Kellogg's Korner

Ok, we got our Truck back on Wednessday, in the end the real problem was the Overdrive silinode. This may have been slowly going out over the past few months and just finaly failed the day after Christmas. I am shure the temerature drop that weekend did not help itout any. The silonode go stuck in position and caused all the damage to the transmission. If I did not try to move the truck the damage may not have been as extencive. Thank God that little hurtal in our life is over.

Tuesday, two full weeks after handing the truck over, I borrowed a car from my buddy Bob, whom I meet online in Final Fantasy XI (who said nothing good comes from online gaming). He was nice enough to lend us his car for the week while we waited to get ours back. He has been out of work for most of the past year, so he needs our prayer. Borrowing his car was a lot of help to us; we were able to get our daughter back in school, which was our biggest concern.

With our Truck back we are hoping to get back into our groove. Angel will be going back to school, giving Teresa a brake from having to deal with her being bored all day. I will be able to stop riding the bus to work and taking an hour to get 15 minutes across town. Finally, Teresa will be able to relax a bit during the week since she does not have to deal with two kids arguing all day every day.

I hope that soon I will be able to get back into writing my Fatherhood Friday posts. I have taken a vacation from them during the holidays. Considering that FF was what brought in most of our traffic, I want to continue to bring in more and send more to the others that take part in FF over at www.dad-blogs.com.

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Our Dodge has been in the shop for two weeks as of today. The fully rebuilt the transmission, only costing $2361.31of the $800 they thought it might cost at first. They finally put it back in on Saturday, only to find a new problem, and what may have caused the issues to start with. I was supposed to be able to pick it up today, but it does not look like that is going to happen now. I am also wondering how much more this addition al work is going to cost.

There is a check engine code for the overdrive coming on now. Also the transmission is locking up when cold. They are now changing out the Overdrive solenoid to try and solve the issue. From the little bit of research id did, and I am not expert on automatic transmissions, since it has been rebuilt they may have the wrong spacer in place. There are many other possible problems, but that is the one that made the most sense and fit into the situation. I am not going to tell them how to do their job, just are I would not want an auto mechanic to try and tell me how t be a Server Administrator.

This also marks our daughters first full week of missing school since it started back up for the New Year. With out the torch we are unable to get her to school. Considering that the homework she had going into vacation was not due till last Wednesday, I don’t think she actually missed much new information. What she has missed though is the refresher that they get coming back from vacation. We have seen where she might have needed that while she sat and did her homework over the weekend.

School is getting more difficult as the years pass, and many places do not see automotive issues and lack of transportation as a good excuse for not getting your child to school. Next year she will be transferring to a new school where she will be able to take a buss if we find our selves in this situation next year, but that does not help now.

I am hoping that they are able it find and fix the problem before they close tonight. We really need our transportation, for getting the girls to where they need to go and buying the things we have had to do with out because we are unable to get out to buy them. You really don’t know how much you depend on something until you don’t have it any more.

Take care of your cars and pray that we get ours back soon.

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Yesterday I ran into something on one of our servers that caught me by surprise. I was unable to log into a server that I was working on without an issue the day before. When I tried to log in I got :

login: <user>
password:
Could not chdir to home directory /home/<user>: Permission denied
/bin/bash: Permission denied

At first I thought is was just a simple permissions issue, so I asked Rick if he could login. When he tried he got the same results. The same thing happened to Joe and Scott. At this point  we thought it was more that a simple permissions, We went over to login locally as root only to find out that we could not.

We started looking at what had changed on the server. We had recently installed Symantec HBSS and their HIPS. These are intrusion detection and prevention systems. We found that the HIPS software was degrading system performance on the server, it was removed the day before. With that, and the fact that HIPS and HBSS have caused issues befor, we went with the thought Hips caused the issue.

We spent the next few hours working that angle. we worked on getting the system online with a rescue CD to get root access. Getting the HBSS back on the server did not fix the login issue, so we moved on to getting HIPS back one. During the install of HIPS a “Kernel Tainted” error showed up. When HIPS did not fix the problem one of the guys thought it might be a kernel issue, I did not think it was the kernel.

At this point i was thinking  the issue was a pam,d issue.  I remember one having a security script write over the pam.d of a x64 with a per hardened pam.d of a x32 Linux system. When rebuilding the kernel did not work we began to work with the pam.d. I copied a pam.d off a working system to copy over the problem system.This did not work either.

Now were were stumped. They started working on any random thought that popped up. I moved in to check out the forums to see if there were any similar issues. after about a half hour of searching and reading I found the fix. It turned out to be a permission issue after all, but one we never even thought of. After checking the forum i tried out the fix. I returned to the system where the others were working and checked the permissions on the / (root) directory. Upon checking this i found that they were set to 700. This setting closed eliminated any one but root from logging in. We changed the permissions 755, what they should be after instillation.  this finaly fixed the problem, we were once again able to log into the system.

We figured out that the root access was disabled by the HBSS and HIPS, this is something we will need to fix latter. Although a great security setting, it had slowed down our progress greatly. we needed to reoob several times to gain root access and then again to check settings.

Symptoms:

1. talent and ssh attempts to non-root accounts get an error “permission denied /bin/bash (or what ever shell the account uses)
2. local login attempts of non-root accounts log out immediately. This can bee seen in audit logs.
3. root account has not issues. (our issues with root were not related to the permissions problem)

Solution:

1. Check permissions on / (root) directory. should be set to 705 minimum.

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Well now, here we are a full week from sending the truck off to Cottmens Transmission. I can understand the delay a little considering that last week was the New Years Weekend. I spend Monday and Tuesday calling to find out if they figured out what was really wrong yet. On Tuesday they finally had the brake down of what was wrong and how much it would cost. Apparently the Torque Converter blow up on the inside, this is the main issue that caused the Truck to stop moving. After that parts of the impellor got sucked into the pump to wreak havoc there and move on into the rest of the transmission. In the end we need to have the transmission completely rebuilt.

The rebuild entails a new Torque Converter ($298), a new Pump ($265), a standard rebuild kit ($1200), and the labor of diagnosing the problem ($398). This is a little more than I was hoping for in the beginning. This basically went form an $800 project that we could have easily afforded to a $2360 project after you add taxes. I hat it when there is a problem with the cars that I can not fix myself.

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