Websphere ND dmgr permission problems

Ran in to a really weird problem with one of our Websphere 6.1 Network deployment setups yesterday and as I couldn't find one single page about the problem in google I thought I'd blog it.
I'm not much of a Websphere admin but managed to fix it after a while.

The problem started when a datasource was updated and all of the sudden all node agents stopped trusting the deployment manager (dmgr). Syncing the nodes failed and hence pretty much everything failed to restart / deploy. Running servers where fine though.
We got this message in the logs:

[1/17/08 13:30:52:020 GMT] 00000028 RoleBasedAuth A   SECJ0305I: 
The role-based authorization check failed for admin-authz operation 
SSLAdmin:temporarilyDisableCertificateAuthentication:java.lang.Long.
The user UNAUTHENTICATED  (unique ID: unauthenticated) was not granted
any of the following required roles: administrator.

My best guess is that node agent configuration was corrupted in some way.
How do you fix the problem then?
Fairly easy actually.
# Stop all node-agents that seem broken (that would probably be all of them!).
# Go to the node agents bin directory on the node (usually something like $WAS_HOME/profiles//bin/).
# Manually sync the node with syncNode.sh, point to the SOAP connector (default is 8879) on the DMGR server. See example

./syncNode.sh dmgrhost 8879 -username websphere -password webfear

# Start the node agent and verify that the logs are happy. Kick off a cell sync from dmgr. You should see entries similar to this in the logs:

[17/01/08 16:14:59:872 GMT] 0000002f NodeSyncTask  A   ADMS0003I: 
The configuration synchronization completed successfully.

Solaris Express on a Toshiba Satellite Pro A200

I bought myself one of those cheap laptops the other month. I needed a small machine for testing and since laptops are just as cheap (if not cheaper) as desktops these days I got a laptop.
The machine came with Vista but I wanted to triple boot Vista, Ubuntu and Solaris Express Community Edition.

• Use diskmgmt.msc in Vista to shrink the partition the machine came with, Windows can do this natively so there is no need to use Partition Magic or similar tools. Create at least three new partitions. One for Solaris, one for Linux and one for Linux swap.
  
• Secondly install Solaris, boot off the CD and go through the basic installer. The widescreen resolution worked out of the box (as usual). Do a full install, spending time "fixing" a smaller installer is just annoying. Solaris will install it's grub boot loader on both the MBR and superblock (on the Solaris partition). It probably makes sense to leave a large slice unused so it can be used with ZFS after the installation is done.
  
• Install Ubuntu. Nothing simpler than that.
  
• Edit Ubuntu's grub menu config (/boot/grub/menu.lst) to include Solaris. Simply point it to the Solaris parition (hd0,2 for me). Add these lines at the end of the file.
  

  title Solaris
  root (hd0,2)
  chainloader

Done!

I had to install the gani NIC driver in Solaris to get the Ethernet card working and the Open Sound System sound card driver to get sound working.
The Atheros WiFi card is supposed to be supported but I couldn't get it to work, even after adding the pci device alias to the driver. I'll post an update if I get it to work.