Every other Monday, AdminRepublic poses a systems or network problem requiring a solution. Some challenges are routine, while others may be more difficult. We then conduct a random drawing from the correct responses and send one lucky winner a fancy new TechRepublic T-shirt. You’ll be the envy of the office. Let’s start with the solution to our previous challenge.
What was responsible for Lucy’s logjam?
Lucy’s logjam centered on problems with administrator account lockouts.

Lucy’s administrators monitored network traffic, and they discovered there was high RPC traffic from the mail server, which was running Microsoft Exchange 5.5 with Service Pack 2. Further, one of the administrators remembered receiving a “DS_xx_xxxxxxxxxx” error when using the Exchange Admin program around the time the account started getting locked out.

What simple step did Lucy take to eliminate the problem? She rebooted the Exchange server, and the problem went away. Congratulations to network administrator Brenda Gies, whose submission was randomly drawn from the correct entries received.

The next challenge:
Our first Linux AdminChallenge revolves around Samba. Samba is a well-known suite of applications using the SMB protocol, which allows other OSs to communicate with Linux. Samba is simple to configure and run. There are, however, some tricks and traps. Our first issue revolves around encrypted versus un-encrypted passwords.

Archie’s Samba system consists of one main Samba server running Red Hat Linux 6.0. All his clients are Windows 98 stations. Each station needs to be able to read and write to the directories on the file-sharing server, but for some reason when each machine goes to log into a directory with its assigned password, an incorrect error message appears.

The smb.conf file has encrypt passwords = yes, but the passwords are not working. There are two possible solutions for this issue: name one (or both) for a shot at a cool new “T.”

Send your answer to TechRepublic by Monday, Jan. 10, 2000. We’ll send a TechRepublic T-shirt to the individual whose name we select randomly from all the correct answers received.

Now the legal stuff
By submitting your answer, you agree to let TechRepublic publish your solution on its Web site. You also agree that TechRepublic may adapt and edit and authorize the adaptation and editing of each submission as it deems necessary. TechRepublic may or may not publish a submission at its sole discretion.
Send us your AdminChallenge scenario and solution. If we use it, we’ll send you a TechRepublic T-shirt!