Windows Server tracks the sessions that have been authenticated into the system, those that have been timed out, those that have errored, kb sent/received, response time, errors, permission problems, password problems, files opened, print job spooling and buffers quickly and easily. Simply use the net command we’ve all been using for 20 years, followed by stats or statistics: net statistics When prompted choose server or workstation. In this case, we’ll use Server. net statistics Server Here’s the output from a new server: And if you’re trying to troubleshoot client/server communications, keep in mind that you can look at much of this on the workstation side as well, but from the…
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Configure A Mavericks File Server
File Services are perhaps the most important aspect of any server because file servers are often the first server an organization purchases. There are a number of protocols built into OS X Mavericks Server dedicated to serving files, including AFP, SMB and WebDAV. These services, combined comprise the File Sharing service in OS X Mavericks Server (Server 3). File servers have shares. In OS X Mavericks Server we refer to these as Share Points. By default: File Sharing has some built-in Share Points that not all environments will require. Each of these shares is also served by AFP and SMB, something else you might not want (many purely Mac environments…
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Disable ACLs for SMB
I had a pretty strange issue recently with how QuickBooks works with Samba. The fix was to disable ACLs for SMB. While this seems like a silly issue for silly software, it’s worth noting the fix. Before doing so, it’s worth mentioning that defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.smb.server AclsEnabled -bool NO If yore having saving issues from QuickBooks and this doesn’t fix your issue I’d immediately switch back: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.smb.server AclsEnabled -bool YES
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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…
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SMB: Name Mangling
Windows 3.x and earlier used what was known as an 8.3 naming scheme, meaning that files had eight places for a name, three for an extension and a dot in the middle. Name decorating is programatically how Windows 3.x and DOS clients interact with files that have more than 8 characters followed by a dot and then three characters for a file extension. Those of us who can remember doing mass migrations of data from Windows 3.x to Windows 9x and/or NT will remember well the naming changes that had to happen to maintain backwards compatibility during this trying time. Especially if we had been using *nix boxen to store…
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Samba 4: A Poor Mans Active Directory
Today I pulled down the Samba 4 binaries and installed it using the instructions the developers are slowly building on the Samba 4 wiki. Overall it was a fairly painless experience, although I do believe I have a couple of bug reports to file (not surprising considering it is not out yet). Overall I found the process to be far easier than it has been in the past. The Samba team seems to realize that in order for Samba 4 to compete with Active Directory that it needs to integrate really well in the *nix server ecosystem. For example, like Active Directory you can choose to have Samba integrate into…
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Mac OS X Server: Cached Logon and Windows PDC Clients
When using Mac OS X Server as a PDC you may find that you need to tell a Windows system to cache login (aka logon) information for longer than the Windows system allows by default. In an Active Directory environment it is fairly straight forward to deploy this type of setting through a GPO; however, the policy settings for an NT4 style PDC environment (aka – via SMB) won’t necessarily allow you to perform this task. To do so you might need to fire up the registry (or script an event in the login script to do so) and edit the following key with a Value (in terms of login…