Monthly Archives: March 2012

And another thing.

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I would like to express my extreme displeasure at sites that use illegible Captcha pictures as a means of self-defence, followed by a "prove you're human" question, then use an IP address blocking service to double-check you're not a spammer, and then finally declare that you are one, and deny you access.

I'm talking about you, FreeNAS forums.

 

Oh, and while I'm whinging about FreeNAS.  Guess which free NAS device's web interface does not play well with Internet Explorer?  You guessed it, FreeNAS.  It needs Firefox to work properly.  Now, I know that the open source community is absolutely full of open source zealots and people who by their nature hate Microsoft and all its products.  But, really.  Face facts:  IE is the default browser with a Windows OS.  Most every machine on this planet runs Windows.  Accept reality.  Fix your fucked GUI.

 

Oh!  One more whinge!  Why did the FreeNAS AD integration break in the first place?  Because, having asked an ambiguous question about hostnames, FreeNAS then creates a computer account in AD using that hostname.  FreeNAS doesn't give a single fuck if that computer account already exists.  It just overwrites it.  One little fucking LDAP query could've prevented that DC destruction.

Revisiting VMware study

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I'm off work today, sick.  Many thanks to the knob at the desk across the hallway from me who came to work sick and spent the whole day yesterday coughing and sneezing into the communal air.  Did I say thank you?  Actually, no, I meant FUCK YOU.  You turd.

Since I am at home, and have time to myself, I thought I'd do a bit of experimentation with Veeam, a backup product for virtualised environments.  Of course, this meant resurrecting my VMware study lab, which I am ashamed to say, has sat idle for the last.. ohhh… at least six months.  Give or take another six months.  In the process of setting up Veeam, I figured I'd try to reproduce the VM environment at work.  This involves configuring a NAS device and using it as a backup target.  Hmm.  i have a VM called "FreeNAS".  Funnily enough, it runs FreeNAS.  A NAS.  That's free.  I set about configuring Active Directory integration on the device and it was playing silly-buggers, so I figure OK, what the hell.. I'll just create a new one.  I downloaded the latest version of FreeNAS, quickly configured it and configured the AD integration.  Or so I thought.  It refused to work, giving me a vague "service couldn't start" message.  Super-helpful.  So I googled, and discovered this cautionary tale, which in turn pointed to this cautionary tale.

You can guess what happened to my domain controller VM, right?  Shame on the FreeNAS GUI designers who didn't think that "hostname" could be interpreted to mean "hostname of the DC" instead of "hostname of the freenas box".  So, with my AD hosed, and not enough care factor to try to fix it, I'm recreating my AD environment too.  Bugger.