Archive for January, 2006

From: Windows IT Pro 

This new version is still a Linux-based recovery tool for Windows, but it has several new features including:

• Read/write support on NTFS drives. The command “mountallfs” gives you read-only access to NTFS drives. Using the command with the -f option gives you safe, fast write access to NTFS drives, but you can create only 10 files per subdirectory, so it’s not an ideal solution if you have to do many copies. Mountallfs -c gives you full write access,
  but you need to manually add ntfs.sys and ntoskrnl.exe from Windows XP Service Pack 1a (SP1a)
• Simple password resets via winpass 
• Offline virus scans with two different antivirus tools (F-prot and ClamAv) 
• Registry editing 
• Partition editing with qtparted 
• NTFS file undelete functionality 
• Lots of hardware support, from most network cards and disk controllers to USB storage 
• Fast boot times (less than 40 seconds) 
• Network NTFS cloning 
• Remote administration possible 
• Network environment preconfigurable at boot 
• Integrated Web browser (links)

All this functionality is from a bootable CD-ROM; no information is written to the physical disk. practice using it. It’s a valuable tool for any power user or administrator

Link:

http://trinityhome.org/trk/

Andy Jones discusses options for WMI and VBS Scripting at msterminalservices.org.

VBScript and WMI are very powerful toolsets that allow server based computing administrators to perform some very complex, and sometimes mundane, tasks with consistency and speed. This article series serves as a look into leveraging this toolset to simplify the configuration of server and user settings. Part three of this article series will look at Citrix Presentation Server’s MFCOM Object. We will explore the settings and properties that may be managed via VBScript and WMI

Link:

http://www.msterminalservices.org/articles/Scripting-Server-Based-Computing-Citrix-Presentation-Server.html

Created by Qui Hong (The Developer), Chris Huss and Mike Laverick (Value-Add and Documentation)

Ultimate-P2V is a BartPE free plug-in that allows you to clone a physical machine to virtual machine – and perform the neccessary “system reconfiguration” required to make it bootable. Without this tool or a commerical P2V tool the virtual machine would just give a “blue screen of death”. It has been tested with Symantec Ghost 8 in mind, but it should be configurable with other cloning software and BartPE Plug-ins

Also included are plug-ins for

• VMware Tools
• VMware SVGA Drivers
• VMware VMXnet
• LSILogic SCSI
• BusLogic SCSI
• Downloads for popular network and storage drivers for physical machine

Read more here

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that VMware Workstation received the InfoWorld 2006 Technology of the Year award in the best desktop virtualization category.  In addition, VMware ESX Server and VMware VirtualCenter received the InfoWorld 2006 Technology of the Year award in the best server virtualization category, marking the second consecutive year that VMware has won this prestigious award.
Link:

http://www.vmware.com/news/releases/infoworld_award.html

Microsoft has long been making inroads into application hosting with the Terminal Services improvements. Given the added cost Citrix brings, why not just use Terminal Services? We’ll take a look at where the gaps remain between the products and why you might be happy with a Terminal Services solution.

In this article at msterminalservices.org, Paul Stansel discuss this old chestnut in the light of developments within Longhorn and Project BearPaw

Link:

http://www.msterminalservices.org/articles/Citrix-Effective-Application-Hosting.html

These bundle came out from developing the Virtual Infrastructure II course.

1573 – Recommended Microsoft NLB Mode for VMotion
1556 – Microsoft NLB Not Working Properly in Unicast Mode
1631 – W2K3 SMP Virtual Machines with Vlance Adapter Lose Network Connectivity
1437 – AMD PCNet Windows Driver Security Vulnerabilites
1179 - Networking error, IP address already assigned to another adapter
977 – Getting a DHCP Address in a Red Hat Linux 9.0 or Advanced Server Virtual Machine
1014 – Windows Virtual Machine Blue Screens When I Use SAN LUNs
1081 – HP Proliant and Compaq MPS Table BIOS Settings for ESX Server
2030 – Using crontab to Schedule vmsnap Backups
1365 - Collecting Debug Information for VMware VirtualCenter Problems
1702 – Slow Inbound Network Performance with Citrix Metaframe Presentation Server/Citrix License Server in a Virtual Machine

I’m very sorry if you experienced problems getting to http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk today. My ISP had accidentally configured a low setting for allowed bandwidth through the site – and their configuration closed the site this morning. I liased with the ISP and this error has now been resolved, and as you can see it’s back online. Sorry, for this interruption of service.

There’s been a healthy debate about the rights and wrongs, advantages and disadvantages of between using either VMware’s SCSI “BusLogic” drivers or the LSILogic Drivers. I’m working on the “new” Virtual Infrastructure 2 course which recommends the LSILogic drivers over the BusLogic ones. They seen as being faster and more configurable. On top of this there are cases where only LSILogic is supported for connecting to external devices. 

Microsoft has made some changes to licensing with Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition. If you purchase Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition, you can also run four virtual instances of the server software inside Virtual Server 2005 R2 for no additional cost. Also, it’s four running instances; you could have 50 virtual instances but can have only four running at any one time unless you want to incur additional licensing costs.

The exact verbiage about the licensing changes is:  

“Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition – Each software license allows you to run, at any one time, one instance of the server software in a physical OS environment and up to four instances of the server software in virtual OS environments on a particular server.”

This is a change from the current licensing scheme, in which you pay for every installation whether running or not and is Microsoft’s move toward a more virtualized environment.

You can find more information in the Microsoft Virtualization_brief.doc document

Link:

http://list.windowsitpro.com/t?ctl=1EA13:2253E

John Toyer author of the VMTN Blog (a round up of the best bits of bloggers on VMware – like mine!) has drawn my attention to Juergen Winkelmann guide to getting Solaris 10 working on VMware’s ESX. It’s not an offically supported OS but can be done. Currently there is only experimental support for Solaris on VMware Workstation

Link:

http://wotho.ethz.ch/ESX_solaris/Install_Solaris_on_ESX.html