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Kerberos brokeage

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I assist other departments on campus with Mac related issues fairly regularly, since I’m one of the few Sysadmin’s on campus that really know Mac OS X Server. The issue they were seeing (and have been seeing since they upgraded to 10.6 about 4 months ago) was any time someone tried to login to a client, or really anything as a user that was part of the OD, it would take about 60 seconds to authenticate. If they used their server’s local admin account, however, it worked instantly.

Everything seemed to be running, but it just took a long time. Investigating further, everything seemed to point to Kerberos just not functioning. It was running, but kinit would take about 60 seconds to come back asking for a password. And for some reason, the REALM for the Kerberos server had been set as SERVERNAME.LOCAL. Which, shouldn’t be an issue in of itself, but it was certainly not “proper”.

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Exabyte 1×10 Autoloader

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Our remote tape library has been malfunctioning for the past few months, and our remote location just managed to ship the library down. Powering it up on the bench, I got the wonderfully informative “L:H/W Inoperable Servo Error”. Okay…

So, after a reset, and it still doing that, I figured the next step is to open it up. After removing all 11 screws, removing the lid, and powering it on, I noticed that the carousel wasn’t aligned correctly with the tape drive.

So, I hand rotated the carousel around so the “hole” in the carousel’s metal ring (while off), and fired it back up. Lo-and-behold, it went through it’s initialization process and scanned all the tapes, and works fine.

Guessing it was in the middle of an indexing or something and lost power, but in such a way that it didn’t re-initialize when it came back up. =/

Either way, works now.

So, if you have this issue, remove all the screws (3 on each side, 2 in the back top, and 5 on the top), open the top up, and rotate the carousel around until the hole lines up with the sensor (you’ll see where the hole passes by the sensor). The carousel only rotates one direction by hand… so if you miss it, rotate it back around. Then power it on. It should fire up just fine.

Good luck!

DeployStudio fix

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UPDATE 2: These fixes have been merged into release. It can be found here. Previous links are broken… unlinking.

UPDATE: This has been addressed in the nightly build found here: nightly, and the release notes here.

The latest release of Deploystudio (here) introduces a great new feature that creates the master image on the HD that is being imaged, then copies it up to the server. Which is MUCH faster than the old version of things where it would create the image on the server as it was being read off the disk. This took hours and hours. The new method takes probably 1.5 hours to create our master image.

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