Tag Archives: Container

What is a Container?

Posted on by
Reply

Container KB ID 0001793

Problem

Google containers and the net is full of people with whiteboards talking at a very low level about containers. They also appear to be largely developer and dev ops related, (which is understandable), but if you simply want to understand the concept of what a container is, then that’s a lot of YouTube watching to pick out some basic concepts. Particularly if you’re an IT pro, Engineer, or a Solutions architect.

Simple Container

Before we look at containers, let’s look at a concept we have had for about fifteen years now. The Virtual Machine; 

Here we use a Hypervisor (Type 1: e.g vSphere, NSX, or Hyper-V, or Type 2 e.g. Parallels, Fusion, VMware Workstation, or Virtual Box etc). To create a virtual machine, the virtual machine runs its own Operating System, and you can install your applications on that operating system. The whole thing runs on the Hypervisor and, (for the most part), the machine does not even know it’s virtualised.

A Hypervisor allows a “Bunch of files” to behave like a physical machine.

A container is slightly different, where a hypervisors job is to separate the Machine from the Hardware, by supplying it with a set of virtualised hardware, so it (the virtual machine) thinks it’s running on hardware. The container ‘engine’ (in this case Docker), separates the Applications from the Operating Systems, by supplying a set of operating system processes, so that the applications think they’re running on an operating system. 

A containerisation tool allows a portable file to behave like an application.

The above diagram is simply to illustrate the point, what is actually happening is, in the Operating system the Docker Engine, puts all the applications into their own CONTAINERS, and supplies each container, with all the processes and OS elements the application needs to run. Each container runs completely separately from all the others, and can be started and stopped independently, so a better representation of what happening is this;

Thats pretty much it! What you will find though, is a lot of people have their containers running in a virtual machine that’s running on a Hypervisor. Some people will recoil in horror, and say that’s  NOT what you should be doing, (unless they work for VMware of course). That scenario looks a little more like this;

Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links

NA

Exchange: ‘Can’t find the Organizational Unit that you specified’

Posted on by
3

KB ID 0001561

Problem

I’ve not actually seen this myself, but it was asked on a forum, and I managed to replicate it on the bench. When working on a user or mailbox in Exchange  you may see the following error;

Error
Can’t find the organisational unit that you specified, Make sure that you have typed the OU’s identity correctly

Solution

This happens because you have a ‘Slash’ ‘/‘in the Organisational Unit that the user object is inside in Active Directory, like so;

Rename the OU to something more sensible!

Why does this happen? It’s because when there’s a slash in the OU name, like ‘MyOU/Name‘ it gets rejected by the system, as programatically it should be ‘MyOU\/Name‘.

I Don’t Have a Forward Slash in My OU Name, and I’m Still Seeing this Error?

Make sure your user, is NOT in a ‘Container‘ rather than an OU. In the example above you can see the icon for ‘Users‘ is different from the icon for “PNL” or “Test” that’s because this is NOT an OU it’s a container, move your user to an OU, then try again. Note: This can happen to the Administrator amount as well, because that’s in a container called ‘Builtin‘.

Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links

NA

Windows Server – Fine Grained Password Policies

Posted on by

KB ID 0000765 

Problem

Before server 2008 if you wanted more than one password policy, you had to create a sub domain just to do that! with Server 2008 we were given fine grained password policies, which were fine (if a little clunky), and involved you creating ‘Password Settings Objects’.

They were a pain if you were not used to them e.g. five minutes is entered as 00:00:05:00. But now Microsoft have made things a LOT EASIER (though they made a good job of hiding it!).

Solution

1. From Server Manager (ServerManager.exe) > Local Server > Tools > Active Directory Administrative Center.

2. System container.

3. Password Settings Container.

4. New > Password Settings > Configure as required > Add > Locate the Security group you want to apply the policy to > OK > OK.

Note: The Precedence dictates which policy will apply if the same user has multiple policies applied to them.

5. You can then create other policies to apply to different groups.

To See What Policies are Applying to a User

6. Locate the user (while still in Active Directory Administrative Center) Right click > View resultant password settings > If a policy is in place it will open.

7. If there is no policy in place you will see, “User does not have resultant fine grained password settings. Please check the user’s domain password settings”.

 

Related Articles, References, Credits, or External Links

NA