Wild Blue Sky

Just fixed a problem that had been (unbeknownst to me) plaguing this place for who knows how long.

After rebooting a domain controller, the SQL servers would start throwing logon errors until it came back up.  Most of the errors were from IIS that use windows auth, a few errors even came from the app servers.  What made it especially tricky was that it really looked like a kerberos problem.  Depending on what machine you were looking at, you’d get an error like

Login failed for user ”. The user is not associated with a trusted SQL Server connection.

or maybe

Logon Failure:
Reason: An error occurred during logon
… it’d go on to tell you what was wrong with Kerberos

and one

The Kerberos subsystem encountered a PAC verification failure

I saw a few

The failure code from authentication protocol Kerberos was The specified user does not exist

Long story short – I looked and poked and Googled… I couldn’t seem to find anyone that had reported this problem before (and I’m usually pretty good at putting together search terms that get me what I want) until I finally found a KB article that fit my hunch of what was happening.  I don’t think I saw the “NO_SUCH_USER” code in any of the logs I looked through (maybe that’s what you get if you’re using NTLM?) but the rest of it sure sounded good.  I tried the work-around on the domain controllers first – stopping the netlogon service before rebooting – and didn’t get a single error.

I deserve a raise.

I’m adding a Windows 2008 RC2 (x64… if it matters) to an existing 2003 domain.  Join the domain, everything’s happy, run all my forestprep & domainprep goodness… but dcpromo kept shitting itself with:

“Failed to examine the active directory forest.  The error was: The operation cannot continue because the LDAP connect/bind operation failed: error: 58”

The only thing I could find was this page which suggested the local admin account password had to be the same as the forest root domain password.  Before I went through all the account renaming and hunting down the password (all your admin accounts get renamed, right?  And no one really has that password?) I decided to just disable the local admin account on the 2008 server first.  It worked.  “WTF?O” indeed.

And not a moment too soon.  The WarHawk beta that I’ve been playing nonstop ends next week.  I can’t wait for the retail version – they’ve made a good number of changes from the beta.  Hopefully the freezing problems will be completely resolved.  We’ll see.  Anyone with a PS3, I would suggest you pick this bad-boy up – it’s hella fun.

While waiting for the flood of killer games to finally come in for the PS3, I decided to try something with a PSP.  I finally bought one – the first hand-held gaming device I have ever owned (unless you count the little LED football game from years ago)  So here’s my setup, and damn is it cool:
1. Tivo Desktop “Auto-transfers” whatever shows I want to my PC  (500GB external drive)
2. Every night I have a batch file run that strips off the Tivo encryption (don’t tell the authorities)
I had this setup from before so I could play my recordings on my Hauppage MediaMVP on another TV in the house (I’m sorry, but I’m addicted to being able to time-shift my television watching)
3. I installed TVersity on said PC to stream my MP3 collection, pictures, and Tivo’d shows to my PS3
4. Remote Play – yes kids, I can play all my music and videos over the interwebs.  Anyplace there’s wireless internet access, I can get to all my media content I have stored at home from my PSP.  It’s not restricted to just what’s on my PS3’s piddly 60GB drive, it’s everything.  This is decidedly cool, and would probably piss off Senator Stevens.  So yesterday I spent my lunch hour watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

It actually works very well – the quality is decent and it hardly chops at all.  The only thing I need now is a way to turn my PC at home into a bluetooth PS3 remote so I can turn it on remotely.  As it sits now, you have to leave your PS3 on in “Remote Play” mode all day so you can connect to it.

The editor for Wordpress (what I use to update this site) changed a lot with this last upgrade I did. It seems to have broken a lot of things, including embedded video. So in case you missed the Little Big Planet video from my earlier post, here it is again:

Thanks to Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin for Wordpress.

In other news, here’s a quick review of the Hauppage Wireless MediaMVP- I already have a Tivo and the POS Time Warner DVR, so with 3 tuners recording I didn’t really need another. I was thinking of setting up a MythTV box, but decided to go with the MediaMVP instead. Right now, I have a space PC running the Tivo Desktop software. I have a few shows that are scheduled to automatically transfer. Every night I have a scheduled task that runs a command line utility that converts the .tivo files into a playable MPEG. It’s not the perfect setup (I’d like to stream shows right off the Tivo – hey Tivo, how about something like the MediaMVP to do this with Tivo?) but works perfectly for the bedroom TV.
The device itself is a cool little thin-client. It’ll show your pictures, play music, and any compatible videos located on your PC. I really like the ability to play internet radio as well – one of my favorite stations (WOXY) is now “internet only.” Speaking of internet radio, help us save it! Seriously, a 300-1200% hike in royalties that only internet broadcasters have to pay is just asinine. Who’s pushing for this?! Has to be the Clear Channels of the world… but I digress. Back to the MediaMVP: Video streaming is actually pretty impressive. I don’t have the best signal, but I haven’t had any issues in the few shows that I’ve played. Pause, FF, and FR all work about as you’d expect. There’s a noticeable hesitation, but nothing horrible. This thing would truly shine as a MythTV front end, but I just don’t have that kind of time. I am thinking of giving mvpmc a look when I have a few minutes. It’s a replacement operating system for the MediaMVP that introduces a few new features and functions. If you’re geeky and going to go that far with it, I’d suggest picking up a router that will handle DD-WRT – it will at least save you from installing a DHCP server on your PC (you need a DHCP server that will hand out a ‘next server’ address, most consumer-grade routers won’t do that.) I’d suggest the Buffalo G54S – I grabbed one at Circuit City for $25 (after $25 rebate) and it completely spanks the Netgear wireless-G router that it replaced. I couldn’t hold a signal in the back of the house with the Netgear, I’ve got a good enough signal to stream video with the Buffalo. I should have taken some screen shots with Netstumbler, it was an impressive jump. Same channel, location, everything… Jon reported a similar increase in range when he replaced his existing (Linksys?) wireless router with a Buffalo G54S.

One of these days I might actually try to put together a well written post that doesn’t wander from subject to subject

Time Warner Cable sucks. More later, but I think I’ll have them do all this work, then I’ll switch to Dish or DirecTV.

“Akismet has caught 100 spam for you since you first installed it.”

Awesome. A week of using Akismet and it caught 100 spam comments. I think 4 or 5 got through that I had to moderate, but I’ll accept that. If you have a WordPress blog, check them out at http://akismet.com/ – takes two minutes to install. I hope Jessica doesn’t install it – it makes me happy that she has a billion-zillion comments to delete everyday.

In home improvement news, click through to see my new front porch… (more…)

It’s really annoying. I’ve moderated 50 comments in the past week. Maybe I should start posting IP addresses. And it’s really pointless – they’re not getting through anywhere, they just create work.

27 degrees and sunny here. Nothing else exciting to report.

While writing this, another 4 comments came up to moderate…