• Mac OS X Server,  Windows XP

    Change H: on SMB PDCs

    Samba can be a PDC, allowing Windows clients to join a single line domain name and then access domain resources (such as roaming profiles) as though the domain were Windows NT-based. When you set this up the default behavior for Mac OS X Server based domains is to create a drive mapping for H: to the users profile path (as specified in the homeDirectory attribute) on the server. H: is kinda’ low for some computers with a lot of drives and it can also conflict with other drive mappings you may choose to use. Therefore you may find that in some cases you need to change the H:. To do…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Unix,  Windows Server,  Windows XP

    Delegating DirAdmin to Windows Clients

    The default behavior of a Windows Server NT4 through 2008 based domain is to allow a Domain Admin account to manage Windows clients. A number of environments have been moving over to using the PDC emulator on Mac OS X as a means of replacing aging Windows servers. One of the biggest annoyances is that the Open Directory administrative accounts they use to bind the Windows computers to are not local administrators. When you bind Mac OS X to Active Directory you can specify which Active Directory groups are administrators of Mac OS X client systems so you would imagine you can do the same thing on an OS X…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    openssl and Signatures

    A checksum can be used to determine if a file has been tampered with at a later date.  To run a checksum use the following command: openssl dgst -HASHTYPE path_to_file HASHTYPE would then be md2, md4, md5, mdc2, rmd160, sha or sha1.  Let’s go ahead and do a checksum of our smb.conf file: openssl dgst -md5 /var/db/smb.conf You should then see output similar to the following: MD5(/var/db/smb.conf)= e4b58a63c6682b298aeca3ad40734c1e MD5(/var/db/smb.conf)= e4b58a63c6682b298aeca3ad40734c1e