My notes, things I have learned, and documentation I have created.

Here are the steps I used to bring a shared disk online from within Windows 2008 R2. I was attempting to create a Microsoft Cluster within VMWare ESXi when I ran across this issue. This worked to bring the disk online and I was able to add it to the cluster I created, however I have run across some other VMWare issues preventing me from bring up the other node of the cluster. Nonetheless, here was how I brought the disk online. Apparently, this is how Windows 2008 handles all newly added shared storage.

H:\>DISKPART

Microsoft DiskPart version 6.1.7600
Copyright (C) 1999-2008 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: VMCL01

DISKPART> LIST DISK

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
——– ————- ——- ——- — —
Disk 0 Online 20 GB 0 B
Disk 1 Offline 10 GB 10 GB

DISKPART> SAN POLICY=ONLINEALL

DiskPart successfully changed the SAN policy for the current operating system.

DISKPART> SELECT DISK 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> ATTRIBUTES DISK
Current Read-only State : Yes
Read-only : Yes
Boot Disk : No
Pagefile Disk : No
Hibernation File Disk : No
Crashdump Disk : No
Clustered Disk : No

DISKPART> ATTRIBUTES DISK CLEAR READONLY

Disk attributes cleared successfully.

DISKPART> ONLINE DISK

DiskPart successfully onlined the selected disk.

DISKPART> ATTRIBUTES DISK
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only : No
Boot Disk : No
Pagefile Disk : No
Hibernation File Disk : No
Crashdump Disk : No
Clustered Disk : Yes

DISKPART> LIST DISK

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
——– ————- ——- ——- — —
Disk 0 Online 20 GB 0 B
* Disk 1 Online 10 GB 10 GB

I have spending quite a bit of time recently playing with Microsoft’s Office365. I have been interested in how to manage the DNS records in my linux DNS to support Office365. For example, I wanted to access my Office365 email, Lync server, and Sharepoint via my specified hostnames as defined in my DNS. Email was simple enough. Setting up these records got the email to my domain directed properly, and I was able to use auto discover to configure my iPhone, android device and desktop computer email clients easily. I have listed the key records below:

mydomain.com. 360 IN TXT “v=spf1 include:outlook.com ~all”

$ORIGIN mydomain.com.
@ IN MX 0 mydomain-com.mail.eo.outlook.com.
ms49911282 IN CNAME ps.microsoftonline.com.
autodiscover IN CNAME autodiscover.outlook.com.

Lync presented a bit more of challenge. And I found several sources on the Internet of people trying to get the records set up properly, but all of them seemed to have something wrong. Ultimately, these are the records that I had to add to access my Office365 Lync server. The lesson learned from setting these records should help records that Active Directory requires that I have never had occasion to look at before.

_sip._tls IN SRV 100 1 443 sipdir.online.lync.com.
_sipfederationtls._tcp IN SRV 100 1 5061 sipfed.online.lync.com.

Sharepoint is giving me a bit of an issue that I have been trying to address with Microsoft, but they have been less than responsive. I hope this is not how small businesses can expect to be treated by Microsoft when this product goes live. It would certainly cause me to reconsider what I otherwise think is a pretty good product. Anyway, I believe I have the records defined properly, but I cannot verify them because I am unable to enable Sharepoint Online in my domain properties or intent ( I have added a screen shot of the issue at the bottom of this post.).

My company records (Sharepoint site):
sharepoint IN CNAME mycompany.sharepoint.com.
sp IN CNAME mycompany.sharepoint.com.

My public records (public Sharepoint site):
sharepoint-pub IN CNAME ProdNet11.SharePointOnline.com.
sp-pub IN CNAME ProdNet11.SharePointOnline.com.

I will update this when, I finally hear something from Microsoft.

Here are the DNS settings as documented in Office365 for mydomain.com. This is the information Microsoft provides to help you add the appropriate records:

Update 1/10/2012:
While trying out the Lync client on my iPhone, I discovered that I was missing another DNS record to support Lync server auto-discovery. I just needed to add the following record to my DNS:

lyncdiscover IN CNAME webdir.online.lync.com.

This allowed iPhone Lync clients to use the auto detect server feature. I suspect that this was needed for other clients too, since I had to set it up manually before. I am going to try this on MacOS later to see if that works better too.

To enable ftps on my CentOS 5 server I first needed to create a self-signed certificate:

# cd /etc/pki/tls/certs
# make vsftpd.pem
umask 77 ; \
PEM1=`/bin/mktemp /tmp/openssl.XXXXXX` ; \
PEM2=`/bin/mktemp /tmp/openssl.XXXXXX` ; \
/usr/bin/openssl req -utf8 -newkey rsa:1024 -keyout $PEM1 -nodes -x509 -days 365 -out $PEM2 -set_serial 0 ; \
cat $PEM1 > vsftpd.pem ; \
echo “” >> vsftpd.pem ; \
cat $PEM2 >> vsftpd.pem ; \
rm -f $PEM1 $PEM2
Generating a 1024 bit RSA private key
……….++++++
………………..++++++
writing new private key to ‘/tmp/openssl.R27560’
—–
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter ‘.’, the field will be left blank.
—–
Country Name (2 letter code) [GB]:Country
State or Province Name (full name) [Berkshire]:State
Locality Name (eg, city) [Newbury]:City
Organization Name (eg, company) [My Company Ltd]:Company
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Department
Common Name (eg, your name or your server’s hostname) []:Servername
Email Address []:Emailaddress

Copy the newly created certificate to /etc/vsftpd:

# cp -p vsftpd.pem /etc/vsftpd/

Add the following to the vsftpd.conf file:

# vi /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf
…
ssl_enable=YES
rsa_cert_file=/etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.pem
…

Note: As is above, this will not allow non-anoymous users to use plain ftp. They will have to use ftps. To change this behavior, add the following to your vsftpd.conf:

force_local_data_ssl=NO

Then, restart/start vsftpd:

service vsftpd restart

Note: This worked fine from WinSCP and SmartFTP, but Filezilla gives me the following:
Error: GnuTLS error -12: A TLS fatal alert has been received.
Error: Could not connect to server