Sorry for the vague title, but there are various thoughts floating around at the moment. The first is a big thanks to the support at Westhost for recovering my VPS over the last weekend. I had started an automatic upgrade of wordpress in one of the sites hosted in this vps, it hung… so I ssh’ed in and found the vps was essentially ruined – it managed to wipe out quite a bit. I’m not sure if it was a coincidence or if the wordpress upgrade was really the culprit, but it managed to destroy quite a bit. The support at westhost though had things back up within 24 hours. It wasn’t just a matter of the site and database getting deleted, but files in /etc were gone (mail configuration hostname resolution wasn’t working, scp wasn’t working…. it was trashed in a bad way.)

Anyway, I’ve still been tinkering with the free morse code mp3 ringtones. In particular I’ve been tinkering with the Text to morse code mp3 generator. I’ve been trying to add utf support. The backend generator does interpret morse for utf characters, I’ve managed to get a way to decode the url encoding if they’re placed in the text box, my big challange at the moment is the file name. I have to truncate the filename so that it’s not too long, but most everything I’ve tried to truncate counts bits instead of characters. Some, even if I tell it to count characters will assume that 1 character=1bit and I wind up with some of the utf characters cut short which gives unusual filename results. In the testing version of the script I’ve just decided to sanitize things by replacing an extended character with an x….

I may spend some time in the coming weeks here giving a peek behind the curtain at some of the scripts I’ve written for that site, or for some of those that I use myself to generate a morse code mp3 from an rss feed for instance. I’m a bit reluctant to get the code of the generator script out there though for concern that I haven’t dotted all the i’s so to speak.

I have noticed in the last few weeks that java updates on windows now clean up old versions of the java runtime. (At LAST.) Java traditionally left it’s old counterparts installed making you go through and manually remove the older version. Why remove the older version you ask? Well, the java runtime engine version can be specified by java code. The default is the most recent, but if someone wanted to do something mischievous, and take advantage of a vulnerability in an older release they could specify that release and if it was installed, then it doesn’t really matter that you’ve updated.

I did notice that it failed to remove something as old as, I think, update 5 of the latest version of the java runtime engine. (Current AFAIK is update 13.) So, it would be worth a check in your control panel/add remove programs to clean out the oldest ones and then in the future it should tidy up on it’s own. (THANK YOU SUN!)

I’ve got ideas for several fairly large pages here – collections of ideas in one place. For quite some time I was pretty fond of the blog post style of entries and for many things that makes sense, but…. there is also a place for collecting lot’s of information on a single topic on a single page so that you’re less likely to “lose anything…” Sometimes I feel like the blog posts are somewhat like a large and jumbled junk drawer and the pages are neat organized boxes with labels telling exactly what is inside.

I should also mention that this site will likely be on the move soon. My webhost provider is in the midst of transitioning away from their current vps model and it sounds as though things will be heading towards more of a shared hosting style setup. This (and many of my other sites) have become complex enough in their demands that I’m thinking I’ll be moving many to a Xen vps hosted environment. I’ve used the morse code ring tones site as a first experiment of my own hosting in that xen environment and among other things I’m blown away by the responsiveness. It will (hopefully) mean a performance boost if things work out right. I haven’t finalized plans yet, but I think that’s the direction I’ll be heading. It looks as though it’s going to be a cost increase for me though as much as 50% more for my overall hosting, so…. I’ll be looking for an overall improvement in speed/responsiveness if that’s the case to at least make it worth spending more.

It seems as though there are a few other notes I was going to write here, but at the moment I can’t recall what they would be….

I thought this writeup was interesting on the idea of using a web interface to customize a livecd. I’ve built a couple livecd’s (that I still use) for tech support, but I’m always thinking of one more tool that I’d like to have. After looking through their wizard it seems a bit limited in the granularity of what can be chosen (at least for what I’m thinking of.) But… it might introduce a new interest in the use of livecds.

I haven’t tried it yet, but there’s a “ready for primetime” open source x86 virtual machine program called virtualbox that’s just recently released version 1.5 It sounds pretty good. I’ve got a fair amount of disk images invested in vmware at the time so I don’t know if I would swap, but I want to look over the features and just see how it stacks up.

Along those lines… I saw someone mention seamless rdp with regards to virtualbox and had to have a look – basically you install seamless rdp on a windows xp or other remote access windows server, then you use rdesktop to connect to the machine specifying the path to the seamless rdp executable and you can get the single application window on your desktop instead of the full blown user interface. (Much like the way remote X applications work.) In fact you can redirect sound/etc and it works fairly well (although I’ve found programs that don’t work well with it too.) Here’s an example command line from the client…
rdesktop -A -s “c:\seamlessrdp\seamlessrdpshell.exe notepad” ipaddressofrdpserver

My server that I setup with mirrored hard drives has really been a fine machine, but I am missing one thing (optical drive.) This Lite-on SATA dvdrw might fit the bill ($32).

I thought I had already posted this, but I looked the other day and didn’t find the article, so I’m posting it now… if it’s a duplicate, sorry… I’m still using Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake 6.06(.1) as a base install for many things… the Long term support idea fo rthe server “stuff” is somewhat reassuring and I don’t want to be chasing minor revision upgrades every 6 months. But, there is another reason, a lot of the installs I’ve done have been a base for VMWare server and there are some very good (and clear) how-to’s in that arena….howtoforge has a good walkthrough that I’ve used as a starting point….

After all is setup and installed with the base operating system they recommend logging in and doing sudo su (to avoid having to sudo everything else…)

Then they suggest installing openssh-server (which in most of my setups has been a near necessity…)

Here are the other required packages…

libx11-6 libx11-dev libxtst6 xlibs-dev xinetd wget linux-headers-`uname -r` build-essential gcc binutils-doc cpp-doc make manpages-dev autoconf automake1.9 libtool flex bison gdb gcc-doc gcc-4.0-doc libc6-dev-amd64 lib64gcc1

After that they suggest creating /var/vm for your virtual machines – where you put them is really up to you….

and then download and run through the installers from vmware. That section is really fairly easy if you’ve already got the above packages setup. (build-essential and linux-headers-`uname -r` are especially nice to have installed (even in an ubuntu virtual machine guest for the purposes of building the vmware guest tools.))

There is a problem with the httpd.vmware startup script – the directory it looks for is missing on reboot, so you will want to edit /etc/init.d/httpd.vmware and add the following after start)

mkdir -p /var/run/vmware/httpd
chown www-data:www-data /var/run/vmware/httpd

as referenced in this pdf

This last week virtualbox announced that they have released a version of their virtualization software as open source. There is a pay version as well with more features. (*read on for features available in the full version.)

While I appreciate them making the core virtualization open source and currently they are likely the most advanced open source virtualization software out there… it is a bit disappointing to see some of the really juicy features in the non-open source version. However, it should be noted that the full version is free for personal use or evaluation.

They do note that some of these features may find their way to the open source version.

Virtual USB Controllers. VirtualBox implements a virtual USB controller and allows you to connect arbitrary USB devices to your virtual machines without having to install device specific drivers on the host.

(usb 2.0 support)
Remote Desktop Protocol. Unlike any other virtualization software, VirtualBox fully supports the standard Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). A virtual machine can act as an RDP server, allowing you to “run” the virtual machine remotely on some thin client that merely displays the RDP data.

USB over RDP. With this unique feature, a virtual machine that acts as an RDP server can still access arbitrary USB devices that are connected on the RDP client. This way, a powerful server machine can virtualize a lot of thin clients that merely need to display RDP data and have USB devices plugged in.

Shared folders. Like many other virtualization solutions, for easy data exchange between hosts and guests, VirtualBox allows for declaring certain host directories as “shared folders”, which can then be accessed from within virtual machines.

Also, an iscsi initiator is available in the closed source version. I haven’t yet had a chance to give a try out to either but, have made a LOT of use out of virtualization software lately. It’s really quite an exciting prospect to see the open sourcing of this which opens up full virtualization to those that have balked at the non-open nature of vmware or the closed source accelerator for qemu.

I ran into this some time back and found the solution a few months later and was reminded today to document it here…. The situation is this… Linux host for VMWare server, the guest machine has usb support and in vmware, you can go to VM, Removable devices and in spite of the fact you have usb devices on the system, nothing is listed as available to use in the VM. Well, it seems this is not an isolated problem. First you need to be sure the usb device is not in use by the host system. But, there’s something else that you need. VMWare uses usbfs to keep track of usb devices and a few distributions ( Ubuntu Linux 6.06 SUSE Linux 10.1, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10, Mandriva Linux 2006, SLES9 SP3 64 bit) don’t enable it by default. ( mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb ) should do the trick (as root) or you could set it in fstab usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0 (and now I’m thinking I may have already posted this once…. )

I haven’t been overwhelmed with VMware server’s web interface. You can start a virtual machine, or see statistics, but you can’t create virtual machines. Well, from the VMWare forums I did find a couple interesting “hidden” features. First, is a file manager at https://youriphere:8333/fm-properties and second is a GSX interface (which gives the ability to create a NEW virtual machine) at https://youriphere:8333/overview (the direct link to creating a new vm is https://yourip:8333/vmcfg-gsx )….

ah… the joys of *nix utilities…. I’ve just successfully tested a “capture” of a live, running system into a virtual disk image. No, I don’t mean that I booted up with an imaging utility. I took a live, booted and logged in system and imaged the primary hard drive that it was living on, into a file on another machine. (Yeah, I know, there are probably a few people reading this and saying they’ve done that and most people that would need to do this already know how…. sorry I missed the memo.) Not too long ago, VMWare released a tool to do something like this (that tool is for windows…) This should work on any platform that supports dd and netcat (although I’m not sure if piping output from one program to another works with a dos command shell – maybe cygwin would be a good environment to accomplish this with.) Anyway… here are the details.

I’m putting the finishing touches on a backup server and wanted to have vmware server installed and setup on it “just in case”, because with all the storage it could certainly host a virtualized mail server or something in a pinch. Well, my main concern was how to quickly and easily get an image file of a LIVE filesystem. I know I could boot up to ghost4linux or ghost4unix or something and image over a network, but that increases the downtime. Now, realistically if this were a live system you’d probably want to disable as many network services as possible first so that there wasn’t new information. This method will start at bit 0 of the drive and progress straight through. In other words, there’s no going back because something changed.

On the machine that will “receive” the image, here’s what you do…. sudo nc -l -p 9998 | dd of=testimage.img this starts netcat listening on port 9998 for data and anything it get’s will be written to testimage.img *(my first attempt at port 9999 gave the following:: Can’t grab 0.0.0.0:9999 with bind :: I suspect something else was already using port 9999.)

Ok, now on the system to be imaged… with netcat installed (and dd)… sudo dd if=/dev/hda | nc ipaddressofreceiversystem 9998 (in other words, we start up dd with the primary drive (drive to be imaged) as the input file and pipe it to netcat (telling netcat to connect to the address of our recipient system at the correct port (same as specified on the receiver.))

Now, for a 2GB test image this took, maybe 5 minutes, I didn’t time it, but it was not long. I found someone estimating about like this…. “Typically 36GB drive may take 50 minutes over 100Mbps link.” So, that might give you an idea of what kind of time to expect.

But, the file created here is not suitable for vmware to use… yet. If you have qemu-img (from the qemu emulator) you can convert it like this…. qemu-img convert testimage.img -O vmdk testimage.vmdk and then vmware can use it as an existing disk image. But if you don’t have qemu (it’s free/open source) you might download that, or try and see if vmware-vdiskmanager can convert to the vmdk from a raw image file. Scratch that, I’ve just found the vmware forums for accomplishing this and they look messy – get qemu and use qemu-img for this it will be much easier.

This incidents.org article the other day caught my eye. It talked of a utility calledliveview that could take a hard drive (or image of a drive) and make it into a virtual machine for use in vmware (saving all changes to a temporary file so the original structure of the disk/drive image is not touched.) It looks like you need to have Windows as your base platform, but it looks as though it would be a useful tool. Windows Incident Response possibly saw the same note on Incidents.org.

I’m most interested to see how well it does with the hardware environment. One of the headaches I’ve had in converting a windows disk image into a virtual machine is the headache of new hardware detected…..

Still, if you’re not touching the original image, it might be just a reboot or two until you’re ready to take a good like at the running system.

It looks as though VMWare is looking to test some of their software for the Mac. Unlike Parallels desktop, Vmware’s offering will be geared more towards a corporate environment.

I’ve been keeping an install of Vmware virtual Server through their beta and Release Candidate phase and have seen several places that they’ve released the 1.0 version today. This release is free (as in no charge.) Although support is available….

Support for VMware server runs $350 USD for a one-year subscription per two processors for Gold level, and $450 USD for Platinum level. Businesses can also purchase VMware VirtualCenter for $600 USD per two processors.

The ESX server from Vmware is their “next step up” and installs on bare metal (no OS required for the host.) It is NOT free though. From my brief experience with the VMWare server, I’m really impressed. I’ve used a number of open-source virtualizers and can see VMWare server with an advantage over them in many categories.

Also, of note, they do apparently use SOME open source components the source of which is available for download. It doesn’t look like much (scsi disk driver and ?pixops?), but it’s good to see them doing what they should and having it for download.

Anyway, good to see the final release. During the beta and release candidate phase there were serial numbers that were used to “expire” the free product to make sure you had the most current version available. I don’t know if they’ll just use the serial numbers now for the registration, but it is free and is not scheduled to expire.

You might be interested in some of my previous VMware related posts…. vmplayer VMX builder, ubuntu server 606 plus vmware server and other vmware server notes, vmware-server, VMPlayer on Mandriva 2006 finally. These give a summary of my experiences with both vmplayer and vmware server through the pre-release process. In some cases, I’ve done simple tests (boot iso time to boot) timing the virtual machine boot process.