Friday, December 20, 2013

Dayz standalone - things i've found on my journey

I know this isn't sysadmin related unless you assume most IT people play pc games.

I decided to write about things i've found and try to help out anyone else whom wants to play.
I will not write this as a survivor story, instead i'll write about loot spawns i've found. Where to look and where to avoid looking.

For now I'll use this as a place holder and update it as I find out more.

Update1:

Maps: Wrecked cars. So far this is the only place that I've seen this spawn.

Axe, Crowbar: Sheds.   The car garages, sheds.

Handgun ammo, baseball bat:   Random houses.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

My struggle with setting up slackware 14 vsftp using a mounted windows share for the home directory

I'm in the process of taking our virtual slackware server and making a physical server running the newest slackware 14.  Along the way i've hit a few issue with newer vsftpd.

I originally hit a 500 error on login because it was not allowing login to users with write access to home.
2nd issue I had was my fstab mount using cifs to a windows machine.  Users could login and download files but they could not upload any files. 530 error message would display.

Below are my steps on a fresh clean install of slackware 14.  It will cover commands that I used to setup mirrors, configure vsftpd.config, inetd.conf, adding a new user, adding a share to fstab and running openssl for the sftp part.

information that needs to be entered in will be in the color red everything else is just my comments or instructions.

After you get to terminal we need to uncomment a location to use slackpkg update.
From terminal type:  vim /etc/slackpkg/mirrors
Exit vim by saving with :wq

Now we need to run from terminal slackpkg update
vim /etc/vsftpd.conf

From what is listed I have uncommented this below.
I had to add in Allow_writeable_chroot=YES to get past the 500 error


anonymous_enable=no
local_enable=YES
write_enable=YES
local_umask=000
ftpd_banner=Private FTP.
chroot_local_user=YES
chroot_list_enable=YES
allow_writeable_chroot=YES
chroot_list_file=/etc/vsftpd.chroot_list

I commented out
#local_umask=022

Save by :wq

vim /etc/inetd.conf
We need to remove the comments from the line below Very Secure Transfer Protocol(FTP) server.
ftp stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd vsftpd
to save :wq

restart the service from terminal by entering
/etc/rc.d/rc.inetd restart

Any users that you want to have full access to all folder on the ftp and not be locked down to their home needs to be placed in the chroot list based on what we have in our changes to vsftpd.conf
vim /etc/vsftpd.chroot_list

Create a directory under home to mount the windows share later
mkdir /home/ftp

Adding our windows share to fstab is my next step.  I had to add in for options gid=ftp,dir_mode=0777 to allow the users to upload files to the share.  If not it would display the 530 error.
vim /etc/fstab

//servername/foldershare  /home/ftp  cifs  gid=ftp,dir_mode=0777,rw,directio,username=windowusername,password=password 0 0
:wq

Now its time to create our users. I prefer to use terminal adduser and follow through the command prompts entering what information is needed.
When it asks for home it will give a default /home/username  change it to be /home/ftp/userid
the user home is now on the windows share
When it asks for groups add the user to group = ftp

Setting up SSl from terminal i chose to run this with 365 days with an rsa key of 1024

openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:1024 -keyout /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.pem -out /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.pem

Now we need to edit the inetd.conf to enable ssl Below are the values i added or changed
vim /etc/inetd.conf
ssl_enable=YES
allow_anon_ssl=NO
force_local_data_ssl=NO
force_local_logins_ssl=NO
ssl_tlsv1=YES
ssl_sslv2=NO
ssl_sslv3=NO
rsa_cert_file=/etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.pem
:wq


Making any changes to this file you will need to either restart the system or issue the kill hup command.
I find it easiest to just restart the server before testing out ftp.


That is all the steps that I took to set up a slackware 14 vsftp server with sftp using a mounted windows share for the home directory.

I did have to ask for help in a forum to figure out my issue with fstab windows mount not allowing file uploads.  Through those suggestions I was able to apply the dir_mode option.

I hope this helps anyone else that ran into the same issue as I did.

Monday, September 24, 2012

edimensional AudioFx headset - Adjusting the volume so your ears dont bleed

I've had one hell of a time with this headset.  Master volume for the system would be almost as low as it would go and I felt like i was going to loose my hearing.

It was either on and ear bleeding or off.

Finally on my 3rd time through downloading and installing the software i noticed under its own software was a settign to adjust output device.


Their software under control panel is called USB PnP Sound Device.

Launch this and on the main setting tab will have different sectioned off panes.  Look at the Output Device.
Click the Sound icon volume.  it will then display a slider for left/right.  For me the sweet spot was -30db on both.

Doing this puts the headset back at a normal volume that wont lead you to shouting at your co-workers from lack of hearing.

Hope this helps.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

How to tell what port a program needs open

This is an issue I run into.  Searching forums for threads that tell you what ports need to be open to let an application work properly.

Most of the time you can find these on their wiki or on the software's forums.  Sometimes the port is listed but its outdated information.

Here is a fairly quick and easy method to find out some information.

Tools needed, application running that is giving the issue, windows command prompt and  task manager.

Open Task manager and click on the processes tab.  The bottom right is a check box to show process from all users. Go ahead and check that.    Under the menue click view->select columns.

Check PID and press ok.

From the application you need to find the port for launch it and log into the server if possible.
Switch to command prompt and type in    netstat -ano

Look at task manager for the running application and write down the PID number.

For example a game  launcher.exe  has a pid of 8081.

looking at netstat for pid 8081 i see it is pointing to an external IP address and its using port 10781.

Bingo thats the port number i need to open.


Hope this helps people out.  If you are trying to open up ports for a game this may get you in the door, most games have ranges of ports that are a few hundred ports.  Way to many to open up for in my case.

If you can open up all ports for a given ip go that route. its a lot easier.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Ubuntu how to run a minecraft snapshot

It has been a while since i've had to update a snap shot and being on the linux side i couldn't remember where a lot of it was.

First go to minecraft.net download minecraft.jar

choose properties and check executable.

Run the file and it will create the rest of the files by downloading them from mojang.

browse from your home folder to .minecraft. There will be a folder now bin
Open that and now take your snapshot minecraft.jar and overwrite it.

I also checked allow executing.


After that finished go to the original minecraft.jar and run with java. log in and you will see the update version there.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Oracle Public Synonms troubles

I got schooled today on this topic.

Our internal users were having issues trying to restore database through our front end web interface.
They were able to pick the database server but the drop down for all the schemas were blank.

Quickly getting to the point  the public synonym for sys.dba_users was missing.

Easy way to see this is from enterprise manager drill down to Schema > Public>  there should be an object called DBA_USERS.

To fix our issue loggin in as Sys

CREATE PUBLIC SYNONYM DBA_USERS FOR DBA_USERS;
COMMIT;


After that was ran all of the schemas populate the drop down list now.

Hope this will help people.

BSOD on newly imaged dell

Had a strange issue when i tried to image a laptop it went through it's normal process and imaged the machine.

When it started to boot into windows it displayed the normal startup window then went straight to blue screen.  Pulling the hard drive and viewing windows\minidump showed that nothing was written to the hard drive.

I got to thinking hmm maybe it is a bad hard drive.  Running diag scan I did not find any issues.

Last step enter the Bios and see what there is to be seen.

The sata drive was set to AHCI. switching this to raid ready and poof computer boots without issue into windows.