Personal tools

October

Sub-archives

Oct 29, 2009

Notes on the Iomega ix4-200d

by Rob Engler — last modified Oct 29, 2009 08:50 PM
Filed Under:

Pros and cons after using it for a few days

I still love the ix4-200d NAS, but there are a few things that got left out of the owner's manual that I had to figure out by trial and error.

  1. Rsync only works against unsecured (wide open public) folders.
  2. If you need secured folders to keep your vital files from being accidentally moved/touched/altered/deleted, using CIFS sharing will enable the security, but you may find that file copy or sync operations take longer than just an rsync operation due to additional overhead in the protocol. SMB signaling can get loused up quickly on a slow or unreliable link.
  3. If you absolutely need to move large files between two of these at geographically distant locations, you can set up an rsync or copy operation to a USB-attached hard drive, mail that drive to the other location and rsync them from the drive to the destination folder. A poor-man's workaround for keeping fulls and incrementals in sync when the line just won't pass enough traffic to suit.
  4. Turn off the power saving on the hard disks. Nice idea, but it takes almost a minute to spin all of the drives up so that the share becomes usable. Unless you really love watching the Windows hourglass spin...

AD permissions and BES on SBS 2003

by Rob Engler — last modified Oct 29, 2009 09:21 PM
Filed Under:

A workaround for Admins in small businesses using BES on SBS2003.

In some small firms running Blackberry Enterprise Server or Blackberry Professional, some BES users may be Domain Admins or Admins on the server. A not-so-recent patch to 2003 enables a scavenging operation in Active Directory on accounts for users belonging to protected groups such as Administrators or Domain Admins that will clear the permissions needed by BES to access this user's mailbox. This was meant to be a safeguard against someone escalating their rights, but practically means that Admins need to use a day-to-day account for their email needs (which isn't a bad idea in itself to separate daily ops from God Mode). As with all things, there is a workaround.

You can use the Dsacls.exe utility to add the entries that are being stripped off the Admin's user objects. To do this, change the AdminSDHolder permissions. Then, add the entries that you want. Because all the entries use the security principal SELF, this workaround should not introduce any security problems.

Note: You must run the Dsacls.exe utility one time to add the one access control entry that is missing from the AdminSDHolder security descriptor. For example, if you want to add six different entries, you may run the Dsacls.exe utility six times.

The following workaround changes the AdminSDHolder object. Then, the AdminSDHolder object is propagated to each user account that is a member of a protected group. Follow these steps:

   1. Install the Microsoft Windows 2000 Support Tools from the Windows 2000 CD. These tools include the Dsacls.exe utility. You can use the Dsacls.exe utility to view, modify, or remove ACEs on objects in Active Directory.
   2. Create a batch file that contains the following code.

       dsacls "cn=adminsdholder,cn=system,dc=mydomain,dc=com" /G "\SELF:CA;Send As"
       dsacls "cn=adminsdholder,cn=system,dc=<mydomain>,dc=com" /G "\SELF:CA;Receive As"
       dsacls "cn=adminsdholder,cn=system,dc=<mydomain>,dc=com" /G "\SELF:CA;Change Password"
       dsacls "cn=adminsdholder,cn=system,dc=<mydomain>,dc=com" /G "\SELF:RPWP;Personal Information"
       dsacls "cn=adminsdholder,cn=system,dc=<mydomain>,dc=com" /G "\SELF:RPWP;Phone and Mail Options"
       dsacls "cn=adminsdholder,cn=system,dc=<mydomain>,dc=com" /G "\SELF:RPWP;Web Information"


      Note Replace "dc=<mydomain>,dc=com" with the distinguished name of your domain.
   3. Wait for an hour so that Active Directory has time to rewrite the security descriptor of all the user accounts that are members of any propagated groups.
   4. After the ADC replicates the changes, all users appear as "user" instead of as "CUSTOM."

You might also apply security update 916803, security update 912442, or the daylight saving time update for Exchange Server that is described in the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 926666  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926666/ ) Update for daylight saving time changes in 2007 for Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2. If you do this, you must prevent the AdminSDHolder from overwriting permissions that are granted to a BlackBerry Services account on protected groups. To do this, create a batch file that contains the following code:

dsacls "cn=adminsdholder,cn=system,dc=mydomain,dc=com" /G "\SELF:CA;Send As" 
dsacls "cn=adminsdholder,cn=system,dc=<mydomain>,dc=com" /G "\SELF:CA;Receive As" 
dsacls "cn=adminsdholder,cn=system,dc=<mydomain>,dc=com" /G "\SELF:CA;Change Password" 
dsacls "cn=adminsdholder,cn=system,dc=<mydomain>,dc=com" /G "\SELF:RPWP;Personal Information" 
dsacls "cn=adminsdholder,cn=system,dc=<mydomain>,dc=com" /G "\SELF:RPWP;Phone and Mail Options" 
dsacls "cn=adminsdholder,cn=system,dc=<mydomain>,dc=com" /G "\SELF:RPWP;Web Information" 
dsacls "cn=adminsdholder,cn=system,dc=mydomain,dc=com" /G "\BlackBerrySA:CA;Send As"


Note: In this batch file, BlackBerrySA is a placeholder for name of the BlackBerry Service account (normally besadmin). If you have accounts in multiple domains, you can also specify the domain in the command line by using the following format:Domain\BlackberrySA.

Alternatively, best practices recommend that you do not use accounts that are members of protected groups for e-mail purposes. If you must have the rights that are given to a protected group, we recommend that you have two Active Directory user accounts. These Active Directory accounts include one user account that is added to a protected group, and one user account that is used for e-mail purposes and at all other times.