Are you a SysAdmin? Are you also a gamer? Do you use the Steam platform? If you answered yes to all three of those questions, you have a new group that you can join. It’s the ServerFault Steam group.

While the group’s name and logo show strong ties to ServerFault, one does not have to be a member of ServerFault to join the group (although it might help for familiarity’s sake). The group is new, with no home on the web beyond the steam group page nor is there an event calendar. However, we’re still young and the opportunities are limitless.

Join up, help out and we can help… umm… decommission some users. Load your LARTs and ready your PODs. It’s game time!

Seriously, Cisco Press. What is your problem? I used to think you were incompetent. Now I think you’re deliberately evil. They explicitly stated that transport layer traffic that uses UDP is called a “datagram.” That stands to reason. After all, UDP is a TLA for “User Datagram Protocol.” Then, immediately afterwards, they state (emphasis mine):

However, this book refers to data formed in the transport layer as a segment, data at the network layer as a datagram or packet, and data at the link layer as a frame.

No rhyme. No reason. Just fiat. “Hey, we know that it’s standard practice to call a specific type of Layer 4 traffic a datagram, but we’re gonna call Layer 3 traffic a datagram. Or we might also call it a packet too, JUST ‘CAUSE WE’RE GANGSTAH LIKE THAT!“

For those wondering, I’m brushing up on my networking knowledge by going through “Interconnecting Cisco Network Devices, Part 1 (ICND1): CCNA Exam 640-802 and ICND1 Exam 640-822 (2nd Edition)” It’s already caused me to make the first part in this series. A series which will likely have many sequels.

I’m not even halfway through it and already finding some annoying inconsistencies. I thought I left things like this behind when I stopped reading MS Press books. Apparently vendor endorsed books have a disproportionate amount of fail in them.

(Updated April 12, 2012)

I’ve been researching web-based server control panels for a few months now. Most people will likely think of cPanel when they hear the phrase “server control panel” and have visions of web hosts dancing in their heads. Server control panels can be used for much more than web hosting, however. Control panels can allow people to administer systems with the click of a button having little interaction with the gorier details. Some might think that kind of scenario is categorically wrong, but I disagree. There are some *NIX oriented colleagues that I’d tackle before they got too close to a Windows server. For them, WebsitePanel might be a better option. There are also some folks that have need of their own server(s) and are happy to perform their own button mashing to reboot services and etc. I’m reminded of Jordan Sissel’s SysAdvent post “Share Skills and Permissions with Code.” In those scenarios, server control panels are excellent.

The nature of server control panels makes them most desirable by web hosting companies. As such, most of the web-based server control panels that I have found are slanted in that direction and might take some creativity to warp to your needs. Others appear to be more easily used as a general “E-Z Mode” SysAdmin front-end (Open Panel comes to mind). Don’t discard a control panel simply because it is slanted to web hosting. Some of them are much fuller than that.

Here is my list of web-based server control panels:

FOSS Control Panels

• DTC (Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X Server. GPL license. Stands for “Domain Technologie Control.” Looks like a great feature set. I don’t know why it’s not more popular.)
• EHCP (Linux only. GPL license. Stands for “Easy Hosting Control Panel”)
• Froxlor (Linux and BSD. GPL License. A fork of SysCP. )
• GNU Panel (Linux only. BSD license. Just kidding! It’s GPL.)
• ISPConfig (Linux only. BSD license. Made by the HowToForge folks. HTTP, SMTP, FTP, DNS and OpenVZ virtualization are supported among many other features)
• IspCP Omega (Linux only. Fork of VHCS. Old VHCS code is MPL, new code is GPL2. The goal is to port everything and make it GPL2.)
• Open Panel (Linux only. GPL license. Their pre-made OpenApps looks cool. I don’t know why this hasn’t made more waves than it has!)
• SysCP (Linux only. GPL license.)
• VHCS (Linux only. MPL license. Stands for “Virtual Hosting Control System”)
• WebController (Windows. only GPL. SourceForge project with an appalling website. Looks like it’s abandoned but I’m not sure.)
• Web-CP (Linux only. Not sure what license, but I assume GPL since it was a fork of the older web://cp product that itself was GPL. Web-CP looks abandoned. The last update on the site was 2005 and the latest bug closed in Mantis is 2006. The wiki is full of spam [I've never seen spam for breast enlargement and pistachios on the same page before - Thanks Web-CP!])
• zpanel (Windows and POSIX-based OSs – that includes Max OS X.)

Control Panels with a Free and Paid Edition

• Webmin (Primarily POSIX-based OSs, however a limited Windows version exists)
• Usermin Module (POSIX only. Simple webmail interface and user account modification for non-root users)
• Virtualmin Module (POSIX only. Allows for multi-tenant use of a server much like a shared web host)
• Cloudmin Module (POSIX only. Creats VPSs using Xen, KVM and OpenVZ among others)

Commercial Control Panels

• cPanel / WHM (Linux and FreeBSD. The granddaddy of control panels started back in 1996 as an in-house app that eventually got licensed. WHM controls the entire server. cPanel is user-oriented.)
• WHMXtra (Not a control panel on its own, but it’s a significant third-party add-on to WHM)
• DirectAdmin (Linux and BSD.)
• Ensim (Control panel that handles the management of cloud services Microsoft Hyper-V, Active Directory, Lync, Mozy, Anti Virus / Anti Spam Solutions like F-Secure, MessageLabs, Barracuda and a ton of other things. It’s really for $n aaS providers to build a business around.)
• Enkompass (Windows only. cPanel’s Windows product.)
• H-Sphere (Windows, Linux and BSD. Originally made by Positive Software before being bought by Parallels. I’m not sure how this software compares / competes with Parallels’s Plesk. This is an all-in-one provisioning, billing and control panel tool. Obviously focused solely on web hosts.)
• HMS Panel (Linux only.)
• Hosting Controller (Windows and Linux. Also supports managing Microsoft Exchange, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, SharePoint, Office Communication Server, Microsoft Dynamics and more.)
• HyperVM (Linux only. Virtualization management platform. Uses Xen and OpenVZ. Sister product to Kloxo.)
• InterWorx (Linux only. Can manage Ruby on Rails.)
• Kloxo (Linux only. More than just a server management platform, this is a large web hosting platform that is geared very much for a client / provider relationship.
• Machsol (Unusual in this list because it’s a control panel to manage the hosting of major enterprise server applications like Exchange, Sharepoint and BES.)
• Parallels Helm (Windows. One of the many acquisitions that Parallels has made.)
• Parallels Plesk (Linux and Windows. Probably the biggest competitor to cPanel.)
• SolusVM (Linux only. Manages VPSs and VPS clusters using OpenVZ, Xen and KVM.)
• vePortal (Linux only. CentOS only. Uses OpenVZ. One of the lowest price control panels.)
• WebsitePanel (Windows only. The former dotnetpanel after it was revised by SMB SAAS Systems Inc. and released as a SourceForge project.)
• xpanel (Rather emaciated looking control panel with very low price. Only advertised to run on Fedora.)

Billing / Automation Tools for Control Panels

These are billing and automation tools that tightly integrate with control panels.

Misc. Inclusions

I’d like for this to become a definitive list of web-based control panels (regardless of their focus; server management or web hosting). Basically, if it can manage a server or services and has a web front-end, I’d like to know about it. I’d appreciate any social shares. Likes, +1s, Tweets, Stumbles, Digg’s and etc. are awesome. If you know of any control panels that I’ve missed (active or defunct, since I love history), or if you spot a control panel that I mis-categorized, please let me know in the comments below.

Oh Cisco Press. Why must you annoy me so.

If you look at the top of my blog you’ll see an oddly place rectangle that touts “Stop Censorship.” Depending on your browser dimensions it might be obscuring the whole “logo” as well as a few tabs. What is this all about?

It’s about the American Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Both are American bills that I believe will have a terribly negative effect on the Internet as a whole and especially within America’s borders. Even worse, the bills have a shockingly large amount of congressional support. The loudest (and seemingly only) congressional voice against these bills seems to be Oregon senator Ron Wyden. The strongest voice for the bills is Nevada senator Harry Reid.

I will not attempt to convince you one way or the other about these bills. As an IT worker, you are undoubtedly an autodidact and can easily research and come to your own conclusions in just an evening or two. However, what I would like to bring to your attention is what you can do to oppose this bill if that is the stance that you take.

If you are one of my US readers, click on over to www.AmericanCensorship.org to find a list of Congressional phone numbers for those senators and representatives that you are a constituent of. Then call them and respectfully voice your opinion for or against. I believe that the American government already has designs on somehow making the internet (or an “alternate internet”) a place “where anonymity is not an option.” As such I take the opposition view on these bills and believe that we need as many voices as we can gather together to work against these threats to internet freedom.

Part of that opposition is getting the word out by utilizing a handy “Stop Censorship” banner at the top of my site. You can place that on your site too by going to the www.AmericanCensorship.org home page and scrolling one page down for some links and directions. Please consider it.

Also, take the time to thank senator Wyden through email, Twitter or give his office a call using the numbers that you can find on AmericanCensorship.org.

I fear for the future of the internet if one or both of these bills pass, and they could in just a matter of hours or days. Take action! All shares, +1s, RTs and etc. are appreciated.

While mucking about in bash with some files containing rather cryptic text, I needed to easily copy and paste it into a web browser. I had hoped that perhaps there was a built-in tool or interface that could help me. Perhaps /dev/clipboard? Yes, I’m that naïve.

The crux of the matter is that I’m using the X Window system to present Gnome to me. Bash needs to pass information up to X and to do that you’ll need a spiffy little package called xclip. It’s not standard in my distro and will likely not be in yours, so you’ll need to consult your repositories.

It turns out that there’s several different clipboard-like interfaces for X and I will not pretend to understand each of them. Simply saying that you’re going to put something into X’s clipboard isn’t specific enough. xclip can redirect bash output to various X displays (it defaults to $DISPLAY if no display is explicitly stated) and to the sundry X selections (primary, secondary or clipboard).

What would a more common usage of xclip be? Perhaps:

cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | xclip -selection CLIPBOARD

Now you can paste your hairy public keys somewhere useful and not have to worry if you captured any bad characters or not. Or perhaps puke your .vimrc file to pastebin for bragging rights. Do you have any other ways to pipe terminal output to X? Let me know in the comments.

This one goes out to Michael @Voretaq7 Graziano. He’s been sharpening his collection of wiggle blade daggers ever since he discovered that I access one server of mine using a password-less RSA keypair. I finally got around to rectifying that situation the other evening.

Obviously I didn’t want to recreate keypairs on my host machine and break all of the other applications that depend on them. Can one add a password to an existing RSA or DSA private key? Yes! Yes you can!

The key to the situation (pun intended) is to use the –p option for ssh-keygen (assuming that you’re using OpenSSH, of course) and then pointing it to the private key that you want to protect. For example:

ssh-keygen –p –f ~/.ssh/id_rsa

This also works to change the password on an existing protected private key.

Michael, this ssh-agent -D is for you. =)

As I’ve been making my way in the realm of the self employed, I’ve had cause to stop and consider the different ways and means by which people make a living. Just the other day, I made an interesting obvervation concerning how the generational view on employment has seemed to change. When discussing what someone’s family member does as their vocation, this seems to be the general breakdown of how it’s viewed:

“The Greatest Generation” – those who grew up in the depression and were young adults during WWII. My grandparents. They tend to be focused on the company that one works for. “Yes, he works for Boeing.” Only when their family member is self employed are they forced to consistently explain what role the person plays. “He’s self employed. He works on computers.”

The Baby Boomers. This is my parents’ generation. They seem to focus on a job title. “Our son is a Systems Administrator.” The focus is less on the company, likely because during my parents’ generation it was becoming less and less likely that a person would work for the same company for their entire life.

Millenials, AKA Generation Y. This is my generation, myself having been born in the poster year for Gen Y: 1982. When asked about our vocation, we seem to have two parallel thoughts. The first is that we don’t seem to see our work as separate from the rest of our life. We have had the fortune to build on the hard work of previous generations to be able to freely choose a vocation that we love and feel called to. “What do you do?” has a larger meaning to us than it seems to have for prior generations. The second thought is that we define what we do not by the company we work for, or the job title we’ve been given, but by a job or project description. “I work on the computer systems that allows a business to function competitively.” We also tend to inject our sense of “calling” into the description. I only just now realized that that’s probably why I’ve lately been changing the way I describe my work: “I make companies happy about the technology that runs their business.” That’s vastly more touchy-feely than my grandparents’ generation commonly expressed their vocation, and yet it’s effortless and natural for me.

I’m sure that I’m not the only one to make these observation. I’m certain that there’s plenty of scientific and pop-science writings on it. I’m just not terribly familiar with it personally. Have you noticed a similar thing? Either way, which culture do you come from? I’m sure this is a different experience in different countries around the world. What is your generation and how do you explain your work to others?

My Problem:

I have an HP ML 115 G5 server that uses a NVIDIA NFP3400 Chipset for storage. I have two pairs of hard drives that are mirrored. The Windows Server 2008 event log was displaying the following errors reported by the nvstor64 driver:

Event 129 nvstor64 “reset to device, DeviceRaidPort2 was issued”

Event 5 nvstor64 “A parity error was detected on DeviceRaidPort2

Sometimes the errors would appear five to seven times per second and bring the server down to an unusable crawl. Windows started seeing disk errors with the drives that were presented to it by the controller:

Event 51 “An error was detected on device DeviceHarddisk0DR3 during a paging operation”

Eventually NTFS corruption began to be seen:

Event 55 NTFS “The file system structure on the disk is corrupted and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume [volume name]“

My Solution:

The drivers are likely to be old or corrupted. In my case they appeared to have been corrupted after performing a bare metal restoration of Windows SBS 2008. Download the latest MediaShield package for the nForce chipset that is in your server or workstation from NVIDIA’s driver page (in my case with an HP ProLiant ML 115 it was the nForce Professional 3000 Series chipset). Then, carefully consider the danger of installing the drivers. In my case one of my two mirrors were broken apart and I had to delete one of the disks in the RAID utility and rebuild the mirror pair. Make a good backup of your system if at all possible (rather difficult if you’re having storage controller issues. You may want to remove and image your hard drives for safe keeping.

Installing fresh, new drivers may solve your problem. It did for me.

The Long Story:

I sought out help from HP’s own technical support and was pointed in the direction of this HP Support Forum thread. From that thread, you will be led to many others with similar troubles. It all seems to be centered around the nvstor driver and its interaction with the NVIDIA nForce chipset. It was as if the driver had been corrupted somehow. The ML 115 uses a NVIDIA NFP3400 Chipset for storage. That chipset uses the NVIDIA MediShield suite of tools that contains the drivers and utilities to manage it all. You can find specific NVIDIA drivers here at NVIDIA’s driver page. It just seems wrong to be on NVIDIA’s site parsing through graphics card drivers to find storage drivers for a server. Oh yeah, that’s because it is wrong!!

What’s especially troubling is that there is no link for the Windows version of the NVIDIA chipset drivers or the MediaShield suite of tools on the ML 115′s own drivers and support page. The only drivers on HP’s official page are for RHEL 5. I’m all for more Linux drivers in the world, by why not also offer the Windows version? The crazy hoops one has to jump through to find the exact chipset model number and then learn about NVIDIA’s nomenclature concerning how they package their drivers in a MediaShieled bundle is less than ideal.

Nevertheless, after finding the latest drivers on NVIDIA’s own drivers page, I installed the MediaShield package. Unfortunately, it broke apart one of my two mirrors, so I had to delete one of the disks in the RAID software and rebuild the array. That was an unnecessary bit of drama. Once that was rebuilt, I monitored the event log for days and none of the nvstor64 errors returned.

Disclaimer: I have and do write for various RedGate Software websites as an independent author. I have received no kickback from writing this blog post other than perhaps making David Convery smile for a fraction of a second.

RedGate Software has recently announced a promotion called “DBA in Space” in which one hard working DBA will be shot into space. Said DBA will presumably be given sufficient bodily protection for the journey as part of the deal.

The competition is in three stages. The first stage is explained by the DBA in Space website thusly:

The competition starts with our five week video quiz. All you have to do is answer the questions and complete some simple SQL tasks. Each week, new questions and tasks will be released. You can get started right away, or join in any time you like – the competition is open till 18th November.

Once you complete the SQL tasks that are presented, you then need to fill out a simple application form. After November 18th, fifteen finalists will be chosen. At that point, those fifteen finalists will need to campaign for votes. The DBA with the most votes gets to be a satellite for a day!

As with any competition, there is some fine print. Due to legal restrictions, Tennessee, Wyoming, Northern Ireland, and Quebec residents are excluded from being shot into space. The actual catapulting will not be done by anyone at RedGate (although I’m sure Robert Chipperfield would give it a go), but rather Space Adventures Ltd. For full details, please see the DBA in Space website.

If any one of my readers get picked as one of the final fifteen, let me know and I’ll plug you on the blog for some votes! I’m already hoping that Sean and Jennifer McCown try out for it. I’d like to see them fight each other for votes in the final fifteen. =)