Jacob's Insidious Ramblings

For 3.5 follow these instructions.
You must be at the console of the server for this.
Hold down ALT and push F1.
Just type in the word ‘unsupported’, without the quotations of course, and hit enter.
You may see a warning about it being unsupported.
type in the root password that was set up when ESXi was installed and hit enter.
You will be at the prompt.
Type vi /etc/inetd.conf and hit enter. This will bring up the configuration file.
Look for where is shows #ssh and remove the # by placing the cursor in front of it and hitting the ‘i’ key. Then hit the backspace key.
Hit ESC and then type in :wq then hit enter.
That saves it and drops you back to the prompt.
Run this command: /sbin/services.sh restart
That should restart the managment services and start up SSH but not cause any issues with any currently running VMs.
Use whatever ssh client software to try and connect to it.

For 3.5u2 and above including 4.0 follow these instructions.
You must be at the console of the server for this.
Hold down ALT and push F1.
Just type in the word ‘unsupported’, without the quotations of course, and hit enter.
You may see a warning about it being unsupported.
type in the root password that was set up when ESXi was installed and hit enter.
You will be at the prompt.
Type vi /etc/inetd.conf and hit enter. This will bring up the configuration file.
Look for where is shows #ssh and remove the # by placing the cursor in front of it and hitting the ‘i’ key. Then hit the backspace key.
Hit ESC and then type in :wq then hit enter.
That saves it and drops you back to the prompt.
Type ‘ps aux|grep inetd’ and hit enter.
Make a note of the PID(number) that shows up for inetd.
Type in ‘kill -HUP PIDNumber’ with of course the PIDNumber being that number you saw from the previous command. This will restart the inetd process but should not cause any issues with the currently running VMs.
Use whatever ssh client software to try and connect to it. It should work just fine now.

Note: For copying files it only supports SCP, not SFTP. That is because it uses Dropbear for the SSH server instead of OpenSSH.

Below is a site I used for help on this:
http://chall32.blogspot.com/2009/10/vmware-esxi-ssh-sftp-access.html

I was toying around with this for a way to automate a backup but do it over a secure connection. Here is the basic instructions that I have for at least setting up the key authentication. Also, WordPress mangles apostrophes so if you copy the commands from here and paste them into a shell it may put them as periods.
continue reading…

I am generally the type that only uses Google for searching. I have a Google email account, that I do not use, and have been playing with Wave a bit but never really wanted to branch out past that.

At home I tend to use Outlook for my calendar. It works great but is not easily transferable to other devices or easy to access remotely. A couple of days ago I decided to look at the Google calendar web application just for grins. I noticed it had a simple downloadable application that would connect with Outlook and do 1 way or 2 way sync between Outlook calendar and the Google one. After testing it out things seem to work great with it so far.

I also downloaded Sunbird since while I was reading on getting Outlook to sync with Google it said it would work with the Mozilla calendar software. I figured why not. So far I have had good initial success with it. Today I connected to it and everything showed up, but a good 10 minutes or so later, some of the events were gone. I was a little irritated about this but after checking the web based method of looking at the Google calendar I was relieved that the events were still there. Sunbird would just not show them for some reason. I closed Sunbird and reopened it. After it logged back in the events would show back up for a little while before disappearing again. It seems that Sunbird or Google needs to figure out what exactly is going on.

I think that at least the Outlook syncing portion will be very useful. Also, if I get a Droid it will work with the Google calendar so I will not have to directly sync my home Outlook with the phone when I one day can afford it.

Some months back I signed up for the event and have been waiting on it as they were promising they were giving out a copy of Windows 7 Professional to each attendee. The event was yesterday and I got there around 7:30a or so. The interesting part was that it took place in the AMC 24 Movie Theater in the area of Willowbrook. I signed up for the developers track as that was the only opening at the time.

To be honest, this was the first time I went and sat in a movie theater and did not watch a movie. I learned a decent amount about the changes from Windows 2008 Server to the R2 release and how things worked. While I am not a programmer at the moment it was nice to see how some of the things worked in the back end.

I have been to two other Microsoft events and this seemed to be more subdued than the one last year. I guess some of the reasons may be the economy and last year’s event had Windows 2008 as a new release and not just the R2 version. I did not stay the entire day but I did finish up the morning part.

One of the nice things was after the morning talks when we all were leaving where the speech had taken place, we got Windows 7 Ultimate. I was expecting Professional since it was stated on the signup website but was happy in any case.

If I get time I may give some detail on another entry of how everything went on my install of Windows 7.

Well, so far getting ESXi installed on my IBM was rather easy once I got a CD drive hooked up to install it on the server. I am thinking there was maybe a compatibility problem with the SATA controller and the Dell. It could have been a voltage incompatibility because it started having issues when it was originally hooked to the IBM and it was in a 64bit slot. I don’t think the 64bit was the issue but the voltage could have been it on the IBM. I plugged it into the IBM on the single 32bit PCI slot and plugged a 500GB drive into it, for VM storage. I had NO problems getting ESXi installed on the two SCSI drives acting as a mirror and then creating a datastore on the WD Enterprise 500GB drive. Since everything on the server is now development and testing work I am not too worried if the 500GB drive crashes. I will be irritated of course but that will be it. The IBM currently has 4GB of RAM in it so I may take the 2GB of RAM I pulled from the Dell to put in the IBM. The Dell only needs 4 even with all that it does. Anyway, hopefully I will continue to have decent luck with this new configuration on the IBM.

Original configuration
Originally I had a desktop computer running Windows 2003 Server as a DC. I ran it in ’2000-Mixed mode’ for Samba’s sake as I was told it was important to do so. I eventually used the VMware Converter to make the DC a VM to run on my IBM as a guest. Samba ran underneath it authenticating off of the guest DC. That was not the most ideal solution but it worked mostly well. Due to some recent drive troubles on the IBM I had to come up with another solution. It was the SATA drives, not the SCSI, starting to have problems.

Dell Server status at the time
I was trying to get everything working on the Dell as a VMware ESXi Server. Most of the things were working right but a storage solution for the data was not coming up properly due to the limited driver support of SATA controllers and of course my budget. I still needed to have a workable solution so I could try to keep my data safe.

New configuration for the Dell
Finally I got tired of the whole BS since, at the same time, I was trying to make sure my backups were good that I had pulled often enough from the IBM. I backed up the VMs and then installed Windows 2008.

Once I had it installed and updated I tried the SATA controllers that I had and had to use the Vista drivers as I could not find official 2008 drivers. When the controller would get saturated it would cause a weird memory error and that would make Windows do a blue screen. As soon as I removed the controller everything else worked fine.

Once I got the machine updated and removed the offending hardware things started to calm down. I attached it to my domain and then created the shares and all that. I copied the data to the server in the specific shares and altered my VB login script to point to the new server. Once I made sure things worked properly it was then time to make it a DC.

As I said earlier, it was running in ’2000 Mixed mode’ so there was more work to do. I changed it to native and let things calm down. I then updated it to 2003 on both the forest and domain. Once I did that I ran the deploy script, from the 2008 Server DVD, on the schema master and that updated the schema. It took a good ten minutes or so since it was running as a guest and not doing too well due to the hard drive problems. Once it was updated I set the 2008 machine up as a DC. Once I made sure any possible errors were ironed out I then removed the old DC after a day of running. Once the old DC was removed I made sure no errors were popping up and then changed the Forest and Domain to 2008 mode.

After ironing out any lingering issues on the DC I went ahead and installed VMware 2.x Server and put two of my backed up VMs on the server. Once is a Linux Shell server with 512M of RAM. The other is a Windows XP Professional SP3 running 512M of RAM. They both seem to run fine as guests on the server and do not load it up too much.

It seems that I will be moving my VMware related VMs and all that to my IBM once I have things migrated to my Dell. I wanted ESXi to work on the Dell properly but the limits of SATA driver support and the underlying PITA it is to dig up logs to find out what exactly is happening has become more irritating than I am willing to deal with in a home environment.

I plan to back up the VMs and other data of course before I start. I will then make the Host OS Windows 2008 and maybe run a guest using the plain ol VMware Server 2.x to get a Linux shell server going. I would actually give Hyper-V a try but it requires a 64-bit processor and none of my server hardware has that. I know most, if not all, of my hardware should work with Windows.

I know some may think, why not try Linux. My IBM is currently running Linux as the host with VMware 1.09 on top of that with Windows 2003 as a guest for DC related things. Linux also runs as the file server using Samba authenticating off of the guest.

Overall using ESXi is not really a major problem if all your hardware is supported and you have the right license but of course I am using the free license and the server is no longer officially supported by VMware but still works. Once I am done, I will try to install ESXi on my IBM as it has almost identical hardware for the most part. The drives on the IBM are big enough for ESXi and the like but not big enough for any VMs so I will be trying to use an IDE drive or something like that to provide the non-fault tolerant space for the development and testbed VMs.

I think I have finally made some headway on my ESXi experiment. I have all the VMs and ESXi running on my RAID5 array. It all works great and the speed is not too bad but there is not enough space for data storage. I figured I could put a couple of 500GB drives and do a mirror. I had two possible options once I got ESXi seeing the SATA drives. One, partition them and make a huge virtual disk on each of the VMFS formatted disk. Then mirror using Windows 2008 for basic data redundancy. The other option was to set the drives up for ‘Raw Device Mapping’ (RDM) access. That involves mapping each drive to a placeholder VM disk. Then, all you do is add them to the VM you want to use them for. I am doing some major testing right now to make sure the controller and ESXi do not have any issues. The controller I am using has a SiI 3512 chip on it. It only supports SATA1 but for a file server you do not need as much on speed as you need it for reliability. Anyway, the two drives I am using for the RAID1(mirror) array are Western Digital Enterprise SATA2 drives.

To get the RDM thing going you first have to get to the local console. Hold down the ‘Alt’ key and push ‘F1′. It will show you what looks like a linux type command line interface. Once you have done that type in ‘unsupported’, without the quotations of course, and hit enter. Then it will ask for the password. Put in your root password and hit enter. It will drop you to the command line. It runs a mini-distribution of Linux called Busybox. When you are at the command line you need to run this command:

esxcfg-vmhbadevs

It will show you the list of physical drives names and what LUN ID they have. You need the physical ID, which is really long usually. Once you have that run this command.

cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore1

If you named your datastore something else then put that name in place. I would then create a directory in there and call it something meaningful as it will help keep the datastore structurally clean. Below is the command I ran, minus the really long number as I did not feel like typing the entire thing out.

vmkfstools -r /vmfs/devices/disks/vml.longnumberhere whateveryouwanttocallthedrive.vmdk

At that point you just need to go to the Remote Administration interface and then bring up the VM configuration and add the drive like you would when you wanted to add an existing virtual disk. Pay no mind to what size it says it is. The OS that you are binding the drive(s) to should know the correct size.

The other day at work I needed to upgrade the functional level of the AD Forest from Windows 2000 to 2003 R2. I was going to add another server and make it the main AD server. It is running 2003 R2 but the rest in the domain controllers are running 2003 RTM with service pack 2 of course. Anyway, from what I remembered, upgrading the level would not be a rebootable procedure but I could not find absolute proof even on Microsoft’s technet site. I proceeded to do every check in the book that I could to make sure that AD was working great. Everything checked out and so I went and upgraded it to plain ol’ 2003 first. On a side note, the domain level was already 2003. After that I had to use the second CD that came with 2003 R2 and run the ‘adprep /forestprep’ on the schema master. It made me a little nervous but it worked fine and still no reboots were required which I was thankful for and expected but with Microsoft you don’t always know. Just make sure you run the adprep command from the Schema Master. That part is important to the success of the upgrade. After that I was able to install AD on the new server. With Windows 2003 R2 the adprep command is located on the second CD in the path of ‘CMPNENTS\R2\ADPREP’.

I have been off and on playing with VMware’s ESXi Server 3.5 u4 on my Dell Poweredge 2600 that is spec’ed similar to my IBM Server but has 6GB of RAM instead of 3GB. So far I have 4 VM’s running on it and it seems like a sweet spot for me as far as speed and responsiveness goes. I have a Development ‘box’ running Windows 2003 Server Standard w/ SQL Server 2005 and is given 2GB of RAM to play with. I also have a Windows 2008 ‘box’ that I gave 2GB of RAM to as I plan to make it my DC one day when it is slated to take over as my main Server and I also want it to one day do the TS Gateway thing. I have a third VM running Ubuntu JeOS Linux 9.04 and I gave it 512M of RAM. It will become my Shell server for now. As my last VM I have Windows XP Professional SP3 with 512M of RAM going as a ‘desktop’ machine of sorts. It is mainly for if my workstation is offline and I need to remote in and access workstation related things, it will be up for that as long as the server is on. The only thing I am working on still is the storage solution for my data. I am getting a couple of refurbished 500GB drives from Western Digital when they come back from repair and plan to do a software RAID1. I may be getting another 1 or 2 bad 500GB drives that are still under warranty to return and get replacements that will end up being my spares for when a drive fails. I already have some spare SCSI drives for the main array. Once I get those drives I will have to spend a fun Saturday configuring everything. Once I get the system mostly completed I will have to test it for a few weeks before making it live. Yes, I do this kind of thing for home use. I don’t like having the system fail on me right out of the gate. It will be nice to have one big system doing the job of 4 machines.

It looks like I just needed a good nights sleep to get it working properly. It definitely was a character building moment though. I will put it in my “Book of Crazy Info” so I can get it working later in case my mind does not hold onto the solution.

Today at work one of the things I was trying to do was figure out how to enable SSL on Apache Tomcat 6. I am still working on that as the things I have tried so far have not worked. Good thing I am trying this on a test machine but it is irritating me. Good thing I do not give up easily. Hopefully I will have some better news after tomorrow. Anyway, time to hit the hay so my mind will be fresh.

There are a few possible changes coming down the pipe. I want to move my data storage from my IBM server to my Dell server. The problem that I come up with is trying to store the SATA drives in the case of the Dell. On my IBM I have three 5.25″ drive bays and so I put one of those internal SATA drive bay enclosures that hold 4 drives in the space of three CD Drives. Well, it has been working fine but when I got the Dell I noticed I only have two 5.25″ bays to work with and so I was thinking that I could either find another enclosure that fits in the two bays and holds 3 drives or have the SATA drives in an external case of some sort. Well, The fastest way I was thinking was purchasing a case that would hold the drives and provide 4 or so esata ports on the back and I could get things working proper. The issue I have with it is that it costs some good money to get a case like that and that is money I do not have. Another way was to get an old case, rig the power supply to always come on when power is provided, and then just house the drives in there and still do the eSATA method. The third was to throw iSCSI at it. I have played with it once before and while it worked I was not terribly impressed with it. The reason was that there are more points of failure that I do not have money to fix. Instead of just the links between the units as with eSATA I have another OS(iSCSI host) to take care of which is something I don’t want. Along with that is a even more hardware that puts out a lot of heat. Anyway, I am still thinking hard about this fun stuff.

Well, this is an interesting thing, I decided to learn how to program. I figure I will start learning how to program C# first and maybe one day learn another language like PHP. I have already got most of a test environment set up on my other server. It is running VMware ESXi Server 3.5 u4 since the processors are only 32bit and version 4.0 only supports 64bit. Anyway, I am trying to get a Sharepoint VM setup and I have ‘Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Standard’ installed on my workstation. I got it when I went to a Microsoft event back in 2008. I am also having to read a book on ASP.Net 2.0 programming in C# so I can wrap my head around it. Hopefully this will not make my brain hurt too much.

I have been using Windows 7 RC1 for a little while on my laptop, as it’s only OS, and for the most part I think it is ready. There were a few issues I noticed but hopefully they got them ironed out before they put the code to RTM(Release to Manufacturing). Honestly, if you held off getting Vista but want to upgrade one day, wait until 7 comes out. It does take care of some of the nagging issues of Vista and overall seems faster. If I can afford to drop the coin necessary to get it, I will soon after it is released.

Normally I am fine with Exchange, being the resource hog it is, but I was having to uninstall the damn thing the other day and it was being a huge pain. Let me set the stage, I had an Exchange 2007 server running as a VM and I had another one that was running full on the hardware of another server. I wanted to keep the latter one and remove the former. The problem was, I had to remove all replicas and everything else before uninstalling. I got everything removed except something that was replicating in the Public Folders database. I never could get it to replicate fully. For months off and on I was looking for answers that would not leave me hacking away at the low level parts of Active Directory. I finally found instructions that made some sense. Move the replicas. Well, I ran the script from the ‘Exchange Management Shell’ and it finished. I checked the status with another command and it showed it was not working still. There was nothing important in the database so I read that you could delete the database when it was not mounted and then when you remount the database it would recreate the public folders from scratch. I figured it was worth a shot. After it recreated the database I did the move replicas again and that seemed to move them. It did take a little bit before it was done. After that I deleted the public folders database and I was able to uninstall Exchange and remove that VM from the domain. Normally I do not get very upset at the little odd Microsoft quirks but man, that really did irritate me a lot.

Not too long ago I went to a Microsoft Event to learn more about Windows 2008 and of course get a copy of it so I will be able to set it up and learn about it even more than I already knew. The reason I said ‘already knew’ is because not too long before I came to the event I was able to work on Windows 2008 Standard up at work. I got it running on a new server and it will be our Terminal Server.

It has a few new features that I find very useful. One is the TS Gateway. It allows you to use the Remote Desktop Connection to burrow through a TS from the Internet using only port 443(https) and either connect to the TS itself or to other servers(and workstations). Of course you can lock it down and it actually works rather well. It works the same way that Outlook 2003 and 2007 fully connect to an Exchange 2003 or 2007 server safely over the Internet. It uses what is called RPC over HTTP(s). Let me just say that the TS Gateway makes things easier on the remote connection front. No need to mess with VPN bs or anything like that. Of course you would want to always make sure the TS Gateway is up to date. The TS Gateway requires at least RDC version 6.0. Windows XP SP2 with the RDC update or Vista come with it. Part of the settings are under the advanced tab on the configuration portion of RDC.

Anyway, another neat trick is something they seemed to have swiped(at least the idea) from Citrix. You can have a Web page, authenticated and encrypted of course, set up to share programs. This works well and allows you to run the program from the TS like it is running on your workstation. It even natively supports Dual Monitors. It is actually called RemoteApp. It is a bit more limited than it’s Citrix counterpart but it works just fine for regular usage. It does not support sharing applications per user. When you share an application, all users that are allowed to bring up the RemoteApp can run those apps. One glaring irritation is that the RDC version required is 6.1(partially due to the ActiveX plugin that comes with that version only). It currently is not being released as a separate product or update. It is part of Vista SP1 or XP SP3. SP1 for Vista has been released and seems to work well but XP3 has not been released but is scheduled to this month. We will see how well XP SP3 works…

It looks like it has been a while yet again since my last post. I am still doing great at Glacial Energy and keep finding more to tinker with. My son is doing well, it is nice to be a Father. When I am not working or trying to spend time with my family I try to sleep a little. I have not had time for any real side projects in a little while. I plan to make some time for some, in other words… less sleep. Nice thing is, I usually can go a while on little sleep before I crash and burn. Up at work I have been playing with DRAC cards on the Dell servers. I have seen them before and know of the Compaq/HP version of it but never got to install and configure one before. Anyway, time to end this post… later.

I know it has been way too long since I have graced the Interweb with my presence. A lot has been happening these past few months that my blog lay slient. I will start with my Son of course. He has been doing great, he is a very good natured baby so far. He smiles a lot and will laugh often enough. He is eating solid-ish food along with his soy formula.

On the job front, at the end of July I took a new job at a company called Glacial Energy. It is not a bad place to work and the responsibilities have increased compared to the job with Wells Fargo. I enjoy the responsibility so that is always good. It is also more along the lines of what I like to work on and do. I manage the network, the servers, and the workstations. Of course I also do the helpdesk part of the job, which is not bad. It does help that most of the people that I talk to are of a nice sort so it makes the troubleshooting a rather calm affair. I am slowly trying to improve the way things are done and optimize my job as to make things easier on everyone.

Now, on to some of my hobbies. I have of course ‘mastercontrol’ as the AD server here at home with ‘zoidberg’ running a RAID 1 setup using two 230GB drives. I have a third sitting around just in case one fails. Unfortunately ‘zoidberg’ currently seems to have a problem when it comes to uptime; which I may have found the solution to it. As usual my mind seems to revolve around the computer and related topics and so most other hobbies tend to take a back seat. I do want to work more on my chess playing and get back into trying to learn the guitar. I have some natural talent with chess but no music talent at all so the latter will be a bit harder to do.

I got a bicycle from my niece Jessica and her husband. I have kept finding excuses to not fill up the tires with air so I can exercise more. I need to start because when I look at my Son I do sometimes think of what would happen when I depart from this rather buoyant body I am attached to. If it were to happen before he is grown then that would of course not be a good thing.

As you can see I have done a bit and have been mulling over a lot of things recently. I know I ought to update this blog more but time is not a luxury that I seem to have a lot of.

I had the chipset fan on my motherboard go out a few weeks ago which started to cause rebooting issues every few days on my main desktop. I found a replacement the day before Thanksgiving. It is a huge heatsink without a fan which seems to be doing the job. I think that the job was done to Windows before I got a chance to fix the problem. Before, the reboots were so sudden Windows could not do a BSOD and now Windows seemed to be doing BSOD’s on me. After debugging the dump file it looked like it was the network driver(I hope). So far things seem to be stable after updating all the chipset drivers and network drivers. While I was at it I went ahead and updated my video drivers. I will be hoping that things are stable this coming week. If not then I may have to reinstall Windows. If that does not fix it then I think my MB may be crap and I will have to rip hardware from my secondary workstation. That is something I really do not want to do. Anyway, later…