nooblet.org

I have a Windows Server 2008 DC and I wanted to use my internal time server on a linux box running ntpd.

After a little hunting around, I found the command required to set Windows up to use the correct time peer.

w32tm /config /update /manualpeerlist:"0.pool.ntp.org,0x8 1.pool.ntp.org,0x8" /syncfromflags:MANUAL

After making this change, you need to restart the Windows Time Service by issuing the following 2 commands,

net stop w32time
net start w32time

If you have problems, first make sure the Windows Time Service is enabled.

This works with Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

I noticed that ProFTPd took a few seconds to connect. On a LAN, it should be instant.

Sniffing traffic, it seemed that ProFTPd was first making an auth request using the ident protocol before falling back to user/pass authentication. This seems to be the standard behaviour according to RFC’s 912, 931 and 1413

Some google searching turned up a page over at metafilter concerning connection delay.

Adding this to the ProFTPd configuration file disabled the auth checks and made connecting/authorising instant, as it should be.

IdentLookups off

On Debian, the ProFTPd config file is at /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf.

Having just upgraded a server to Windows Server 2008 with Microsoft Exchange 2007 I came accross a frustrating issue.

If IPv6 has been disabled on your network interface prior to installation of Exchange 2007 then Exchange will fail to install the Hub Transport Server role with the following error,

Service ‘MSExchangeTransport’ failed to reach status ‘Running’ on this server.

Other Exchange services will fail to start if IPv6 has been unticked in your network adapters configuration settings. I routinely disable IPv6 if it is not needed on the network, but it seems Exchange has been written to utilize the new protocol and requires it to function.