THE BLOG HAS MOVED!

here:
http://www.robinengstrom.se


still very much a work in progress. a constant battle with wordpress

ESXi and iSCSI for fun and profit!

i have a fairly minimalistic setup of computers here at home. a small apartment without room for a full blown computer lab.

my quest this past week have been to migrate (rebuild) my current lab environment from microsoft hyper-v to vmware ESXi update 4.

the computer i run as the host of the virtual machines is the HP 2510p ultraportable laptop from HP. 1,2Ghz CPU (with VTx), 2GB RAM and a slow 100GB 4200 rpm 1,8" drive.
far from supported in the HCL for ESXi. the only other computer on my network that is always on (you cant count an apple tv, right?) is a mac mini G4 PPC with 512MB RAM hooked up to a TV.

the plan was to utilize a 1TB external USB-drive from iomega with built-in RAID0 as storage for the VM:s (no problems in hyper-v offcourse) on the 2510p.
but ESXi does not support USB and i have been hacking the oem.tgz, trying all kinds of stupid ways to get USB support and finally gave up.

now i have it working and want to share.

i now have two 1TB drives connected via usb to the mac mini and is running netbsd:s iSCSI package, sharing one of the 1TB drives as an iSCSI SAN.
the HP laptop is booting vmware ESXi from a usb-thumbdrive and is connected to the SAN.


here is how you do it:

1. install ESXi to a thumbdrive
2. iSCSI on OS X
   
   • download ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/distfiles/netbsd-iscsi-20080207.tar.gz on the mac. untar, export CFLAGS='-D_POSIX_C_SOURCE', configure, make.
   • create /etc/iscsi
   • copy etc/* to /etc/iscsi
   • edit /etc/iscsi/targets
     mine look like this:
     
   
   
   run ./iscsi-target you should get a output similar to this:
   
   
   
   
3. connect ESXi to you new SAN!
   
   • open the VI client and connect to your ESXi server
   • go to the configuration tab and click storage adapters
   • open properties for the iSCSI hba.
   • under the general tab, click configure and check enable.
     
   • under the dynamic discovery tab, click add and type in the IP for the iSCSI-host
   • confirm by clicking close.
   • click storage and verify that you have some newly connected storage to play with.
     
     
     
     
4. test!
   
   • create a virtual machine and see if it works. mine does!
     
     

note: i don't run XP. it is just a virtual machine to run the VI client in from my primary apple laptop.

no GPT in XP

note to self:
the next time i'm formatting a USB-disk for windows use on a mac, putting important data on it, travels and tries to use that disk in a windows xp machine: remember to use MBR instead of GPT/GUID.




had to download damn small linux to be able to get the files of the drive.

error 2229 when installing bootcamp on Windows 7 32bit

 

apple are sloppy when they create their windows installer packages. you have to use the English format to be able to install bootcamp in Windows 7. change back to your preferred language after the install and you are good to go again.

 

online network diagram creator

http://employees.org/~andin/network/

good stuff! and free!

test &ndash test

test

humor

putt print? e-mait?

remote server administration tools for windows 7

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82516c35-c7dc-4652-b2ea-2df99ea83dbb&displaylang=en

read this

How to Suck at Information Security

update to my appe aiport rambling

frid's comment in my blog regarding 802.1x in aiport extremes made me investigate the issue further.

i can't find this in apples documentation anywhere, but if you have the “Allow this network to be extended” checkbox checked, the options for WPA2-Enterprise disappear.








jiha! thanks frid!

at last...

itunes adds every song two times when you import albums

maybe i am the last person to understand why this happens.

when you drag in albums into itunes you sometimes get two copies of every song. very frustrating.


seems like this happens when the folders contains playlist files. if you want to drag the albums into itunes, remove .pls and .m3u files in the folder. if you just want to add one album, just drag the playlist file into itunes.

i have been walking around thinking that both Apple Airport Extreme and Apple Airport Express had support for WPA2-Enterprise and 802.11x. none of them have.

there goes my vacation-project :(.

how i use smart playlists in itunes

i have a large mp3 collection on a shared network disk and when i reinstall my computer i add albums and songs ad-hoc.
to just sync the songs i actually listen to with my ipod i create a smart playlist like this:


(match songs that have been played one time or more.)

local DoS in vista

open an elevated cmd prompt and add a route with a netmask larger than 32 bits:

route add 1.2.3.4/400 1.1.1.1


bsod!


more about the buffer overflow here.

get computer models from wsus

if you want to get data from wsus that the built in reporting tools doesn't support you can use the powerpack for powergui to get basically anything you want that is in wsus internal database.

1. download and install powergui
2. download and extract wsus powerpack
3. (you also have to have the wsus administration tools installed on your workstation.)

open up powergui and add the powerpack by rightclicking the top PowerGUI node and choose import. point to the location where you unpacked the wsus powerpack and click open.


now you can browse around the wsus-tree in powergui and do some really nice stuff. for example, list all the computer models in your network (click Computers > Get-ComputerTargets) and export them to a csv file.

tip of the day

this is a classic but sometimes i forget:

in windows vista press CTRL+ALT while you click on a program to open it in elevated mode.

boot camp 2.1 update: Error applying transforms.

this is was an irritating one.

boot camp 2.1 update fails because i am using a swedish version of windows vista.

to fix:

open up regedit and locate this key (the productkey kan vary):

change the Language REG_DWORD value to 409 hex.

HTPC

i have what we call a "i-landsproblem" in sweden, at home.

we got ourselves a nice big tv yesterday and now i want to retire the old mac mini G4 who served as GUI for the old, smaller tv.

what i want is an interface that looks good on a tv and is maneuverable with only a wireless mouse. all the files are served from two 1TB external iomega drives connected to a HP 2510p laptop, running windows 2008 enterprise edition.

the candidates are:

1. Mac mini G4 1.4Ghz with 512MB RAM
2. HP 6210s, 2Ghz Celeron with 1GB RAM
3. Asus EeePC 901, 1,6Ghz intel atom with 2GB RAM

i think i am going to start by testing xbmc under linux on the HP 6210s.

tempting...

after watching this (skip the first 20 minutes)
http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/KYN02/


this seems rather tempting:
Microsoft.Windows.7.64Bit.Build.6801.DVD-WinBeta
Microsoft.Windows.7.32Bit.Build.6801.DVD-WinBeta

windows command of the day

you can pipe stdout to the clipboard in windows.

example:
ipconfig /all | clip

google reader keyboard shortcuts

speaking to a unix-consultant at work yesterday, he told me that I had to use the old vi keyboard shortcuts to navigate in a console menusystem.
i told him that it was no problem and that i have owned oreilly's learning the vi editor for eight years.

but then i struck me.
i use the google reader shortcuts a lot and the shortcuts for "up" and "down" is the same as for vi!

"k" for up and "j" for down.

windows command of the day

this is a old one. but sometimes you scratch your head trying to remember this one:

subst:
Associates a path with a drive letter.

kind of an old shool symoblic link for windows.

lets say for example that you remove a computer from the domain for a retired user that has a lot of files linked to his old home directory. and you have copied over all the files from the network drive to a folder on the local harddrive. and you just want to get it over with and have some well deserved coffee.

use subst and walk away :).

i have plans of writing down som guides on how to deploy windows with MDT both to macs (bootcamp) and the asus eeepc. over wireless.

stay in tune.

in love with resource monitor in server 2008

sitting home on a friday night a bit drunk and monitoring the migration from our old mac-based fileserver at home to the new windows-based one. installing WSUS 3.0 SP1, Windows Deployment Toolkit and running robocopy. listening to old school electronic music and sipping on a beer.
at last some sunshine after a hard week at work.