Yast2 Modules Not Loading in OpenSUSE Leap

I finally upgraded my system from 13.2 to Leap 42.1. There were a few problems along the way, but overall it was a smooth upgrade. I remembered to remove the nVidia drivers, but forgot to disable the nVidia repository so it installed a driver that no longer supports my trusty 8600GT. After figuring that out, networking wasn't working but just needed quickly reconfigured, same for sound. But the one thing that was stumping me was yast2 failing to load any module in GUI mode. No matter which I loaded, I would get the error:



Run command: /sbin/yast2 sound &
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'YUIPluginException'
 what():  Couldn't load plug-in qt
YaST got signal 6 at file /usr/share/YaST2/modules/Wizard.rb:782
 sender PID: 3605
/sbin/yast2: line 440:  3605 Aborted                 $ybindir/y2base $module "$@" "$SELECTED_GUI" $Y2_GEOMETRY $Y2

A quick visit to Google resulted in multiple posts stating that yast2-gtk was needed but isn't getting installed. I use KDE but let's give that a try. zypper in yast2-gtk and nothing changes. So let's try zypper in yast2-qt. This results in libyui-qt6 providing yast2-qt is already installed. I forget why now, but I did a rpm -qa | grep libyui and saw libyui6, libyui-qt-pkg6, etc. So logic would dictate at this point I need libyui-qt7 as well, so I installed that and bingo, it installed a couple of libraries and the sound module now loads. Software management started to load, but then threw up an error that qt-pkg could not be loaded. So zypper in libyui-qt-pkg7 (another package that I had the corresponding version 6 of I overlooked the first time) and I appear to be back in business.

Hope this helps someone. There's a lot of posts stating you need newer version of one package or another, but none that really specify exactly what to install.

AlwaysOn Availability Groups and User Accounts

I recently built a AlwaysOn Availablity Group for my companies database server on SQL Server 2012. With three databases for mission critical applications running on the database server, we needed a little more protection than a weekly backup that we can restore.  So I took two fresh servers, installed Windows Server 2012 Standard and SQL Server 2012 Enterprise on each and found this link, which is a great place to start when building an AlwaysOn Availability group.  There's a couple points that were either missing or noted so briefly that I missed them, but it pretty much covers everything from end to end.  There's also an ebook called "High Availability Solutions" downloadable from Microsoft with a lot more information and detail.

Exchange Server component Mailbox role: Mailbox service failed.

The short version of this story is READ THE LOGS!  Now here's the long version.

I was trying to install Exchange 2013 in my lab environment and kept running into this error consistently. I scoured the Internet and tried everything that was suggested for anything even similar, with no success. At one point I even scrapped the VM and built a new Server 2012R2 VM from scratch, and the same thing happened. The Exchange setup wizard would fail at about 97% into the Mailbox role installation with the following output. It's not all here, because its ultimately wasn't of much use.

Contacting server and signing in...

Apparently Office 365 has this neat feature where your password expires but it doesn't want you to know. This morning I logged into my computer, grabbed my first cup of coffee of the day and sat down.  About 30 minutes later I got an email informing me that I was not signed into Lync.  And sure enough, the client is sitting there still saying "Contacting server and signing in..."

Free CCNA Resources 2.0

Do you want to become a CCNA with little or no cost out of pocket beyond taking the exam(s)? Between my own attempt at the CCNA and my association with forums and blogs where we eat, sleep and breathe Cisco networking, I have collected a number of free resources that I have collected together here in once place in hopes that it will be of help. I'll try to keep this list up to date as I find new material. Feel free to add a link in the comments or let me know if a link no longer works. Most importantly, PLEASE let me know if I was fooled and listed something here that is less than reputable. Happy Studying!

The exam hasn't changed real drastically from the 640-802 version, some tweaks but nothing drastic. So don't be scared away from anything written specifically to that exam.

Networking on Alienvault as a HyperV Guest

The information here was compiled while using Alienvault 4.6 and I know that 4.3 required the same steps. If you're using a different version, you may need to take different or additional steps. If you're using a newer version, perhaps this is all sorted out already.

Stuck Disc in Nintendo Wii

My daughter has friends over today and they wanted to play an old Nintendo Gamecube game on the Wii as there is no working Gamecube in the house. Naturally it wasn't reading, and it wouldn't eject either. These are the little 2 inch mini CDs. She thought she remembered us putting a second disc in there last time this happened, but that one got pulled in as well, and now we have two discs in the Wii.

I grabbed a putty knife out of the garage and pushed it in, on the right side of the disc slot as you're looking at it. I pressed the eject button a few times, and the first disc came out. Grab it immediately or it will get pulled back in. Same process and the second disc came out as well. They're both a bit scratched up from the ordeal, but they should be fine.

The Savior 

Hyper-V replication across the WAN

I've recently been working on Hyper-V replication across the Internet to give our clients the option of maintaining an offsite copy of their server in our data center. Everything was going smoothly up to a point. I set up a site-to-site VPN connection between them and us, built an Active Directory two way trust between their domain and ours, and then tried to enter their Hyper-V host into our System Center Virtual Machine Manager system.  This is where I ran into a road block.

Workstation Unable to Join Domain

I had a computer that would not join a domain. No matter what I tried, it would come back with "The following error has occurred when trying to join the "abcdefg.com" domain: network path not found."  I tried just about everything I came across while searching on Google:

• Disable Windows Firewall
• Run ipconfig /registerdns
• Run dcdiag on the domain controller
• Verify FSMO roles of the domain controller
• Verify reverse lookup zone in DNS
• Ping domain.com 
• Verify _ldap._tcp.dc._mscds.domain.com in DNS

Free as in Speech

There's a lot of terms in the world of software that can sound like the same thing to someone not well versed in all of this.  And a lot of these terms have a lot more in common than they have different. adding to the confusion.  So exactly what is Open Source Software (OSS), Free Software, Freeware, Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) or even Shared Source Software? And more importantly, how are they different?  And exactly what is the whole free as in speech vs. free as in beer thing?

Open Source Software (OSS here on) is software where the source code is made available to the users of the software. There are a number of licenses that this software is released under, such as the BSD License, The GPL, and others. I'll skip the pros and cons of all of these different open source licenses and how they differ because that's more of a philosophical debate.  What is important is that you as the user are free to use the software as you wish as well as being able to examine or even modify the source code.  Different open source licenses place different restrictions on redistributing the source code or software which makes use of some or all of the source code.  But any truly open source license does not restrict my use of the software in any way, only how I am permitted to redistribute it, despite a lot of FUD against the GPL that is out there.  I can modify the source code in any way I wish and keep the changes to myself as long as I am not distributing anything containing the original source code or my modifications. If you care to compare and contrast software licenses and your rights and responsibilities as a user or a distributor, visit the Free Software Foudation's website at www.fsf.org.

The FSF builds on this principle with their term Free Software.  The FSF states that "'Free Software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in free speech, not as in 'free beer.'"  To put it simply, when you enjoy free beer, you are free to drink and enjoy the beer, but you're not getting the recipe so you can go home and brew you up another batch tomorrow.  With free as in speech, you are getting that recipe, and you are allowed to make your own any time you wish.  Free as in speech is free software (such as a utility like The Gimp), free as in beer is freeware (such as Paint.NET).

So what is the difference between Free Software and Open Source Software?  That lies mainly with the developers of the software.  Free Software is as much as philosophy as a license.  Proponents of Free Software want all software to be free (within their definition of free) with an almost religious devotion.  Proponents of Open Source Software either just want to share their work or cite the open source model as a superior way of developing software.  Most of us fall somewhere in between and use the term Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) which is fine since both camps use the same licenses.

There is one more category related to this discussion.  Some commercial software vendors provide what what is referred to as Shared Source Software.  This is where the vendor provides the source code for a product to a customer for review, but the customer usually has no rights to anything other than a review.  Therefore shared source is not really related to free and open source software despite the providers attempting to make the case that it is.