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All the interesting objects in an Active Directory DSA have an objectSID which is used throughout the Windows subsystems as the reference for the object. When using a Samba4 (or later) domain controller it is possible to simply query for an object by its SID, as one would expect - like "(&(objectSID=S-1-...))". However, when using a Microsoft DC searching for an object by its SID is not as straight-forward; attempting to do so will only result in an invalid search filter error.

Occasionally one gets reminded of something old.

[root@NAS04256 ~]# kinit adam@example.com
Password for adam@Example.Com: 
kinit: KDC reply did not match expectations while getting initial credentials

Huh.

[root@NAS04256 ~]# kinit adam@EXAMPLE.COM
Password for adam@EXAMPLE.COM:
[root@NAS04256 ~]# 

In some cases the case of the realm name matters.

So you have a lovely LDIF file of Active Directory schema that you want to import using the ldbmodify tool provided with Samba4... but when you attempt the import it fails with the error:

Error: First line of ldif must be a dn not 'dn'
Modified 0 records with 0 failures

Eh? @&^$*&;@&^@! It does start with a dn: attribute it is an LDIF file!

Once you cool down you look at the file using od, just in case, and you see:

Distribution: CentOS 6.x / RHEL 6.x

If you already have a current version of PostgreSQL server installed on your server from the PGDG repository you should skip these first two steps.

I've seen this one a few times and it is always momentarily confusing: on an interface on a Cisco router there is a rather high number of "unknown protocol drops". What protocol could that be?! Is it some type of hack attempt? Ambitious if they are shaping there own raw packets onto the wire. But, no, the explanation is the much less exciting, and typical, lazy ape kind of error.

GNOME3, aka GNOME Shell, provides a comprehensive set of hot-keys for capturing images from your screen as well as recording your desktop session. These tools are priceless for producing documentation and reporting bugs; recording your interaction with an application is much easier than describing it.

I use VirtualBox for hosting virtual machines on my laptop and received a Windows 2008R2 server image from a consultant as a compressed QEMU image. So how to convert the QEMU image to a VirtualBox VDI image?

Step#1: Convert QEMU image to raw image.

Starting with the file WindowsServer1-compressed.img (size: 5,172,887,552)

Convert the QEMU image to a raw/dd image using the qemu-img utility.

Attempting to create a file on a large XFS filesystem - and it fails with an exception indicating insufficient space! There is available blocks - df says so. HUh? While, unlike traditional UNIX filesystems, XFS doesn't suffer from the boring old issue of "inode exhaustion" it does have inode limits - based on a percentage of the filesystem size.

I use a lot of SD cards and USB thumb-drives; when plugging in these devices automount in /media as either the file-system label (if set) or some arbitrary thing like /media/disk46. So how can one modify or set the label on an existing FAT filesystem? Easy as:

You have a text file with four million records and you want to load this data into a table in an SQLite database. But some of these records are duplicates (based on certain fields) and the file is not ordered. Due to the size of the data loading the entire file into memory doesn't work very well. And due to the number of records doing a check-at-insert when loading the data is also prohibitively slow. But what does work pretty well is just to load all the data and then deduplicate it.