I experienced a weird time sync issue today with my Windows VMs. I went to stream something to my PS3 from a network share, but I received an error. I thought the share had just lost connection and I needed to reconnect it. When I tried that I received a couple errors, extended error or something and an error stating the time in Windows was different than the server I was trying to connect to. That’s when I noticed the date being reported was 9/12/12, which was 3 days behind. I logged into my DC and tried to sync with a couple Internet time servers, but those still resulted in a date that was 3 days behind. Manually changing the time and date resulted in Windows completely ignoring what I entered and going back to 9/12/12. ...

Needed to e-mail an attachement using only mail, after a little Googling I found the following which works great! The first .gz is the file location, the second .gz is what will show up in the body of the email allowing you to download it.

This will list the IP and number of times that it appears in your access log if more than once. If you only want it to show the IP if it appears, for example, more than 10 times change a[i] >1 to a[i] >10.

I am constantly forgetting one or more Samba/CIFS packages that are required to mount a Windows network share. The return codes don’t really provide very much useful info. Even when searching Google there was not a whole lot for return code -22. For CentOS, I found installing the following package solved my CIFS error.

I had a feeling using a cheap $7 flash drive as the boot OS might be a bad idea. Turns out it was. The drive started throwing errors after about a month and a half of running pfSense for my network. I didn’t want to go mechanical HDD for a 24x7 low power box so I decided on a OCZ Onyx 32 GB SSD. More than enough size and speed for how I am using it. Hopefully this is the last hiccup with this machine and I can now get into some more advanced features of pfSense. ...

I had some issues with accessing IPMI in my pfSense build. It seemed like if I let pfSense boot up and I was not accessing IPMI at the same time, pfSense would take over the whole NIC and not let me access IPMI. I read here that this is normal to not be able to access IPMI once pfSense boots but that defeats the whole purpose of IPMI so I don’t think the system should behave in that way. After messing with it for a few days all I can say is IPMI seems really finicky when sharing a NIC, or maybe I’m doing something goofy. ...