Sonicwall Password Change on CLI

I had a co-worker reach out to me this morning asking how to change a Sonicwall NSA 2400 password via the console CLI on SonicOS Enhanced 5.9. The built in help and the online documentation did not list this as an option. He resorted to an hour on the phone with support before they offered an undocumented (and probably not supported) command. The syntax is as below:

setAdmin "username", " password"
commit

If you know of a better way, please comment and I will be happy to update this post.

unRAID Is Awesome!

I came across a video on YouTube a few months back and was immediately hooked. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuJYMCbIbPk

This launched my latest computer project. I am planning to put the finishing touches on the tower hardware this weekend (a video card upgrade) to a month long project of selling old computers and parts to raise capitol so I could pay cash for the new build. I was able to sell three systems and put some of the Christmas bonus with cash I had saved up to combine these three computers into one tower running a single Skylake i7 6700k chip. With a Corsair PSU, Case, and liquid CPU cooler, Crucial RAM, two AMD GPUs, and various hard drives I already had, the system took shape and has been running for two weeks quite well. The power savings from cutting three computers down to a single system will provide savings on our power bill, a theme for this year (cutting expenses to pay the house off faster). My former gaming/work from home desktop, Reba and Summer's shared workstation for photo/video editing and watching educational videos, and the home server I was running in the basement now run from a single system in my office that is so quite, I have decided to put a reminder on my calendar to clean the dust filters monthly so I do not forget it is there.

What is unRAID? It is a platform built on Linux with a great set of tools available out of the box and a straightforward user interface for configuring and managing these tools. It includes support for such modern conveniences as Docker containers and KVM virtual machines. The magic of being able to pass multiple graphics cards and other peripherals at the hardware level to different VMs means each virtual workstation functions as an independent system with full video performance, separate sound playback, and user input for each user. I can even pass an entire USB root hub (or multiples) through to a VM to get further functionality and add USB devices to the VM after it has started up (when the USB device assignment cannot be changed at the VM config level). I use this to connect USB storage to the VM for formatting flash drives or adding other USB peripherals.

The network attached storage function of the server combined with a container for CrashPlan and another for Plex means I can shut my VM down when I do not need it without affecting the backups I host for family all over the country or media streaming of our music or digital movie collection. The VMs are portable, so I can move them to the next unRAID build when this box ages enough to warrant major upgrades or replacement. The software allows me to add, remove, or upgrade hard drives as I need to add capacity, including a parity disk to support single drive failure. At a starting cost of $59 at the time of this writing from https://lime-technology.com/, the software is very reasonable compared to a Windows Server license.

The system isn't without a hitch here or there. I have to disconnect one USB hub built into a monitor and an external hard drive I back up to in order to get the system to boot fully. I still need to track down if this is an OS or UEFI issue, but since I only have to reboot to change hardware, I can live with the issue for now since the hardware is basically finished.

Maybe I can get some photos posted of the system after I give the presentation to my coworkers next week.

Amazing Memories

Today while I was at work, I got a surprise (planned) visit from my wife, daughter (almost 3 now, unbelievable how the time flies), and our dog. They brought me a frog balloon hugging a heart that says "I LOVE YOU!" and several other goodies/snacks. I sat at my desk for a few moments after they left and thought back to when we were in Canada for an 8 week contract gig I had for a hosting/information system design company. One night while there, we set an alarm for 2:00AM, bundled our daughter all up in her car seat (she would have been 7 months old at the time), and drove a few hours north of Edmonton, Alberta, to see if we could find any dark sky to watch a potential aurora borealis. We sat there in the dark for what must have been hours watching light dance across the sky before driving back to the house we were staying in. Every so often we would start the car back up to run the heater for a few minutes, but that was one of the things on my bucket list from childhood that I had no idea how to check off the list until the evening before.

I am so blessed to have a wife that has loved me enough to put up with me for four years (and counting)!

IT Humor

Scene: a server administrator walks up the the senior server administrator outside the server room.
Admin: "Your backups are full of it!"
Sr. Admin: "Yep, every weekend."

Remote Server Management Brain Teaser

I have a fun little puzzle to work out. Yesterday around 4pm, one of our remote servers at a branch office in the middle of nowhere (Culbertson, MT) had a RAID controller failure resulting in a corrupt and unbootable ESXi 5.0 server. This is a Dell PowerEdge 1950 III server with a DRAC 5 card. I have the system booted up via DRAC from a live Ubuntu 12.10 desktop CD with mvfs-tools installed so I can access/backup the datastore. I have co-opted the guest workstation from that office via TeamViewer and have shared out a directory. Unfortunately, all the workstations in that office appear to have 250GB HDDs in them (formatted down to 230GB, minus the 15-20GB of OS and applications gives me at most 210GB free). I need to back up a VMDK file that is 250GB, and since I can't boot the ESXi box to export (compress) the vm image, I'm sorta limited on my options. I could overnight a USB HDD for them to plug into the server, I could try to split the VMDK into multiple 25GB files and try to copy the first two or so to another system, or something else. Still pondering this one while one of the staff in that office runs home to see how big her external hard drives she isn't using are.

Installing MPD on Ubuntu Server

I have been working on a project for my 1 1/2 year old daughter this weekend and just got it working before church this morning. We have a stereo/cd deck in her room and while useful for helping her to go sleep from time to time, there was no way to turn it on or control it without going into her room. Generally, she would wake up more seeing us in her room and would cry/beg for us to get her out of bed if we had to go back in and put some music on to help her go to sleep.

Enter MPD (Music Player Daemon). MPD is a service (a.k.a. daemon in GNU/Linux terms) that allows you to play music from a remote system's hard drive through that same remote system's audio hardware letting you control it from your local system (as I am using it; it does more, but I haven't fully explored it yet). There are many clients you can use to control the music service (Android, Linux, Microsoft, Apple).

The Setup

I already have a FoxConn nt330i nettop running Ubuntu 10.04 x86 Server dedicated to my daughter Summer hosting a motion server that streams a webcam feed of her crib to our local network allowing my wife to check on her during nap times (the grandparents have access too since they live in other states). I figured I could find a way to add in some sort of media playback even though this is a "headless" server (no keyboard or screen hooked up to it, and no GUI running; just a command line server). I found some cheap Harmon/Kardon desktop speakers I had stored away in a box and plugged them in, turned them on, and set them at a medium volume level. I did some Google searches and came across several explanations of basic setups for MPD on desktop versions of Ubuntu, but nothing clear on how to set this all up start to finish on a headless box which does not have any audio playback support by default. This lead me to document what I did in this blog entry should I need to do it again or should someone else be in the same boat as me and not know what pieces are missing from the server version to get the full audio setup working.

Getting It Working

These steps will get you from a clean Ubuntu 10.04 x86 Server install to working MPD controlled by a remote client.

1. Install Ubuntu 10.04 Server (x86-64 should work, I have only tested on x86). Install options shouldn't affect the rest of this guide, so pick what you normally do when setting up a new box. This should work on other versions of Ubuntu, Debian, Debian-based, or any other version of Linux, but you might have to find your own sources for these packages, resolve dependencies, and compile from source. Test in a virtual machine if you want to try out a different OS. Or you could use Ubuntu.
2. Install software that is needed for audio, MP3, and MPD.
3. sudo apt-get install alsa lame mpd
4. Set your sound levels using the Alsa sound mixer
   sudo alsamixerYou will see a picture like below with your sound output options. Make sure the output you are using is turned up and that the box at the bottom of that channel doesn't have an "m" in it ("m" signifies it is muted). I am using the front audio out jack so I have adjusted the channels marked "master" and "front" using the left and right arrows to select each channel, the "m" key to unmute it, and the up and down arrow keys to adjust the volume level (by default everything is muted and turned all the way down).

   

   Alsa Mixer

5. Set your MPD options. Generally all you need to do is make note of the music_directory parameter and the bind_to_address parameter. The music_directory can be anything you want (I set mine to /music and copied all my music into that folder). The bind_to_address is set to "localhost" by default in Ubuntu even though the config file says the default is "any". I set mine to any just in case my IP address changes. You can hard code yours to match your IP address if you want.
   sudo nano /etc/mpd.conf
   update the two lines below in this file
   music_directory        /music
   bind_to_address       any
   press ctrl+o to save (output) the file, followed by ctrl+x to exit the file
6. Create your music directory if it does not exist.
   sudo mkdir /music
7. Copy your music into the music directory. You can copy it from a USB flash drive or somewhere on the network for example. I have a central home server that all my data is backed up to and hosted on, so I used rsync to copy all of my MP3s to Summer's computer. Notice the trailing slashes on the paths in rsync. Those are important (and a discussion for another time).
   sudo rsync username@sourceserver:/all/of/my/music/ /music/
8. Set the music directory permissions. As noted in the mpd.conf file, the mpd user needs read access on the music, and since this isn't private tax data, I just set it to read all for all users.
   sudo chmod -R a+r /music
9. Restart MPD to apply new settings.
   sudo service mpd restart
   If you get any error messages after issuing this command such as "could not bind to address x.x.x.x" or "failure to read from /music (or whatever you put for your music_directory)" double check the edits you just made by revisiting step 5 paying special attention to anything that might have a typo or wrong IP address in it.
10. Connect to the server using whatever MPD supporting client you wish (I use an Android app on my tablet, my wife uses a Windows 7 client on her laptop). A list of these clients can be found on the MPD wikia link above. Consult the application's documentation for how to configure connection settings.
11. Queue up music and see if it works! You might want to start with lower audio levels than what I did, these setting worked for me, but yours may turn out a lot louder depending on what soundcard and speakers you have.

Now Summer falls asleep from time to time with the soothing sounds of Native American flutes or classic lullabies. Since she is still teething, the music helps her relax and fall asleep faster, and can help calm her down when she wakes up with a particularly bad tooth ache. I just started some more quiet flute music for her while typing this when I noticed her fuss a little in her sleep on the webcam.

Monitoring the Network

I have been deploying PRTG at my new job this week and thought I would write a quick post about the subject. Basically PRTG is an all encompassing solution for monitoring local and remote IT infrastructure. We have a central office with four remote offices that are staffed, and systems in an additional three datacenters. I need to know instantly when the internet goes down at either of two remote sites that have particularly bad DSL service so I can call the staff and have them power cycle the DSL modem as an attempt to restore service. I have PRTG configured to e-mail me if anything goes wrong, day or night, as well as the Android app on my phone and tablet if I happen to be at home and not watching my company inbox. The solution is fast and reliable, with remote probes at each site to continue logging performance and uptime on servers in spite of poor internet reliability. In short, it tells me exactly what is wrong before users call and complain. For more info, take a look at http://www.paessler.com/prtg. Enjoy!

Change: The Only Constant

It has been a while since I have written any updates, mainly because so much has been changing lately, I have not had any time to sit and type. I got laid off from Computronix USA Inc due to downsizing, found a new job at almost double the pay managing the entire network/server infrastructure including the main office, four remote offices around the mid-west, and three remote datacenters. Things are growing so fast, that I'm working a ton to keep up with fixes and deploying new equipment, but the work is good, and I enjoy it.

Summer is still growing like a weed, and is learning more sign language and is trying to talk a little. She runs to the door to greet me every day when I get home. She is a wonderful child!

Feeling Secure Does Not Mean You Are Secure

I am putting together a presentation on basic Internet security best practices for our Annual General Meeting this Friday that I will be presenting with my brother-in-law to our office as part of a day of informative sessions covering work-related and non-work topics. We are planning to cover the basics of passwords, firewalls, and anti-malware software, and there might even be a guest appearance of a weaponized pineapple or perhaps a reaver will show up and ruin someone's day. You just never know what might happen on the Internet these days.... Now, where do I find some lolcatz hacking into people's e-mail accounts.

Winter Sports

Had a great day shooting today. My rifle scope is way off, so I'll be working on that in the coming weeks if I get time. The shotgun is performing well, and the pistols are still very nice. I need to work out a steadier trigger pull, but other than that, my shooting is staying on target. It sure is cold sighting in a rifle with snow pouring down....

Sunshine in Winter

Summer is a wonderful child. She is soooooo cute! She is perfectly happy to play all on her own as long as you are sitting on the floor by the couch in our living room. If you sit on the couch, she comes over and bugs you to play with her. She is such a social ladybug!

Christmas Letter - Draft 1

This year was filled with an incredible amount of wonderful "firsts" for our family. From our first child and daughter being born, to Reba's first ten days away on a trip without me since we got married, to our first time living outside of the country, the year has been full of surprises and new experiences at every turn.

Reba took Summer to visit the Character Training Institute in Oklahoma she attended during her college years. They enjoyed time introducing Summer to old friends and Reba had the chance to help cook in the kitchen again she had worked in while attending there. Summer came back with some wonderful toys hand made for her while they were there.
This fall, one of the network/server administrators in our company took a short term disability leave, which gave me the opportunity to temporarily transfer to the Canadian office to fill in for him and receive training in our corporate standards and best practices for server and network management. During this seven week trip, Reba, Summer, and I stayed with a family from the office up there (their basement that they normally rent out was available at the time of our visit). We were there long enough to be able to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving and still make it back in time for US Thanksgiving as well (two in one year!). Summer took crawling lessons from the one year old and two year old we stayed with and had days of fun sharing toys and enjoying all sorts of new tastes and getting to share a bed with Reba and me again. While there, Summer started crawling (with the proper motivation, a slice of pumpkin pie Reba would drag along the floor in front of her), pulling up on the bed (and any other furniture with good enough edges to grab hold of), and even took a crawl up one step while we were packing up the car the day we left to head back to Denver, Colorado before Reba found her and scooped her up. Reba enjoyed days of sight seeing and touring the town, while I spent long hours commissioning servers and upgrading network components at the main office location and colo across town. Victory (our 7 year old dog) spent the time with friends to avoid complications at the border crossing leaving and returning to the US. He was overjoyed to see us when we returned to pick him up.

Summer Sunshine was born March 2nd, and our lives changed. She has grown up much faster than we could have imagined, having learned to crawl just well enough to be able to get to a couch or bed to pull herself up and stand there, reaching for anything low enough to get her hands on. Just yesterday Summer took the bottle from me and decided to feed herself (with marginal success) for the first time. At a little over 9 months old, she has started to stand for a few seconds at a time unsupported before sitting back down, and will take steps when assisted. Victory has developed a look of fear and trepidation at "little sis's" new ability to chase him around the apartment on all fours, and grumbles every time she tries to use him as a support to stand up. He is getting tired of having to run away from her; his only safe hiding places are on the couch or bed when we don't have Summer up there with us.

Reba's parents joined the Coloradan Davidsons and Winsingers for Thanksgiving this fall and we enjoyed a big family dinner together as well as a chance for the men of the family to spend an evening at the shooting range together.

== More Edits Soon ==

Good News! Heading Home!!!!!

On October 2nd, my wife Reba, our daughter Summer, our dog Victory, and I left Denver, Colorado to embark on a two day drive to our new home for a month and a half in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I don't like telling people when I'm home or away, because there are some unkind people in this world who would like to know such information. But as we are almost home, I can talk about everything in retrospect. Things to note from the last month:

• Summer is growing
• She started crawling shortly after we arrived at the place we stayed
• She decided crawling was only useful for getting to something she could pull herself up on and stand
• She will be walking very soon
• She has sprouted four teeth (that we have found, mostly by her biting us with them)
• She misses Victory
• Victory has been living it up terrorizing the cat he is living with while we are out of the country. Also, the family watching him for us either already has or will in the next week most likely be having their first baby (yay for growing families)! We pick him up on our way back to Denver.
• Reba loves Edmonton, but not enough to move there permanently. I agree. It's too cold there. I've been sick with all the cold weather and trying to bike to work. But there has been lots to do, capped by a rodeo we went to Monday night. The science museum we visited shortly after our arrival was also cool (liquid nitrogen presentations are always entertaining).
• The Aurora Borealis was worth sitting out most of the night in the cold car for. If we had stayed out longer, we could have seen a more amazing wave, but the one we got to see was very impressive. Greenish blue waves of ionizing radiation flowing across the sky is an amazing sight to see.

Life has been crazy and will continue to be for some time. Our vacation to visit family in December will include me being on call the entire time. No pressure.... I have been receiving training from the hosting division of our company and will be working remotely from the US office on hosted build outs for client projects and internal use over the next 4-5 months as needed. I'll also be helping with server updates and other regular outage tasks (which will be fun if the VPN goes down). I'm learning a lot about the corporate best practices and will apply this knowledge to the US infrastructure as it grows. It turns out I'm filling in for an employee on short term disability (had I known this, the 12 hour debate with Canadian immigration might have been shorter). My work permit expires soon, so that's why I'm headed back to the US in a hurry. Reba has been giving me rides since it is too cold for me to bike to work with how sick I've been getting. She has also been making me wonderful lunches. It's fun to poke into the bag each day when I get to the office and dig into an orange or chocolate bar (there's usually a couple of each in there, I'm getting spoiled).

Life in Canada is a little different. Not as different as I was expecting. Adjusting to to KPH instead of MPH was easy. Buying gas hurts, because it costs around $1 CAD/liter, but the car can hold 60 or so liters.... Costco, Walmart, Best Buy, lots of the same stores here. Costco is insane. The prices are way better than other stores around here, so it is a mad house in there, wall to wall packed with people all the time. Reba found a sled for our now 8 month and 1 week old baby girl. It's the perfect size and is well padded, so she should love going for rides in it all winter long. If the snow we heard about over the last month and a half keeps up, she will get lots of rides in the snow to get the mail, take the dog for walks, and just general time outside. Reba found a big, fluffy, down snow suit for Summer, with lots of space to grow into, so we'll toss a few warmers in the arms and legs and tow her around for as long as she wants.

While we are on the subject, Summer is amazing. She studies everything. She thinks a lot. You can pick her up and stand her up on your lap and she will give you this look like she knows she can figure you out if she just works at it long enough. She is happy all the time, even when we aren't. She still only gets upset if she needs something. And as usual, it's sleep, food, or a change of diapers. She hasn't enjoyed the cold either, but she is getting over the cough she picked up a couple weeks ago. Reba's teeth are doing well too (she had two pulled the week before we left).

All in all, the trip has achieved it's goal of introducing me to the work I will be doing for the next half a year, and has helped the staff catch up on workload due to being down a staff member. It is clear that at least another employee needs to be hired, but the dollars don't allow for that at this time, so we have to take projects as they come and do our best to prioritize and not lose any time.

I can't wait to get home, sleep in my own bed (with Reba, Summer, and Victory all snuggled in), and play a little Minecraft on a computer that can handle it. I've had a Foxconn NetTop that can't handle much beyond websurfing and video playback, and to have a real desktop with my multi-24"-monitor setup back will me nice. And whenever it launches, I need to go pick up the Samsung Galaxy Nexus to replace a very aged (launch day purchase) Motorola Droid (OG).

Almost Half Way

About three weeks ago, I started re-training with my company to fill additional responsabilities in managing internal systems and infrastructure (servers and network). This has been a great experience and I am learning a ton about delving deeper into hosting systems for customers. I'll be at work late tonight to update servers and do some other maintenance.

While I have been busy at work, Summer has decided to start poking out her first tooth (bottom left front tooth), and she is beginning to crawl (with the proper motivation; pumpkin pie works well). She's as big as a 1 year old, and yet she's just a week over 7 months.

Going Nowhere Fast

Today was a very frustrating day. After dealing with T1 and IP address migration issues all morning, I took Reba to get teeth pulled. On the way home and to pick up Summer, I got yelled at and cussed at by other drivers. I also had a driver fly out of a parking lot and across two busy lanes of traffic to stop short right in front of me for no reason I could determine. I almost hit her and I could have been hit myself. Then there are the drivers who tailgate, pass, and then slow down in front of you. I had a couple of those too. It was only a 40 minute drive... Rush hour in Denver is not pleasant.

Old Games

I picked up two $1 copies of Age of Empires 3 with all expansions some time ago and finally started playing it. Don't get the point of the cards, but ok. I should read up on some strategy for how to use those. Graphics are good for 2005 (?) game. Mechanics seem the same, but resources are simplified; mills are odd with how cheap they are, and that they give infinite food. Raising sheep is cool.

Summer will crawl any day now. She likes getting up on her knees, but doesn't move yet. Still, it is fun playing with and watching her wave stuff around!

On The Move

Summer is about to start crawling and we still have lots of baby-proofing to do. Also have a neat job opportunity coming up. More on both soon!

Life Of A SysAdmin

I just got home from work at 3AM after hopefully saving the servers from themselves. The AC unit has quit again, and the server room got up to just under 120 degrees F before I realized what was up thanks to E-mail and SMS messages not being sent (I will be looking into that Sunday afternoon or Monday morning). I have spent most of the day catching up on MS updates on 1/3 the servers, with a short break to install shelving and a longer break to rearrange the bedroom. Server admin is taxing, but I love working with the servers and the 2AM drives to work to set up box fans in the server room are down to once a year.

Regarding the room reworking.... Reba wants to move Summer into her own room, which means moving my half of the office room into a corner of the master bedroom. I'm keeping the Linux gaming server and the primary desktop I built early last year, but almost everything else needs to go for lack of space. On the up side, I can play Minecraft in bed now.

Summer is growing like a weed and getting cuter every day! Speaking of, she just woke up, so I will write more some other time.

My Wonderful Daughter

Last night, Summer was awake every couple of hours demanding food. She wasn't sleepy and wanted to play. Her mother and I did not want to play. We fed her and did what we could to make her happy, and this morning I watch Summer for a while so Reba could get some more sleep.

This afternoon, Summer had finally had enough. She was not happy and wouldn't stop screaming. The only thing we could do was walk around and bounce her until she finally gave up. I think I walked the circular walk in front of my apartment that goes around the stairs for about an hour before she finally got sleepy enough for us to lay her down.

Some people say parenthood is not worth the trouble, but I disagree. To see how happy she is to see me when I come home from work is amazing, even though she doesn't have a clue who I am yet. And when she gives me the cutest smile in the world every time I walk into the room, I melt a little inside. Summer is amazing. We love her.

Happy 4th of July!

Reba and I celebrated Summer's four month birthday on Saturday by taking Victory to the dog park. Victory has been needing more exercise this summer and is feeling a little neglected with how much attention Summer requires. He also needs a close eye to watch his feet when he goes to the park as he has been ripping the pads on his feet with how rough the gravel at the park is. He seems to be doing ok and healing up fine this time. We left as soon as he got a little hole in one pad, and it isn't bad enough to hurt him any. Summer slept the entire time we were there.

We also attended the annual DOSUG (Denver Open Source User Group) bbq/cookout at Plumb (something) Park. Good food and good talking with the active members. I want to start attending the regular meetings the group holds monthly. Reba enjoyed talking with some of the ladies that came. Good family event.

Sunday we slept in as Summer didn't sleep much Saturday night or Sunday morning. Lunch at Nate and Jos's was good as always and I helped nate with a wiring problem in his new truck. It now has a working radio! All the cousins had great fun, and all four are growing like weeds; especially Summer.

Today we took Summer and Victory to Cheesman Park to watch Nate's family bike/ride/walk in the 5th annual bike parade. Very hot out, but lots of shade to be had made it survivable. This evening was a cookout with Chris and Marie. Vic had to stay home, and was very good! He didn't get into anything this time! Chris grilled up some good buffalo burgers and a perfect t-bone steak. We swam for a bit and watched fireworks on TV. Twas a good day.