Category: Daily Life

Ramblings, often stream of conscious, journaling the events of my life.

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Why fight it?

Sometimes you just can’t fight the current. I am desperately trying to produce some results for a client but now Amy is home so I’m refereeing the fights between Evan and Amy. Dinner tonight is pork roast and homemade mashed potatoes so I type a line of code and check the stove. Type a line of code, answer a question for Tommy ("When did the walls get painted?") Type a line of code, install a Firefox plugin I need for faster development (Firebug wasn’t on this machine).

This is not much different than working in a cube farm on a Friday before a holiday and having constant interruptions from fellow employees. It is a difficult way to work and far from ideal but if I remember to stay calm, not eat any children, and breathe, the work will get done.

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Feeling Old

Feeling old is when taking three steps across the kitchen to the coffee maker causes you to wince. For the past couple of days, I have had excruciating pain in my lower back. The pain is concentrated in my lower left back just above my buttocks but I also feel it in my left shoulder blade. I thought it was related to sleeping on that horrid air mattress at Frozen Head since I could not find my RidgeRest. I thought my back would improve but it seems to be worsening. I don’t exercise. I don’t stretch. All I do is sit all day long typing. The dogs and Evan make it difficult to stretch but I think that I must return to 20 minutes in the evening and 20 minutes in the morning. I never felt better than I did when I was stretching in the morning and evening.

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Vista Fails to Connect to Samba

I was (still am) a huge fan of the e-smith gateway server (now SME Server see also http://contribs.org) which was a very simplistic way to take almost any computer and have it up and running as a email, web, database server and more in under 2 hours. It has reliably been my development server of choice for years although my next nix server is likely to be Ubuntu.

I am having a problem getting Vista to authenticate across the network to allow me to browse directories and work on my development files. As it turns out, the default Vista security is set to use only NTLMv2 authentication. Samba can’t handle this. One solution is:

To solve the problem run secpol.msc to get into the Local Security Policy screen. Goto "Security Options" then find "Network Security: LAN Manager authentcation level." Change it from "NTVLM2 responses only" to "LM and NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negociated”.

Now, to exasperate the problem, Vista Home Premium does not have secpol.msc. Instead you must manually edit the registry. Use caution when editing the registry! Run regedit. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa. Look for the key LmCompatibilityLevel, right click, choose modify, and change the number to the appropriate value of 0 to 5.

0 – Clients use LM and NTLM authentication, but they never use NTLMv2 session security. Domain controllers accept LM, NTLM, and NTLMv2 authentication.

1 – Clients use LM and NTLM authentication, and they use NTLMv2 session security if the server supports it. Domain controllers accept LM, NTLM, and NTLMv2 authentication.

2 – Clients use only NTLM authentication, and they use NTLMv2 session security if the server supports it. Domain controller accepts LM, NTLM, and NTLMv2 authentication.

3 – Clients use only NTLMv2 authentication, and they use NTLMv2 session security if the server supports it. Domain controllers accept LM, NTLM, and NTLMv2 authentication.

4 – Clients use only NTLMv2 authentication, and they use NTLMv2 session security if the server supports it. Domain controller refuses LM authentication responses, but it accepts NTLM and NTLMv2.

5 – Clients use only NTLMv2 authentication, and they use NTLMv2 session security if the server supports it. Domain controller refuses LM and NTLM authentication responses, but it accepts NTLMv2.

[Source, Microsoft TechNet, LmCompatibilityLevel]

In this case, to support Samba, I want the value to change from the default of 3 to 1.

After doing this, reboot for the change to take affect. Next, read Security Watch The Most Misunderstood Windows Security Setting of All Time.

See also.

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Da da dum daaa

A moment of silence please. My motherboard on my ever importance workhorse of a desktop I use for everything Internet personal and business has died. Yesterday the computer spontaneously turned off 8 times. This morning it would not turn on at all. Assuming it was just dust inside, I went to clean the machine this morning and discovered at least 5 capacitors that were leaking and partially exploded. I need this machine working so I may try replacing the bad capacitors but more than likely it is my turn for an upgraded computer. Fortunately, the college student’s "gaming" computer appears available. He won’t be pleased but it will make due for me in this pinch.

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Is hate worth the trouble?

I’ve just been on the phone with Sprint because one of their customers has left a pseudo-threatening/hateful comment on my wife’s blog. They advised immediately filing a police report so that their corporate security department could escalate the issue faster than if I handle it myself. I really don’t like giving hateful people this much attention. It’s best if they just go away. People, the Internet is far from anonymous! In cases like this, you don’t leave a bread crumb trail; you leave a paved boulevard.