Carl’s Blog

I got one of these in for a customer the other day, and since the T300 overview proved popular, I thought I should take some photos of this one too.

Overall it seems a little bit smaller than the T300. Similar weight, slightly lighter. Initial feelings are that it’s a slightly cut cost version of the T300, but in reality everything is just fine. There are more flexible/cheaper processor options, Core i3 replacing dual-core Xeon x33xx of before, and this machine now uses DDR3 memory (ECC as usual).

Noise level is about the same as the T300.

There’s no LCD text display any more.

There is now the option of a PERC S100 embedded/onboard software RAID 0/1, which I’m happy enough with since I was most often using the SAS6i/R with SATA disks before. What I haven’t been able to find out is whether the S100 is enabled in the BIOS even when a non-RAID specification is ordered. I like to buy the servers with a single disk, and buy my disks elsewhere. On this occasion I had to pay £70 for a second 250gb SATA disk from Dell. Ouch. Next time around I will chance it and see if the S100 is always there in the BIOS, since it is otherwise a no-cost option.

As far as slots go, the PCI-X has gone, and we now have physically 1x PCIe x16 slot, 2x PCIe x8 slots, and 2x PCIe x1, but actually they are wired as 2x PCIe x8, 1x PCIe x4 and 2x PCIe x1. Basically the x16 slot only works as x8 and one of the x8 slots only works as x4. This is all according to the printing on the PCB anyway. I haven’t actually read the published specs. All slots are PCIe 2.0.

Chipset is Intel 3420.

Maximum RAM is now 32gb over the T300’s 24gb.

There’s a fancy UEFI based “System Services” (F10 on bootup) Unified Server Configurator built into the ROM, which has a new OS Deployment option built in, so no need to boot from the Dell Installation / System Management DVD, except that the UEFI based OS Deployment tool still required that DVD to load/pre-install the OS drivers from, and also it didn’t seem to work for me anyway! I ended up doing this one just like all the other Windows installations that I do on Dell servers.

There seems to be space for an SD/MMC card reader in the back, not entirely sure what for, and it’s covered with a blank on my machine.

As with the T300, the non-hotplug configuration comes pre-cabled for four SATA drives.

There are now two USB A ports on the motherboard, for backup devices, or even for putting a USB flash disk/key inside the machine and leaving it in permanently.

Enjoy the photos..

I have just installed the beta of Exchange 2010.

It seems that when accessing OWA through Firefox or Epiphany on Linux, we’re only given the option of OWA Light, therefore exactly the same experience as with Exchange 2007.

Firefox on Win32 works as expected. How obviously intentionally lame.

Fortunately we can override the useragent in both Firefox and Epiphany (my preferred browser due to FF’s annoying right-click Linux bug).

Go to about:config in the address bar, click on the “I’ll be careful” thing to carry on, and right-click, create a new String, called general.useragent.override with the following as the data:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8

Close and reopen Epiphany or Firefox and Exchange 2010’s OWA Premium works perfectly

Note: you must close all Epiphany or Firefox windows for this to take effect.

Even better is that you can use Prism to launch OWA “as an application”. You will need to edit /usr/share/prism/default/preferences/webrunner-prefs.js and add the following line:

pref(“general.useragent.override”, “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8″);

See screenshot below:

OWA Premium from Exchange 2010 launched through Prism on Ubuntu Jaunty

I’ve just come across something concerning that I haven’t seen before.

Customer’s computer appears to be infected with something.

Banking websites such as rbsdigital.com , lloydstsb.com, hsbc.com , well, the website displays perfectly except that the security phrase box asks for the whole phrase instead of just particular characters from the phrase.

It’s as though something is intercepting and re-writing the page as it’s displayed (url and cert look fine, DNS of sites resolve fine).

Computer has various infections on it by the looks of it – twext.exe which I’ve come across enough times, and various random .dll’s fired up through rundll32.

What’s concerning me is how the page is modified in-line and the url and certificate are spot on.

Here’s the analysis results for the .dll, called through Run -> rundll32. Doesn’t look good for detection.
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/9ec1b577f2bf5688597dc1c911bea47d

Here are the results for twext.exe, called through Winlogon -> Userinit.
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/ae4eda13de80161b65b3a18122ead92f

c:\windows\system32\a.exe , doesn’t appear to be called from anywhere that I’ve noticed yet, but obviously suspect filename and file date. Same file as twext.exe.
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/ae4eda13de80161b65b3a18122ead92f

c:\windows\system32\userinit32.exe , called via addition to Winlogon > Userinit, hidden from Windows API and only visable with icesword, but registry modification was re-creating itself after removal. File timestamp on this one is 2004-08-11 , same as most stock XP files.
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/cf0b882c689a513443845f3edea5cb16
Microsoft Antivirus (whatever that is) misses this one.

c:\windows\usebexuyiruburu.dll – can’t remember where this was called from. Think it was HKCU -> Run, whereas others were HKLM -> Run
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/4407b4eb1474268be3033b8268608877
Again Microsoft Antivirus does well while nearly all the other 38 antivirus programs fail.

Here is a short video clip I shot of a PowerEdge T300 alongside my normal workstation. As you can hear, the noise is not really a problem and I don’t think it is very loud at all.

This theme is so nice that I feel I couldn’t possibly ruin it with a banner advert at the top. I’ve only earned $33 from them in the last six months anyway!

Wow. This took me totally by surprise, and it seems to work very well. There’s no sound redirection or clipboard, but basically you connect to the Linux machine using an RDP client (Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection, or Terminal Server Client), and instead of getting a Windows logon box, you get an xrdp one. You choose a session and hey presto you have a Gnome or KDE session, through RDP!

It has two ways of working. The first, and easiest to get going, is that it uses vncserver (the VNC X Server) as the actual X server, and the xrdp program grabs the vnc display and RDPs it over to you. So you have the performance of RDP.
The other way is that it uses an RDP X server, so I suppose you could call that native X-RDP rather than VNC served RDP. This is a touch more complicated, and I was unable to get the svn version of the X11rdp Xserver to compile. There is a precompiled binary of what might be an old version at http://server1.xrdp.org/temp/ though.

The precompiled binary was the only way I could get X11rdp to work (that is native RDP – I got the vnc/rdp to work almost right away)

Let me clarify some points:

• xrdp is the name of the project, and also the name of one of the binary files that deals with RDP and integrates with the VNC server and sends it to you through RDP.

• X11rdp is the name of the special RDP Xserver that is another part of the project, which skips out vnc altogether. When you grab the (small) sourcecode off the project website, and do the make/make install, it will not build X11rdp.

• X11rdp is also called “Xserver” within the project.

You will see in /usr/local/xrdp/sesman.log something like: “No such file or directory” if you are trying to use X11rdp server (sesman-X11rdp) but don’t have the X11rdp Xserver compiled/installed, or if you are trying to use VNC (sesman-Xvnc) but don’t have vncserver installed. VNC server will be provided by your distribution (Fedora, Ubuntu..) so is very easy to get. X11rdp is made by the xrdp project, so is not so easy, but the precompiled binary seemed to work OK for me.

The project’s website is very low priority, and does not reflect the true activity of the project.

The website is at http://xrdp.sourceforge.net/

Some random files, including a pre-compiled X11rdp (that’s the rdp-native Xserver remember..) are at http://server1.xrdp.org/temp/

There are some forums here: https://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=112022

You can browse the developer mailing list here: https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=xrdp-devel

and there might one day be a new homepage at http://server1.xrdp.org

That’s about all the links I could find. The developer mailing list gives a nice indication that the project is moving forwards.

I thought I’d take some photos and do a brief overview of the Dell PowerEdge T300 server.

I have supplied and installed a few of these to my customers, and I think it is my favourite small business machine for now.

This is a single-socket (i.e. single CPU) machine, although that single processor is a Quad Core Xeon, so it’s not such a negative point really. I have found in the past that I have gone for dual-socket servers, because they are naturally reasonably high-end rather than being more like a basic desktop, but these servers have always been left with the second CPU socket empty, and by the time you might think about adding a second CPU, those CPUs are long gone off the shelves and the price/performance of a replacement machine makes replacing the whole machine much more viable. So I am happy that this a single-socket machine – that’s perfect for the small businesses that I deal with.

For less than £600 +vat, this machine comes with a 2.5GHz Quad-Core Xeon CPU, 4gb RAM, a SAS 6iR RAID-0/1 controller card, and 2×160gb SATA hard disks configured as a RAID1.

What I do then is head off to http://www.scan.co.uk or http://www.microdirect.co.uk and buy a couple of large capacity hard drives. The machine comes cabled up ready to take up to four drives on the SAS 6i/R card. The SAS 6iR can create multiple RAID1 (or RAID0 if you’re that way inclined) volumes. So all we do is drop in a couple of 1,000gb Seagate HDDs, and create a large, cheap, mirrored storage volume.

The machine only has a single half-height 5.25″ drive bay free. There are two bays in total but the first is taken up by the DVD-ROM drive. This limits your choice of tape backup drive. The backup choices from Dell are even more limited – last time I checked they were only offering those cartridged 2.5″ SATA hard drive things. What I do is head over to Scan again, and pick up a Freecom DLT-V4 half-height 160/320gb SATA DLT drive. This completes my current favourite small business server. The Freecom drive uses SATA power and SATA data, and slots perfectly into the PowerEdge T300 like it was designed to be there in the first place. The drivers that Windows Update offers for the SATA DLT do not work properly, but Quantum’s website has working ones.

I recently did a setup like this (running SBS 2003) for a chap who works from home. In his case I used an internal Freecom 36/72gb USB DAT drive for reasons of cost and lower noise (the server was next to his bedroom). Unfortunately the PowerEdge T300 has no molex power connectors at all, only SATA power. Therefore a SATA Power -> Molex adapter is required, which is precisely the opposite of what you will have lying around. These adaptors are available for a few pounds online though. The Freecom USB DAT drive comes with a USB B to motherboard header (7/8 pin) cable. Here comes the second gotcha of the PowerEdge T300 – no internal USB headers, however, there is a USB A port on the motherboard, so you use a regular USB A->B cable but inside the server, as strange as that seems (see photo of internal USB A port on the motherboard).

The PowerEdge T300 comes with dual gigabit ethernet ports as standard, provided by a Broadcom chipset.

There are three PCI-E x8 slots, one PCI-E x4 slot, and one full length PCI-X slot which I assume would also accommodate a regular 32-bit/33MHz PCI card such as a modem, ISDN adapter or WiFi card for example. You can’t see the PCI-X slot in the pictures because it’s right below the SAS RAID card.

There are six SATA 3Gbps connectors built onto the motherboard, in case you do not opt for the SAS 6iR RAID 0/1 card or a full-on PERC 6 RAID-everything card. One of the onboard SATA ports is taken by the DVD-ROM drive.

After fitting the extra hard drives as in the pictures (four non hot-plug SATA drives total), there is one spare SATA power connector which can be used for the tape drive or whatever you fancy.

There are six DDR2 DIMM slots.

The front LCD display panel can display text of your choice, for example the company name and telephone number in case the item is stolen and ends up in a responsible person’s hands.

The server is available with the option of Hot-Plug/pullout hard disks. I have not encountered this configuration though. It also looks like the machine has the option of dual/redundant power supplies, since the rear is labelled “1″ and “2″.

As usual with Dell’s servers, everything is extremely well put together and designed. There are no little hairdrier chipset or CPU fans, just large slow-turning fans and lots of properly designed ducting panels to allow good proper airflow. This is what I like most about Dell’s servers, for this kind of money everything is spot on.

Some pictures. This is my first attempt at a blog so I apologise for rambling on and not laying things out in a clear and conscise manner. I may come back to do some editing later