Agh! Vista.

Agh!! Vista is driving me nuts. Yes, I am a Windows and Linux admin, so I need to work with Microsoft OS's as well. I have been test driving Vista for the past few months. At first, it wasn't so bad. But as real work needs to get done I get very frustrated with its performance.

Example, I was running Fedora as the main OS on the machine I run VMware Server on. I could run about four or five VMs in the background and you tended to forget they were even running in the background. Now I am running Vista with VMware Server. Ugh! Even running *one* VM is painful! Just to start it and the OS starts hitting the disk heavily. Once it gets running it isn't too bad - but keep in mind I am running *one* VM compared to the four or five I used to run.

Google Apps

I am giving Google Apps a try for one of my domains. I really hadn't been planning on trying it, I was relatively happy with my current hosting situation. Several months ago I started forwarding all of my email to the various domains I have to Gmail. The Gmail interface worked for me, I could access it from any computer without needing to setup IMAP settings on each PC. And now that Gmail offers IMAP access I always have the possibility of using a thick client if I feel then need. This setup has worked well for the past several months.

Then this week happened. Any emails forwarded from my hosting provider to Gmail have been taking 12 to 24 hours to get passed through. The hosting provider is aware of the issue and is supposedly working with Gmail to resolve the issue. But as of yet, no change for the better. Most of the mailing lists I subscribe to are affected by this forward. Now I could have resubscribed to the lists with a gmail address directly, but the reason for the forward is to minimize me ever having to change the subscribed address - I could just update the forward.

After three days of this I decided to setup a Google Apps account for one my busier email domains. The setup was pretty painless. I still have to play with some of the features, but for now my email is happily flowing without delay.

Laptop Repaired and Fedora 8

I finally have my laptop display repaired... again! Supposedly they replaced the LCD this time. Hopefully my display will actually continue to work. The turn around was pretty quick this time though - we used a different after market warranty provider this time. I sent it in Monday afternoon, received a call from them on Tuesday while they were working on it and received it on Wednesday - just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday.

First thing I did was install Fedora 8 on it (reminder, it's HP nx7400). I have been anxious to play with it on my main laptop to see how much the suspend and hibernation efforts paid off, as well as seeing if my onboard wireless worked without jumping through hoops and sacrificing a chicken.

Very pleased so far! Wireless was working with minimal fuss. Suspend works quite nicely and hibernate also works, though a little slow, but it works. The buttons for volume control work as well. Adjusting brightness with the fn key also works with no issues. The lights for those buttons do not work, but that is not a major deal. The wireless light also does not work - though the wireless is working.

Everything is very snappy, I as able to enable Compiz with no issues. I installed Compiz Fusion, but haven't been able to get it to work completely. I have not spent much time with that yet. I may be missing something simple though. We'll see when I have more time to look at it.

So.... Another laptop and another success!

Fedora 8

This week I took the time to work with the latest Fedora release - Fedora 8. My main laptop is still suffering from LCD issues, so I have not been able to use it as I normally would. Earlier this week I used the Live CD to get a glimpse of it.

The first boot was on a VM running on VMware Server. Everything just worked (as expected). I tried out the install to Hard Disk option which also worked great. No issues with that install.

I needed Fedora install on a laptop for a Release Party on Thursday night. With mine in the shop I figured I would make use of the Fedora 8 Live CD. I used it on a Sony laptop, which I have found needs one to jump through a few more hoops than I find on other vendor's machines. Depsite that, the Live CD worked great - the largest issue being brightness control. That was easily fixed by installing the spicctrl package and cranking the brightness up. It ran great.

This weekend I added a Fedora 8 install image to my installs served via http and the PXE boot setup I have at home. Today I installed Fedora 8 on an older Dell laptop via my PXE boot setup. The install took a little time, but that was to be expected for the older hardware I installed on.

I am always impressed at how much better and complete Linux installs get with each new release. I think most everything is working on this laptop with a minimum amount of fuss. Even the on-board wireless card is working - something I tend to cheat on and just toss in an old Orinoco card that always works. On top of that - the laptop specs are a Celeron 1GHz with 256MB of RAM. For those type of specs the OS runs remarkably well. Sure it swaps out when I open too many apps, but adding some more RAM to the machine would surely solve that.

Fedora 8 seems to be a great release. I can't wait until my LCD is finally fixed on my main laptop so I can get it installed on there. If you haven't tried Fedora 8, grab the Live CD and give it a try! You would be amazed at how much more life your old hardware has left in it.

Back to VMware

Over the past two months I have been working with Microsoft Virtual Server. When working on various numbers this year the licensing costs for VMware forced us to look at possible alternatives - one of these being Microsoft Virtual Server, with a possible move to Windows Virtualization when it is finally released.

Most of the experience with the Microsoft solution was very positive. Once the Virtual Additions were loaded in the Windows guest VMs I was able to get very good performance out of them. I ran a variety of servers on the host (which was running Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 and the most recent Microsoft Virtual Server) and could run several VMs at once and still have good performance.

I was down to two final things to test when I finally ran into what we will consider a show stopper for any chance of us moving to the Microsoft solution. The first was to test a Linux guest VM and the second to test hot backups. Linux guests are now supported in the Microsoft solution and hot backups can supposedly be done through Microsoft Data Protection Manager using VSS. I never made it to testing hot backups, as the Linux experience proved to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

I installed a CentOS 4.x guest. The install went with no issues and it was easy to get setup. Wanting to use a SCSI disk I managed to get the Linux Virtual Additions to install. I wasn't very happy with this install though, mainly because they require you to use the --force switch to RPM to get the X portion of the extensions to install. In my opinion if you ever have to use the --force switch with RPM, something is wrong.

To get the SCSI portion to start at boot I needed to integrate it into initrd. This was not too bad and soon I had the vmadd-SCSI starting with no errors. Part of my testing was to test IO performance. I did this by running iostat in the background and using dd to create a 2GB file on the virtual disk. My first time doing this caused the guest to get numerous disk errors and render the Linux VM unusable. My other running Windows VMs did still run and respond to requests. However, when powering off the Linux VM it hung on shutdown. The only way I could find to power it off was to restart the host server. Luckily this was a test environment, but had this occurred in production it would have been unacceptable.

I tried more that afternooon to get the Linux VM to fail after I brought the host server backup. I could not get the Linux VM to fail though. When I came in the next morning though the Linux guest had died again with the same errors as seen the previous day. It had died at 8pm the previous night - the only thing going on at that time was the iostat command I left running refreshing every 2 seconds. Again, it required a reboot of the Virtual Server host to get the Linux guest to come back up.

Now, it is possible the actual issue within the guest could have been fixed. But, I had seen enough. There is apparently some condition that exists that can crash a guest VM bad enough that the whole server needs restarted. I cannot risk going into production when such conditions are found in testing.

I tested VMware ESX Server similarly when we considered it for production. I was never able to crash a guest VM to the point that the entire ESX server needed rebooted to resolve the issue. Powering off the guest always worked. Perhaps I just haven't run into the issue with ESX and there is some condition out there that will force me to reboot a production ESX box to fix one broken guest - but with the Microsoft solution I have actually confronted this issue in testing.

So we are back on track to continue our VMware ESX implementation. It feels good to move forward again. It also helps that VMware's new Foundation packs coming in December will really help smaller businesses like the one I work for afford the ESX products.

Even more nx7400 LCD Display Issues

The display on my primary laptop, an HP nx7400 has once again quit working. This is the third time this has happened in one year. The laptop boots with no issues, just no LCD display. Looks like another trip back to the repair depot for it...

Busy News Days for Virtualization

It has been a busy couple of days in the virtualization realm of technology. Yesterday VMware had their IPO. Their stock did very well, increasing around 75%. Personally I expected this. They do make a very good product and are certainly the leaders in this arena for now.

Today Citrix announced their acquisition of XenSource for $500 million.

Meanwhile Microsoft continues to work on their virtualization products for the Enterprise with Virtual Server available now and Windows Server Virtualization coming 180 days after the release of Windows Server 2008.

Certainly very interesting times in the virtual world. It seems more and more companies are seeing the value in virtualization. Now it is just a matter of choosing which solution will work the best for you.

Microsoft's Virtualization Site Updated

As posted in a recent post in Matt McSpirit's blog the Microsoft Virtualization site has been updated. It looks like they are finally starting to bring all of the tools together under one section of the site to allow easy access to the tools, documents and resources related to Microsoft's Virtualization technology.

More SCVMM Fun

I have continued to do some more conversions with the tools in Beta 2 of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager. I did another V2V conversion of a Windows 2003 Server SP2 machine. That one went quite well -getting used to the Microsoft tools has certainly helped speed things up in getting a VMware VM converted to a Virtual Server VM.

I also did a Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) conversion today. The source server was a test server running Windows Server 2003 SP1. Unlike the V2V tools in the beta, the P2V tools can be driven through the GUI. After answering a few simple questions the conversion kicked off. I did not keep an exact eye on the time, but to convert the server running on an 18GB mirror it took around an hour for the conversion to finish I think. Add some more time to get the VM booted, new hardware detected and another reboot to get the Virtual Additions installed and it was a relatively quick process.

VMDK to VHD Conversion with Virtual Machine Manager Beta 2

I have been working with the conversion of VMware virtual machines to Microsoft Virtual Server machines. Microsoft has a public beta of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) (Beta 2) that includes Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) and Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) capabilities. The conversion of physical machines is done through the GUI in SCVMM. Conversion of VMware's VMDK files is done through PowerShell commands.

I was most interested in playing with the V2V functionality of the tool to see how well it worked. I have several VMs in test and production running on various flavors of VMware's products. For my first attempt I worked with one of my smaller Windows 2000 Server with Service Pack 4 VMs.

I stopped the source virtual machine and copied its working directory to one of my Microsoft Virtual Server hosts. I am running SCVMM in a Virtual Server VM. The first step I did was to run the New-V2V command which has this description:

"Converts a virtual machine created in VMware(R) to a Virtual Server-based virtual machine managed by Virtual Machine Manager."

Working with a copy of the original VMware VM I followed the example from Get-Help New-V2V -detailed.

First I ran:

Get-VMMServer -Computername vmm-beta2.matrix.com

Per the notes in the example this retrieves the server object from the VMM database.

Then:

$VMHost = Get-VMHost -ComputerName "ghost.matrix.com"

This retrieves an object that represents the virtual machine host and allows me to reference that object as $VMHost.

and Finally:

New-V2V -VMXPath "\\ghost\c$\tmp\W2KServer_w-SP4_SPARKS\win2000serv.vmx" -VMHost $VMHost -Name "SPARKS01" -Path "e:\virt-servers\dump" -MemoryMB 256 -RunAsynchronously

This command points New-V2V to the vmx file for the VMware virtual machine and creates a VM on the Virtual Server VM Host in the Path listed. It also sets the amount of memory to 256MB. RunAsynchronously returns the shell prompt immediately while the job runs. You can watch the job in the admin console of SCVMM. There are also several other options detailed in the help file for New-V2V that you can pass regarding properties of the new Virtual Server VM.

This was a smaller VM that I was working with, only a 2.8GB VMDK file. The conversion went pretty quickly, but I was met with errors before completion.

"Error (3217)
Required files for the P2V conversion of \\ghost\c$\tmp\W2KServer_w-SP4_SPARKS\win2000Serv.vmx are missing from the P2V patch cache. The files are archived in DRIVER.CAB, which is located at %WINDIR%\Driver Cache\i386 on \\ghost\c$\tmp\W2KServer_w-SP4_SPARKS\win2000Serv.vmx or on the Microsoft Windows 2000 installation media.

Recommended Action
Copy DRIVER.CAB for the source operating system and paste the file to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007\P2V Patch Import" and then run Convert Physical Server wizard again."

This error also occurred for SP4.cab, the UPDATE ROLLUP 1 for SP4 and another update or two.

To resolve I copied the driver.cab and SP4.cab from other Windows 2000 Server SP4 machine to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007\P2V Patch Import" on the SCVMM host. I also downloaded the updates needed individually from the Microsoft site and copied them to the same location. Once those files are copied I ran the following command in the SCVMM PowerShell prompt to add them to the Patch Cache

PS C:\> $vmmserver = get-vmmserver -computername VM-BETA2
PS C:\> add-P2VPatch -vmmserver $vmmserver

Then, through the GUI I could click retry job to let the conversion process continue.

This portion of the conversion finished and I was able to start the new Virtual Server VM through the admin console for the SCVMM. The VM booted Windows 2000 with no issues. Upon logging in new hardware was detected and I was asked to reboot.

After the reboot I did lose my mouse and keyboard control for the VM. I could no longer enter CTRL-ALT-DEL to login. The keyboard did work to hit F8 to get to Safe Mode, but once in Safe Mode the keyboard and mouse did not work either.

At this point I decided to boot to the recovery console to see if I could find out what the issue was. First I noticed that VMware Tools was still trying to start. I disabled it from the Recovery Console by typing:

DISABLE vmwaretools

I rebooted after this and still had the issue. So back to the recover console I went. I noticed the i8042prt service was set to disabled. So I ran the following command to enable it:

ENABLE i8042prt SERVICE_BOOT_START

After a reboot the mouse and keyboard worked in the VM. I installed the Virtual Additions into the guest OS and all appears well with the newly converted VM.

Playing with the Nintendo Wii

I finally had the chance to play with a Nintendo Wii this past weekend. I had a lot of fun with it. I mainly played the Wii Sports games, but did play just a bit with Legend of Zelda to see how it worked with a more traditional game. It was a good time and seems like a nice system for the money. I am not a big console gamer, so the Playstation 3 is not what I consider anywhere near affordable and the Xbox 360, while attracting me somewhat is still a little more than I want to pay for a console system.

The Wii also seemed to keep what are ordinarily non-gamers entertained - a big plus to bringing the system into the household. I might look into picking one up a few months down the road if availability isn't too much of an issue.

Never leave the tapes in the car...

For those not following, The Columbus Dispatch ran the following article today:

http://tinyurl.com/2qplpn

The intern forgot to take the backup tapes inside. He has now lost his job. Uh, what is the State of Ohio doing sending tapes to people's homes? This intern is apparently told to take the tapes home with him, forgets to take them out of the car and is fired when they are stolen from his car because he apparently only remembered to take them in 85% of the time.

Let's take a step back for a moment. Does the State of Ohio really condone taking backup tapes home? Are they really that much safer in the apartment or home of the intern? It sounds to me like the State of Ohio really needs to look at some of their policies if backup tapes going home with people is acceptable.

Folks... tapes containing sensitive data should not be taken to an employee's home. There are service available in Ohio that will transport your tapes to secured facilities with paper trails. Even in these cases, the sensitive data should be encrypted.

COVUG Tech Days

I just got back from the Central Ohio VMware Users Group (COVUG) Tech Days at Kalahari Resort. It was a great time and very, very informative. The event was held up at the Kalahari Resort just a touch south of Sandusky, Ohio. The convention center and hotel were very nice - I believe the convention had approximate use of 10,000 sq. feet, so there was plenty of room for everybody.

The event had numerous vendors there with presentations and break out sessions held on both Thursday and Friday. VMware, HP, EMC, DataDomain, Vizioncore, esXpress, Equallogic, Dell, Intel, AMD, Acronis and others had booths and presentations.

I find these events great ways to get an overview of what is happening out there and act as a starting point for what I should be looking more into. Some of the things that caught my eye this time around...

I sat in on an Acronis presentation. It seems like a very nice product. The ability to restore on different hardware is very attractive and would be handy to have for any Virtual to Physical situations one may run into to make a vendor happy (i.e. to be on a physical box for support instead of virtual). I do plan on looking more into their product and see if it has a place in our organization.

I always try to sit in on Equallogic presentations and I managed to catch one this time as well. I still really like the hardware they put out. People are always saying good things about it and from the live demos I have seen it does seem to be a very impressive piece of equipment. I still lean towards getting one of these for Phase II of my virtualization project at work if the budget for next year will permit.

I managed to talk to David Siles, the CTO for Kane County who runs a lot of Equallogic storage with VMware. He is running to 5 9's availability and is running VMs, Exchange DBs and SQL DBs off his SATA based arrays. He had great things to say about the boxes and it was nice to hear from someone running some very serious workloads on just the SATA products.

I also sat in on an esXpress presentation. They do the backup software that does hot backups of VMs. I am using their software in production and am very fond of it. Their presentations are usually fun as the tech guys do them, not sales guys. They have a couple of cool things coming up soon - file level restores from within the VM and a feature to help allow automated replication to warm standby boxes.

I also attended several sessions done by VMware which were informative. Their NDA sessions are always a nice glimpse at what might be in store for us in the future.

All in all, a very successful trip. If you ever have the chance to attend one of the COVUG events I would encourage it. They are very informative and a good time.

fixmbr fun

I needed to free up some space for my upcoming prep for the MCSE 2003 upgrade tests (more on that in another post). I have an evaluation copy of Windows Server 2003 that came with the study guide I will be working from and wanted to setup some VMs on my laptop. I need the space for the VMs, so I decided I would remove my Fedora Core 6 partitions while I prepare for the upgrade tests.

Before I did that I wanted to set the MBR back to the Windows loader instead of GRUB. Easy enough I figured as I set about to boot off an XP CD yesterday morning to use the recovery console and fixmbr to take care of that. So I boot off the XP disk and was met with a Blue Screen regarding pci.sys before I even made it to the Welcome to Setup screen. Hoping that was a just a fluke, I tried again. Same thing.

Some brief searching shows that I need to use an XP disk with Service Pack 2 integrated. So after scrounging one of those up I was able to boot to the Welcome to Setup screen with no issues. Of course then, the XP installer could not see my SATA disks...

The laptop I am working on has not floppy drive to use the F6 option with. So after a bit of time I built up an XP disk with SP2 integrated and the SATA controller drivers slipped in as well. Success! GRUB is gone and the Linux partitions have been reclaimed.

Blog Move

Yes, once again I have decided to shuffle my blog to another location. So that makes it an old Movable Type blog, to Live Journal, to a Word Press site to Blogger. For the most part I have several other irons in the fire at this moment and decided to ease my maintenance just a little bit.

And yes, it has also been a long gap since my last blog post... We will see if I can do a little better getting things posted.

Virtualization Hardware Purchase

After several months of planning and working out a plan for our company to make a move towards virtualization the PO's were signed and hardware is being ordered. The main server was ordered today along with our VMware licenses. A SAN is ready to be ordered - just have to cross paths with our local vendor to get those final details worked out.

We are moving ahead slowly and won't be taking full advantage of all that VMware has to offer. The primary goal is server consolidation at this point. The savings we get from knocking out a few of our underutlized servers should make management a little more open to further VMware investments with a Phase II hopefully coming next year. Phase II is where we build in the real redundancy and virtualize even more of our servers. Phase I just has us getting the low hanging fruit.

As for redundancy - we will only have one workhorse server running ESX. For Phase I though it will only run about 6 VMs or so. We will use a 3rd party backup product, probably esXpress, to hot backup the VMs to another storage location. In the event of a host failure one of the older boxes will be available to bring online and at least bring up some VMs to lessen the impact while the host server is repaired. While not the spiffy automatic roll over we could have had - it will allow fairly quick recovery by restoring those backups.

I am looking forward to the hardware getting there and getting some of this stuff setup! We've been using VMs in test for quite some time now. We have two VMs in production now, but the move to ESX Server will be the first major push for us. Should be fun!

HP nx7400 Display Issues... Again!

Last fall work provided me with a new HP nx7400. The thing seemed great at first and then the display issues started. Occasionally when the thing hibernated the LCD display wouldn't come back. Power off, power on and sometimes that worked. Other times you had to pull the battery, do the dance and sacrifice a chicken to get it to come back. About two months ago it finally came to the point where nothing I did would get it to come back. That resulted in a return to the warranty depot for an LCD replacement/repair.

Now, today - I just had the same issue happen. No LCD. The laptop boots, you can hear it booting. But there is absolutely no display. I will call them again in the morning and see what happens - probably another trip back to the warranty depot for the laptop. Unfortunately, this is about the worse possible time for this issue to resurface. Over the next few weeks I will need to be working from home a bit more than usual and that laptop was the only machine I have that actually runs Windows on it. Hopefully the repair will once again be quick and I won't be without it for too long.

Windows World Test Environment

While kicking back this weekend I started re-building my Windows test environment I have in VMs. It had been a bit since I had used it - last practicing disaster recovery for AD and Exchange 2000/2003. While all my test servers were functioning, I couldn't really be sure of the state they were in. So I shuffled a few things around and built up two Windows 2000 Domain Controllers, two Windows 2003 Server member servers and an XP client. I started with 2000 AD as it is time for me to play a bit with some AD upgrades. I also need to get Exchange into the mix when I have a moment.

Usually I just populate my test environments with a handful of accounts. This time I wanted to get more in the ballpark of 100 accounts up and running. I ended up using the dsadd tool from the Windows 2003 box to add the accounts to AD. By using Excel I was able to build up 100 dsadd command lines to paste into a script file. Very brute force, but it works! When I get time I might tweak the script a bit and build it up via a for loop to make future script tweaks easier. Here is the dsadd command I used (posting here more as a reminder to myself than usefulness to others):

dsadd user CN=test10,CN=Users,DC=ANSALON,DC=KRYNN,DC=local /
-samid test10 -upn test10 -pwd insertpasshere -fn Test -ln Ten /
-display "Test Ten" -s GOLDMOON

Seems to have worked quite well.

Week of Releases

Looks like everyone is releasing software this week! Microsoft released service pack 2 for Windows 2003 Server and Red Hat released RHEL5. Good stuff! I haven't had much time other than to read feature lists and release notes on either release yet. SP2 for Windows seems like a typical service pack with a couple of features thrown in (I thought MS was going to quit releasing features in service packs!) and RHEL looks to have made several improvements - though a minimum requirement of 1GB of RAM? Apparently folks are getting it to install with 256MB if you do text mode and minimal install. We'll see how that goes once CentOS releases their spin...

DST Change - The Day After

So far, so good. I had written a script last wek to check the time on all the servers (Windows and Linux) and email them to me as a text file. That gave me a very quick way to see the state of affairs this morning when I woke up. All the servers looked good - they had all updated the time correctly as expected. I went into work this morning anyways, as there is a manual timer I needed to change which has no concept that DST changed and probably never will (it has been on the list to be replaced with something that uses NTP anyways, so no major loss there). I logged on from a machine or two, made sure my proxy auth was still working (I have a squid proxy tied into AD which is very sensitive of time drift due to kerberos). Everything seemed good.

So hopefully tomorrow will just be a million questions about why some calendar appointments are off (after the userbase certainly ignored the emails I sent on the subject when we initially patched the client OS's) and probably a machine or two we just forgot to update. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

On a humorous note - I popped on Lady Elfshadow's laptop this morning and saw the time was off! In all the prep for keeping work machines updated I had neglected to update her iBook. Easy fix, just check the available software updates, tell it to grab the DST fix and a reboot later it was good to go.

Firefly loot ordered...

I couldn't wait. One day was enough waiting to make sure it wasn't an impulse purchase. Here's what I ordered:

Serenity Official Visual Companion
Firefly Official Companion (Vol 1)
Finding Serenity

Since I am cheap it could be many days before I get them as I chose the Super Saver Shipping option... Something to look forward to!

Firefly

My friends turned me on to the now canceled television show Firefly (and later the movie Serenity). One of them had the series on DVD, as well as the movie. I watched them pretty quickly and I ended up getting for my own enjoyment later on. I rarely watch shows more than once - just a few movies are on the list that I tend to enjoy time after time. Well, here I am not even a month later and rewatching the series. I am enjoying just as much the second time through!

I think it is the SciFi/Western thing that I like. Sort of a wild west feel out in space. A combination that just seems to work for me. I enjoy most of the characters in the series as well, which does go far to make it interesting for multiple viewings. A really good series - too bad it was canceled.

To help fill my need for more Firefly I think I will pick up a few of the books off of Amazon. I have some gift cards built up and I think I could get most of the highly rated ones in one swoop. I will give myself a few days to avoid it being an impulse buy and probably order them up. Already have them in my cart!

Month of PHP Bugs

March is the Month of PHP Bugs. The Project's goal is to improve PHP security. The bugs they are announcing each day are bugs with the core PHP code itself, not just poor coding practices of various PHP applications out there. A lot of this was sparked when Stefan Esser resigned from the PHP Security Response Team several months ago. (You can read an interview with him here.) He felt issues were not being addressed promptly enough or being ignored - and so we now have the Month of PHP Bugs.

My thoughts on PHP are conflicted. I used to be a big fan of PHP apps, they seemed to solve a lot of problems for me at work or other places (i.e. this blog is PHP based). But then I started to do some work with the Fedora Infrastructure team who had a poor opinion of PHP based on its security track record. I still use PHP applications, but I do tend to look for alternatives when I can. My PHP work apps are internal applications and safely behind the firewall. The publicly exposed PHP apps I use tend to be for personal use and are installed at my hosting provider who provides me the lazy path to updates through the one-click installs. So at least the path to upgrade is just a few clicks away.

In either case - looks like March might be a busy time for admins with a large number of publicly exposed PHP applications.

WordPress 2.1.1 Issues

Looks like WordPress had a breach in their security and someone was able to add some exploit code to some downloads of the 2.1.1 release. Not all downloads were affected, but WordPress has released 2.1.2 to help eliminate any issues. My host had just recently upgraded their on-click installs to 2.1.1 - looks like another time procrastination paid off as I had not updated yet! You can read about the issue here.

VMware Server and SQL Server

I negelected to update this post regarding the issues we had been facing with Microsoft SQL 2000 running on VMware Server 1.0.1. Despite several attempts and different tactics tried I could not get the ERP upgrade the developer was working on to work without experiencing SQL errors.

I decided to try the eval copy of ESX Server. So I spent time shuffling off the VMs running on the current VMware Server (running CentOS 4.4 as the host) to my other one running on Windows. I then rebuilt the same hardware as an eval ESX 3.0.1 server. I moved the SQL VM back to the ESX server, made sure things were running good and turned it back over to the developer to test the ERP upgrade.

This time it worked flawlessly. The upgrade proceeded with no issues and completed. The developer has been happily working out the normal upgrade bugs with the ERP upgrade - which were not related the SQL issues at all, just broken customizations and such.

We are certainly glad it worked and I guess this just goes to reinforce that one should only run ESX Server in production.

VMware Server 1.0.2 Released

VMware released VMware Server 1.0.2 today, the release notes are here. I haven't had the chance to get it installed anywhere yet, but for those with more time it might be of interest.

Vista Bug Forcing Reactivation

It didn't take too long for this to crop up. A Windows Vista bug that forces reactivation. This bug in their highly touted Software Protection Platform forces a user to reactive their copy of Windows Vista over things as simple as a device driver update, installation of a program, the running of a program or removal of program. Apparently in some situations the only way to resolve the issue was to call Microsoft.

This is one of the biggest reasons I despise all the activation hoops and genuine windows detection Microsoft has so heavily been investing their time in. Problems such as these cause the paying customer (often times corporate customers - where hassling with reactivating OS's is $$$ lost) trouble. Meanwhile the software pirates will continue to use their tricks to avoid having to deal with any of this. The person that suffers is Microsoft's legitimate customer!

I understand that Microsoft is plagued by software pirates not paying for their operating system or other applications. Inflicting troubles such as these on customer is not the answer though. It's bad enough for a non-technical home user to have to deal with this. It is equally unpleasant for corporate help desk folks to have to deal with this as well. There are enough other issues that aren't directly inflicted by Microsoft to deal with on a day to day basis that people don't need even more issues.

Now Microsoft does acknowledge this is a bug with the OS. However they failed to actually announce this patch until it started hitting the tech news sites. Then they admit that they released a patch at the end of January. Of course you can only get the patch from Windows Update if your operating system is proven legitimate. Brilliant! Microsoft is their own worse enemy these days.

Hosting Provider Outage

My hosting provider was down in the early morning hours today. The first portion was due to an emergency planned outage to repair a building UPS. When the power came back on there were issues with one of their core routers. Looks like things are back to normal now though.

DSL Upgrade...

I finally got around to calling the phone company today to see if there were higher DSL speeds available and to make sure I was getting a fair price on our DSL server (cable isn't available in our area). Turns out I am getting kicked up to 3x our current DSL speed - 512kbps to 1.5mbps - and saving $15 a month! I guess sometimes it does pay to talk to the phone company! The change is supposed to take place on Monday.

Google Launches Business Applications

Google has announced the launch of Google Apps Premier Edition. The Premier Edition will have the following applications available:

Email
Calendaring
Messaging and Talk Applications
Word Processor
Spreadsheet

You can get all of this for $50 per user. The email limit is 10GB and things can supposedly be made ad free. They are also guaranteeing 99.9% uptime for email.

This looks like a pretty good deal to me. There are some reservations, but at an early step forward I think this is a strong start. Several years ago Microsoft stated that common applications would be hosted on the web. And while Microsoft has their Windows Live, it appears that Google is much more structured and organized in their pushing these applications to the corporate customer.

I have recently started making more and more use of the Google Calendar, Docs and Spreadsheets. The Calendar largely due to some repeated issues I have been having with my PDA. I was tired of it failing while I was at home over a weekend and not having any calendar or contact information, so I finally started making more use of the calendar and contacts portion of the Google apps. I have also started using the Docs and Spreadsheets more often as well. I find it convenient to access from multiple computers and operating systems. The links they have added to GMail to open documents in Google Docs has been pretty useful as well.

I am still not comfortable with certain confidential documents up there though, so that is a limiting factor. I also have some issues with margins in certain docs when I print them. I may just be overlooking a setting though. I am looking forward to seeing these hosted applications expand in the future in their features.

"Windows Vista Capable" Hardware

I was browsing /. this evening and someone has linked to a hilarious Dell page touching on the hardware requirements for Windows Vista. The page is here. Once there choose the hardware link and browse the Hardware Requirements portion. The page is covering the various labels they have been putting on computers in preparation for Windows Vista - you know the ones like, "Windows Vista Capable" or "Windows Vista Premium Ready".

On Dell's page here is what they say "Windows Vista Capable" is good for... are you ready? Here it is:

""Great for... Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games."

Great! So Dell is saying that if your computer is only labeled as "Windows Vista Capable" you had better not be wanting to do much more than boot the OS! Good luck to you if you actually want to run an application and use your computer! Of course they are listing the "Windows Vista Capable" hardware as only having 512MB of RAM and I know there are "Windows Vista Capable" machines out there with a GB of RAM. Still sort of funny though!

Saturday Game Report

Saturday’s game was a great time! We had a little bit of a late start due to the show we were getting. My place is out in the country, so sometimes the roads in my area take a bit to get cleared. Everyone made it and only one person got stuck in the driveway. A little pushing got that situation sorted out. We all got settled in and feasted on North Market cinammon rolls!

First up was an adventure called The Blackguard’s Revenge. Lots and lots of undead and our party doesn’t have a cleric. It wasn’t too bad though, luckily despite their sheer numbers they weren’t that powerful. And we all had a good string of Fort saves to keep that pesky level drain problem from being too bad. There were a couple of purple tongued things that were a little difficult, but doable. Then we ran into the Blackguard who was pretty tough. And then on to some big monstrous thing that had spectal hands to deliver touch attacks. The fort saves were quite high - I think my fighter was the only one that had a chance to make them. That critter also tried two Will save based spells which thanks to great rolls by my fighter and a little Action Point help allowed me to make both of them. With that one down it was on to the next adventure.

I am not sure of the full title, Iron Crypt something. More undead and lots of traps. The party rogue was doing a good job at taking care of most of the traps. We aren’t finished with that one yet, most of it has been trap/puzzle based so far.

So a successful gaming day! We played from about 10:30am till 9pm. A full day of gaming!

Saturday Game Day

Saturday gaming session tomorrow! Our gaming group occasionally has a marathon gaming session on a Saturday. Tomorrow is one of those sessions. The guys are coming down tomorrow and I think we are playing from at least 10am to 6pm. I know one person needs to leave at 6pm - I’m not sure if that means we are all stopping or if we will just continue with one person short.

We recently switched DMs back to Crothian (screen name), but we are still carrying on the Eberron Campaign. It should be a fun session - I think our resident rogue has us headed off to some crypt to kill some time while we figure out how to repair our recently salvaged airship. Too bad our party doesn’t have a cleric!

Virtual Server vs. SQL Server

It looks like I have run into my first real issue with VMware Server. After many successes I have finally come across a problem. We are ramping up for some testing for an ERP upgrade. To help allow us more complete testing I decided to role our current physical test ERP server into a VM. Day to Day operations in that test VM have been working fine. I have done some DB restores, people have been using the VM for normal testing and no issues to report.

Last night we tried our first upgrade of the software. It failed part way in saying it had lost connection to the database. We looked at the errors just a bit, but decided to roll back to our shapshot and then re-run it. No point wasting time on what could have been a fluke. The second upgrade also failed. There were several errors including ones saying we needed to run DBCC CHECKDB on the database. We did that and it returned clean, no errors. Running it again though resulted in a lost connection with the server error. More digging in the SQL logs also showed I/O timeout errors as well.

Doing some searching through the VMware forums show there are several others that have had this problem. So far, no one has a good solution to the issue. The best I have seen so far is to create a VM in GSX Server and then upgrade to VMware Server. I would rather avoid doing that, so I have not tried it yet.

In looking at the VM it appears it is using the buslogic driver (the OS is Windows Server 2003). That is not the ideal driver, so I will try switching that to the LSI driver tomorrow and also increase the amount of RAM available to the SQL VM to see if that can help us get by the problem. If not it looks like I will have to go back to a physical box for a bit to keep from holding testing up at this early stage.

Seems so odd that I am seeing this issue though. I did some serious testing in VMs with Exchange upgrades, restores, etc and had no issues at all. Some of the Exchange restores included 15GB restores, much larger than the DBs I am working with now. Hopefully I will get this figured out or VMware will come up with something - it doesn't appear I am the only one facing this issue.

PayPal Security Keys

There has been talk of PayPal offering security keys for use with their site - as well as eBay's website. The story recently surfaced on digg.com (it's probably been on there 50 times before - it is digg.com after all). PayPal's page on it is here. It is still in beta testing phase now, but if you give PayPal $5 then they will send you one of the key fobs. You then activate your account for use with the new key fob and your new login process will include entering your normal username and password, as well as the 6-digit number displayed on the key fob (which changes every 30 seconds). Two factor authentication.

This move is obviously due to the fact that eBay and PayPal customers are frequent targets of phishing attempts. By using a method as above those attacks become much, much more difficult to be successful. I applaud PayPal for making this move as a solution to the problem. There are several people that criticize PayPal for charging $5 for the key fob. I see no issue with that, it's a token amount of money. These devices are not free and I am sure they realize if you charge just a little for something, only people who will really use it will ask for one. Why send a key to someone who has no real intention of using it. And if you give stuff away for free people will take it even if they have no intention of using it (my closet is full of T-shirts that I have and never wear only because they were given away for free from some convention).

The largest issue I see in the future with these measures are that one has the potential to end up with several of these key fobs from various banking sites and such if this becomes more of widespread practice. Just from sites I frequent I can think of three or four that I would like to see move towards this type of system. Despite that, I still think this is a good move by PayPal and am anxious to see how the system works for them.

Time Zone Updates

Thanks to the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 IT folks get to roll out time zone updates across all of their machines - servers, client PCs, various applications that might be running on the servers or clients and any network devices that might need an update to continue keeping accurate time. We have delayed our rollout a bit because of our CRM product which is using what I think to be a "hack" to solve the problem with their app. So we waited another couple of weeks to see if they came out with something a little more elegant. They have not.

So I started looking over the various tech docs as a refresher for the updates we will start rolling out next week. This just doesn't look like it is going to be much fun....

Trojan on Dolphin Stadium Site

I just caught the article on Digg about a trojan being on the Dolphin Stadium website. Websense was the one with the warning on their site. Apparently a bit of javascript code had been dropped into the header of the site and was downloading a bit of malware - a keylogger/backdoor. You can read either of the above articles for more details.

This just goes to show that folks really need to keep their browsers (and web servers) updated with the most recent patches. Often you will hear the excuse from the user side that they don't go to the "bad" parts of the Internet. But this is a common tactic - infecting either the main page of a mainstream site or often times easier, exploiting the banner ad system to get harmful content to run. So just a heads up that even if you stick to mainstream sites keep you browsers patched and seriously consider switching to an alternative browser such as Firefox.

VMware Converter 3.0

VMware Converter 3.0 was released yesterday. I had played with the tool while it was in Beta - converting VM files from one version to another and a physical machine (just an XP Pro box) to a VM. Everything seemed to work quite well for me during the beta.

The timing for the release was just perfect. I had been planning on converting one of our primary test servers, our ERP test box, to a VM this week. The server in question runs Windows Server 2003, SQL 2000, our ERP software and several other databases. Using the new VMware Converter it took about five and half hours to convert it into a VM. Powering the VM went well, it did some hardware redetection after which I installed the VMware tools and had the server working.

There were several clean-up items I had to do post conversion. First I uninstalled all the HP tools (the physical server was an old DL580). That resolved a couple of start-up errors from the HP stuff looking for devices that were no longer there.

I also noticed the host server was getting hammered processor wise. I suspected this was due from converting from a quad proc server to a single proc, which can cause issues such as this if the OS in the VM is still using a multiprocessor HAL. Unfortunately it doesn't look like there is a "supported" way to revert back to a Uniprocessor HAL in Windows 2003. Searching the VMware forums a bit I did find this thread:

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=410987

That has a snippet in there that lets you use devcon to switch back to the Uniprocessor HAL for Windows 2003. I tried it and it worked great! Solved the high processor utilization issue and seemed to run fine. Not sure I would do this on any critical production servers, but should be a handy trick for test systems.

I also needed to resize the disk for the server. I had tried reducing the size of the disk during the conversion and it ended up with only 2GB free on my DB partition. I used vmware-vdiskmanager to add another 12GB to the disk. I could have tried using diskpart in Windows to expand the partition, but from looking at it it didn't appear that it was going to like doing the system drive. So I used the GParted Live CD to resize the partition which worked very well.

With that done, the server was up and running in a VM. So far everything seems to be working well. A very cool tool!

Virtual Appliances

There has been a fair amount of talk about the Internet about Virtual Appliances. Virtual Appliances are ready-to-run virtual machines that are available from VMware's website. These appliances are possible due to the free VM products VMware provides, such as VM Player and VM Server. This easily allows nearly anyone to download one of the free virtualization products and then download an appliance to use. There are numerous to choose from.

The one that prompted this post is the SugarCRM appliance from rPath. For quite some time now I have been suggesting SugarCRM as a possible replacement for our current CRM system. The appetite for such a replacement varies depending on who you ask and when you ask them. I recently spotted the SugarCRM appliance though and decided to download it. Within five minutes of having it downloaded I was up and running an install of SugarCRM and entering in Accounts for testing purposes. While setting up a demo install for SugarCRM wouldn't have been too difficult - the ability to download the appliance and work on other things while it downloaded and only spending about five minutes powering the appliance up was a great way to test out some software!

If you haven't looked at some of the appliances they have it is probably worth browsing and seeing what they have if you haven't done so already.

Virtualization...

I have been doing a fair amount of work with various forms of virtualization. Past blog posts have mentioned some of the stuff I have been doing at home. At work we are getting set to make a big push to virtualization - mainly for server consolidation.

We've been using virtual servers in our test environment for about a year. So far all work there has gone well - most of the time the developers don't even realize they are in a VM unless I make it known. Over the past few months I have been stressing some of the VMs in test a little more than usual. Most of this more intensive testing was due to testing of an Exchange migration. All of that testing was done in a VM and I did numerous Exchange restores, Exchange upgrades, OS upgrades and then reverting back to the original snapshot. This was all done on a VMware GSX server and worked flawlessly.

With that testing leading to a confidence boost in virtualization I started to seriously consider making steps to implement some VMs in production. So far I have two production VMs - using VMware Server on a Windows host. Both serve critical roles to work at the company (shipping and build-to-order and picklist printing). So far both have been great - none of the users know the server was virtualized.

Growing from this success, full bore planning has started for moving to real ESX servers running on good hardware with hot backup solutions in place. Most likely we will get things approved as I can get Phase 1 implemented at budget or less than budget.