Adventures in Tech

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Converting a SOE install into a VMware imageLike most companies we have a bunch of SOE (standard operating environment) that run on our various machines.

We currently seem to be having a lack of physical hardware onhand as test machines.
I figured the second best would be to create an ESX server machine and then just load a whole heap of SOE images into that and use those as our test hardware.
I know the hardware layer drives will be different, however its good for just being able to run through testing of applications and testing software deployments which is my part of the world.

Only one question remains, how do you get these SOEs into ESX?
Just installing via the ISO into vmware fails, as the SOE doesn't have the driver files for vmware ESX.
The best option is to use the free vmware converter.

The vmware converter will convert various version of vmware images into different types but more importantly it will convert physical hardware into vmdk's (vmware disk files) that can be loaded into esx.

To convert our SOE into ESX I did the following.
1. Image a laptop with the SOE (was one test machine we DID have!)
2. Install vmware converter
3. Select vmware converter to convert the local machine directly into my ESX server.

During doing this I discovered something about vmware converter which is really cool!

You can select a remote machine!! This means I can install vmware converter onto a server or desktop and then use that to convert laptops etc that I connect up to the network into vmdk's without having to install vmware converter on each one!

It should be noted that this obviously requires full admin access to the machine that your converting and full access to the ESX server to import the images.

I'm not sure when this remote feature was added to vmware converter, but I don't remember it being in previous versions.

Certainly very cool! And now I have all the SOE images on my virtual machine to mess around with.

Caveman

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Missing package files on a SMS distribution pointHi All,

Merry Christmas to all those who celebrate it.
I'm at work on Christmas eve so I thought I'd share a little tip you might find useful regarding SMS or SCCM (Systems management server / Systems configuration and control manager)

We use SMS for all sorts of software deployments and I seem to have become the defacto manager of it.
Recently we had a machine that wasn't installing an update.
This update was advertised in the run advertised programs icon in the control panel, however when running this update from it, the files would download, but would fail at the integrity check.
I checked the local site servers SMSPKE$ folder (local site servers are SMS distribution points) and found that for the update I was trying to install the DP didn't have all the files for it!
I checked the SMS console and found that SMS seemed to think the package was installed correctly.

Now I could have just refreshed the DP point via the SMS console, however its a large package and this would have taken about a day.
I make the guess that the hash values SMS uses for its check were ok and it was just the files that were missing.
I then copied the couple of missing files directly into the package folder on the distribution point and reran the advert on the users machine. The package now installed correctly and passed all the checks.

This saved having to wait a day for the whole package to copy back to the DP point if I'd refreshed it, please note your mileage may vary but works for me!

Caveman

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Windows PE - Problems building large ISO files with oscdimgHi There!

Today I've got an interesting issue I ran into with windows pre installation environment version 2.0.

For those who don't know windows pe is a very cut down version of windows that will run from a CD, USB key, hard drive etc. Its designed as a platform for deploying images for SOEs (standard operating environment) images.

PE version 2 is the latest version of windows pe and can be obtained from the WAIK (windows automated installation kit )

I recently wanted to create a winpe disk that would auto boot up and start restoring a ghost file onto a drive.

The auto starting ghost part was easy enough, however the ghost image I had was in multiple span files of around 2GB in size.
I discovered that I could just fit both ghost files onto a DVD along with winpe! Perfect I thought, this will save having to swap disks which was how it worked currently.
I took my raw winpe source files and into my images folder I pasted the second gho file, I then reran the oscdimg -n -h -bc:\winpe\etfsboot.com c:\winpe\iso c:\winpe\winpe.iso command to rebuild my iso file.

I had to add the -m flag as this image was larger than the normal that the oscdimg command was expecting, but I'd had to do that with the first version of the dvd as well.
The iso built and I burned it to DVD and ran off to test it in my favorite test laptop. On booting the disk I noticed that the font on the "starting windows" screen seemed different, it looked a bit larger than previously. Then I received an error stating that winlogon.exe in C:\windows\system32 was corrupted or missing!

Cursing one of those bad DVD burns I tossed the disk and burnt another, however I had the same problem! Winlogon.exe missing or corrupted!
The next thing to try was to rebuild the iso with the oscdimg command, however that didn't help either!
By this point I was starting to believe that my whole winpe framework was broken! So I blew it away and copied another version out of WAIK that I had installed on my computer and this time I wasn't taking any chances. I created a DVD without any ghost or ghost images and confirmed that booted up perfectly and that the font had returned to normal, I then added my ghost tools and again I didn't see any problems.
Then I added the ghost files, reburntit, and found it died again with WinLogon.exe missing or corrupted along with the different font size.

So seemed the issue was with the ghost files being on the disk! So just to prove my point, I created another disk with just one ghost file, which took me full circle back to where I started that morning. Sure enough the disk booted, ghost fired up and started to restore from image.

So obviously the problem was with having the two ghost files in the same ISO! I checked and rechecked the sizes to ensure I wasn't over burning or something or that I wasn't getting really close to the edge of the DVDs.
I tend decided maybe there was something wrong with microsoft's pe iso creation tool. I created my winpe image without the ghost files and made that into an ISO.

I then decided to mount the ISO in read write mode and add the two ghost files to the iso manually. Linux makes this a complete snap with one command (mount -o loop /path/to/file.iso /mnt/winpe) which uses the wonderful loop device built into the linux kernel.
Windows on the other hand doesn't make it that easy (who would have guessed?) however the program Magic ISO will do this, but of course its not free(no surprises there). OS X can't seem to do this either which is a bit of a shame, I did a quick bit of hunting around as well as I had my mac laptop handy. However OS X doesn't have a loop device in its kernel and doesn't seem to have a decent method for this, although it looks like hdutil may offer some solutions. I was in a hurry this day so I just booted up my *nix vmware system and used that to add the ghost files.

After adding the files into the iso I burnt the disk again and tested it, no strange fonts... which was good sign... and ghost loaded correctly and started doing its thing just as I'd wanted at 8am that morning!

I'm not sure what the issue was but it looks like the oscdimg command can start doing annoying things when faced with large files, in future I'm just going to add large files manually.

I'd love to hear from anyone else who's run into this problem and done more research on what the cause is than I've had the time too.

Of course once I got all this fixed up, I then had to contend with ghost images which weren't spanned correctly, but that's another story I won't bore you with!

Now I probably should get back to my exam study, boy will I be glad to have uni outa the way for another semester!

Caveman

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Resetting outlook email profiles via registry.It’s a bit of a quiet Wednesday, well its not really, I’ve got more work than I know what to do with, however seem to have been working like a blue tailed fly for weeks now and the workload isn’t getting any smaller.. So I’ve decided I’ll work at a rate that isn’t going to kill me.

Today I thought I’d mention a useful registry hack I’ve discovered for clearing out an outlook profile through the registry.
But before I go too far.. What is an outlook profile?
Outlook has individual user profiles and unlike most normal applications these aren’t linked to your user account. These profiles can be managed in windows by using the Mail control panel icon (filename: C:\windows\system32\MLCFG32.CPL).
Through this all the profile options can be configured and setup.

Now in an exchange environment some timesoutlook just loses it and often can be fixed by creating a new outlook profile and this is much quicker than creating the user a whole new profile under Documents and Settings.
In some situations you may wish to reset the users outlook profile but can’t run the CPL (on a Terminal server for example) or the MLCFG32.cpl doesn’t seem to be resetting the profile correctly.
NOTE: We are talking about editing the registry here, so please take great care and have a backup of your registry handy just in case ;)

- close Outlook
- Outlook settings will be lost
- find user in registry
* HKEY_Users
* look for user's ID (use getsid for this)
* Software >> Miscrosoft >> Windows NT >> Current Version >> Windows Messaging Subsystem >> Profiles/
- all folders (keys) listed under profiles will be the outlook profiles that user account has
- delete all of them.
- open Outlook
- outlook will ask you to setup your accounts again.


That’s it! See didn’t break your machine.. Oh it did? My bad!

Hopefully this was helpful to someone! I know I’ve used it a few times and is even more useful when you’re trying to do things in a somewhat secured environment.

Two posts within a week!! I’d better be careful!

Caveman

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Ok.. Its been awhile!!WOW.. its been ages since my last post! yes I'm still alive, no I haven't died, yes I've been super busy!

I am currently working fulltime/semi part time for an IT company in Sydney. On top of that I'm still plodding my way through my university degree, which is probably becoming more and more pointless every week.

So what do I do? I'm currently working as what effectively is a windows engineer, although I don't get the title or the pay but I still get the work load and the responsibility. However the company I work for are really good with giving me time off to do uni. Last semester I was only at work 2 days a week instead of full time! When I have uni break I normally work full time and lots of overtime to make up for it. They also pay me peanuts but I'm not to fussed about that and its worth having a slight drop in pay for the flexibility for uni.

I also get lots of experience and get to work with some interesting environments. They aren't super huge with the biggest one having around 1500 users but none the less its a big change from the unix admin work I was doing before.
Moving over to doing more highend windows support has also been an interesting learning curve and certainly one I'm glad I've made, but of course mad google skills are still the key to learning more. The number of problems I can solve regularly just be using a few google quires never ceases to amaze me.

So what at I doing in the forum world I hear you ask? Well nothing, I don't admin any boards, irc channels or random unix servers anymore. I don't even hang out in any forums at all or have much to do with any of the contacts I had on irc or on the forum boards.

Last year (2007) turned out to be a bad year for my family with my Mum was diagnosed with cancer a few weeks before christmas 2006. It turned out to be Sarcoma, which is a very aggressive form of cancer. She was operated just after Christmas and given radio therapy which ended up making her very sick with a 2 and a half week stay in hospital.
Prognoses was good, however in June it was discovered that the cancer had spread to the lungs and being so aggressive it was deemed terminal and she was given 6 months to live.
She died on the 6th of December in the emergency ward of the San hospital, almost 6 months to the day from being diagnosed terminal, after a very very brave fight and having had as much fun from life while she could in those 6 months.

University has just started again for me this semester. I'm currently doing a third year network subject, a java programming subject and formal logic as a filer subject.
So far I think I'm really going to enjoy the networking subject which takes what I did a few semesters ago to a higher leave. We also get some contact with Cisco routers, which again we did a few semesters ago but this semester we will be covering more than how to set an IP address in a router!!!

Ok That's all for now. I'm going to try to post interesting things I discover at work from time to time!

Caveman

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The mass of systemsI have recently changed by computer setup and I thought you might all be interested in having a look.

Click the photo to travel to the flickr


Gear shown in the photos is as follows:

Main computer:
AMD XP 2600 barton core
1GB Corsair DDR ram
3x300GB and 1x150GB hard drives giving 1.050TB
Leadtek Geforce FX 5600 video card
Sound blaster Audigy ZS sound card.
3x10/100 network cards
DVD burner

Server box
Celeron 333
256 MB sd ram
1x20GB hard drive.
3x10/100 network cards

Ibook
1.2Ghz G4
512MB DDR ram
20GB hard disk
DVD rom - CD burner

Dell - Latitude | D610
Pentium M 2.0GhZ
1GB ram
60GB hard disk
DVD burner

Switch
Level one FSW-1610TX
16 port 10/100 switch

Wireless access point
Linksys WAP54G

Belkin Surge Pro F9D800au-5M-ORG

AOC 17" LCD monitor 8MS


The Dell is the newer system in the setup, however that's not the interesting part.
I control all these systems from the one keyboard and mouse.
To switch from my main system to the ibook laptop I just move the mouse off the left edge of the main screen and it moves onto the laptop screen.
To move to the dell I move off the right side of the main monitor and onto the dell system.
Keyboard and mouse work prefect AND even the clipboard gets copied across, its fantastic! The program I use to do this is synergy http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/.
It runs as a server on my main box and the client system (dell and ibook) all connect in. Its totally cross platform and currently I have it running on OS X, Kubuntu linux and windows XP. I have also confirmed it works on vista.

Frankly I see this as better than dual monitors as it means I can hammer one system and still have a responsive system to use.
I have also noticed that synergys still works well when cpu load on the server system is 100%

Hope everyone had a happy new year and a nice christmas.

Later!

Caveman

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