn't figure out where it was coming from, so I shut it down for the rest of the day and started researching components for a new computer, that would later be named Suzi.

Status of Miki's PS:
250 W
Came with Case back in late 2001.
First sign of trouble: Two Months Ago - grinding sound coming from PS

Update @ 21:45
I just got off NewEgg, where I ordered a new PS for Experiment8... A 300 watt APEX AL-A300 (for $20 + $6.99 shipping). It's got 4 molex, 1 SATA, 1 +12 (20 or 24 pin capacity) and 1 4-pin connectors. It should be compatible with Ex8 (my AMD machine).

If this supply is good enough, I'll also be adding the same thing into my P4 box... I'll just order the same thing from NewEgg again. If (however) the supply for some reason doesn't work in Ex8 (ie: Ex8 is going bad itself, or the PSU isn't compatible with the motherboard) I'll attempt to use the APEX in Miki.
/Update

WINS - my god.

For about the 1 millionth time, my MCSE text book is covering WINS. I'm so very tired about hearing about WINS... Not to mention that it isn't all that common in the real world.

Granted, I may run into it in the job force, but more than likely, I'll just be using DNS stuff... And learing about two types of name servers is annoying. I already have to contend with AD integrated DNS and non-AD integrated DNS... Now, I also have to remember everything there is to know about WINS. ~sigh.

I wonder how common place WINS is in the market... I mean, it was "phased" out with Windows 2000 --which used DNS mostly, but was compatible with WINS if necessary... But if you use Active Directory, you will be using DNS. No buts about it. So why o' why do we have Windows Server 2003 64 Bit Datacenter Edition is capable of running a WINS server? Can't we just get rid of it yet?!

I guess there is a place for it in modern businesses, but dang.

Also, my text book was talking about using DNS: for optimum performance, install DNS on a multi-processor machine, with high speed hard drives, with a maximum-speed network card, on a Windows Server 2003 cluster. Then, DNS will be sweet.

WTF? DNS on a CLUSTER?
I think I'm gonna run away now.

She's Suffering from Minor DLL Failure...
My Windows 2000 machine (Miki) has recently been having DLL troubles... Usually, I'll see an "crashed" application with this error message:
NTDSAPI.dll cannot be found in one of the following directories:
*directory where specific application is located*, C:\WINNT\System32, C:\WINNT\System, ...
Other directories are listed where "..." is, I just can't remember them all.

I haven't done any research on the topic yet, but it has happened three or four times, requiring a restart each time. The DLL is of such importance, that I have nearly no access to any of my drives and very few applications will launch. A really annoying part is that saving is difficult, if not impossible... So any unsaved data most likely will be lost.

Even though I use SUSE-Linux more than Windows, and I use SUSE more intensely than Windows, it has had fewer restarts in the past two weeks than Windows has in the same time frame.

The odd thing is that Miki started acting up just a week or so after I started using SUSE... Which is just odd that it would start breaking down so soon after I purchased a replacement machine.

I'm thinking about doing what Andrew suggested... Installing Windows XP onto that machine instead of 2000 next time... Out of all the Windows versions, 2000 is the one I prefer, but I really need to get familiar with XP. And I guess if I have to reinstall Windows on Miki, then XP shall be the version of choice ~sigh.

Update (2005.10.08 @ 23:50)
Did some research on ntdsapi.dll - it's a process for finding resources on the network, but it is also a critical component of the "day to day" running of Windows (on a network or off). I guess that's why when it dies, then it's either working with an operating system that's half there or cut my losses and restart.

I (unfortunately) didn't find any references to the problem of having the DLL crash, I'll look into that more, but since it's a critical system function, it's probably covered by the System File Checker, which I can run anytime... Now that I know of the problem. The only issue with running sfc is that it doesn't really know about service packs... Which can sometimes cause it to attempt to down grade files that were updated -- which then leads to instability or the dreaded BSoD @ boot or something along those lines.

At least it's a starting point though.
/Update

Dramatization!
Today, Tim (my MCSE instructor) was doing a lecture on the first chapter of our MCSE297 book... Security. He was talking about the risk of Disgruntled Employees, while most of the class was getting that glassy eyed look...

That was until he leaned over his lectern and pulled the power plug on one of the student servers...

*POWEROFF*

It was just so sudden and unexpected that it really drove home his point that administrators need to protect their servers from all different types of people, including employees that we would never suspect of doing something like that.

By the way, the student who's computer was killed didn't turn it back on... By the time he was done with lecture, it was the end of class. It's not likely, but we'll have to wait until next week to find out if there was any damage to the server.

No Nameservers Madness
Here at college, me and my roommate segregated ourselves from the rest of ResNET - this causes our friends to he annoyed by us (we don't share files though Windows networking - but neither do we download from them) but it's also had an interesting side effect...

We are configured to use the name servers of the college, which seems to have caused trouble with my Samba server in SUSE. I can't access any of my shares on SUSE without using my \\192.168.1.11 address. However, SUSE can see my Windows 2000 server just fine using its name smb:\Miki-ni\

My roommate and I are discussion possible solutions to this problem, but for now, we've resorted to using the hosts file (paths - in Linux, then in Windows)
\etc\hosts
C:\WINNT\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

I made one entry into my Linux host file, but I'm not sure that it was necessary -- SUSE was already seeing the Windows machine by name. It's Windows that can't see SUSE by it's name (Suzi)... And no matter how much I play with it, I just can't seem to get it to work out like I want it to... I'm now able to do
ping suzi
and get the results I want, but doing a
\\suzi
at a run dialog, I get a "cannot be found" error... Grrr.

Update: Nameservers Madness: Oct. 3 @ 3:37 PM
After letting Windows sit idle all night long, it seems that my hosts (or lmhosts - I modified both) is now working for \\suzi in the run dialog. Happy Dance!

Now, if I can only get Suzi to show up in the Zenshougun workgroup... Suzi still isn't listed as being in any of the workgroups in the "Microsoft Networks" section of Network Neighborhood... Or anywhere else in Network Neighborhood for that matter. However, the \\suzi still works... At least that's something.

Windows Server 2003 Acronyms That I Have Forgotten... (Must Not Forget!!!)

Group Policy Object (GPO) Application:
L : Local
S : Site
D : Domain
Ou : Organizational Unit
--Order of precedence for GPOs to be applied... OU overrides all previous.

Flexible Single Master Operations (FSMO) Roles:
D : Domain Master
R : RID Master
I : Infrastructure Master
P : PDC Emulator
S : Schema Master

D and S "the outside ones" are one per forest
RIP, "the inside ones" are one per domain

S can take hold of all other roles - so it should be on a server by itself. S cannot be taken by any other FSMO role, so that server should at least have its system state backed up frequently.

--there'll probably be a lot more acronyms that I should remember but don't... I'll likely add those in (or into future entires) as I remember them or run across them).

EXT2 in Windows...
I was reading in an LiveJournal group about EXT2 file system access in Windows... The guy on there was posting about EXT2 IFS driver which just sounds odd to me...

I can't tell you how long I've heard "be careful mounting NTFS partitions in Linux with write access - you never know when you'll screw up your MFT!!" - so I've always just use write access... Even though, I hear success stories all the time. Now, you can do EXT2 in Windows?!? That just doesn't seem right.

I can't try this thing out anyway - all my file systems (that are "data" partitions at least) are reiser fs... So, I'm not going to even bother messing around with it. Not to mention I can't remember the last time I booted into Windows on Suzi... Before I returned to college I think - which would have been over a week ago.

Side Note - Audio
I've been having some odd audio issues in Linux. I'm an avid anime fan, and I've never had a problem watching anime while leaving amaroK (or another video) paused in the background. Now, I seem to be having some odd issues, which my anime seems to be exempt from...

First, I wanted to watch a flash file that I've had for quite some time... The only way to get it to play the audio was to close amaroK, KPlayer, and Sunbird - all of which are applications that had recently played music (or recently used/tried to use audio in one fashion or another).

Then, it progressed further - a video file that my roommate sent me (an XviD file - common codec among anime fansubbing groups) wouldn't play with amaroK running in the background. It got even worse when I was watching some MCSE-related CBT videos on my PC... Which I would have to exit all sorts of applications that had recently used/tried to use/could use audio.

Now, it's not uncomon for me to have to exit amaroK, Sunbird, KPlayer, and Kopete before I'm able to play a certain video or otherwise have sound fro a specific application.

I've also noticed that the audio in Chromium and a few of my other Linux games don't work at times. Quite disappointing.

For now, I'm betting that it's something that I've misconfigured or there may be an application that's monopolizing the audio system... Which (if it is) I will promptly prune from my system.