Sharepoint/RTM Demo VHD on Vmware Workstation 7.

At last I got the "2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine (RTM)" working on my vmware workstation 7. Thanks to this Vmware Community post and this link on sanbarrow.com

Here is the procedure that I used.

• Convert the VHD image to VMDK (SCSI Disk) using Starwind V2V converter. It took quite amount of time to convert the disk. 
• Created a new virtual machine with following settings.
• Custom (advanced) installation.
• Hardware Compatibility : Workstation 6.5-7.x
• Guest Operating System Selection : I will install operating system later
• Guest Operating System : Microsoft Windows , Version : Windows Server 2008 x64
• Virtual machine name : Windows Server 2008 x64, Location : c:\users\......
• Number of processors and cores : 1
• Memory : 1 GB
• Network Type : NAT
• SCSI Controller : LSI Logic SAS
• Disk : Use an existing virtual disk
• Existing Disk File : (select the VMDK file generated using Starwind V2V converter)
• Click Next and Click Finish.

• Boot the system normally. You will mostly end up with Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD). The system will automatically restart and during start up it will offer you to "Launch Startup Repair". Select it and the system will ask you to select the language and then to enter the administrator password. The default password is 'pass@word1'. Once you enter it you will be provided with a small window with different options. Select the "Command Prompt" option.

• A CMD window will open with X:\.... prompt. Type the command "regedit" and press enter, it will provide you with the regular registry editor window.

• From the list select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE a.k.a HKLM and then from the menu select File > Load Hive. Browse to C:\ (or which ever you virtual disk) windows\system32\config and select SYSTEM. It will ask for a name for the new loaded hive, name it p2v.

• Now find the key 

HKLM\p2v\ControlSet001\services\LSI_SAS

and set the Start REG_DWORD to 0 (it was 3 for me, for some people it was 4). Now select HLKM\p2v and from menu select File > Upload Hive. Select "yes" when asked for confirmation. Close the regedit and restart the VM.

If every thing is ok, you should get the windows 2008 server running by now.

gitosis-admin cloning issue.

I was having problem while trying to clone the gitosis-admin repository from the server. Every thing was setup as per the instructions, but it will never get cloned on to my windows client "GIT extensions". It was exiting with an "Access Denied" message. To my surprise it was working perfectly on my Linux and other machines. 

After some head banging, I found that the host name that I was using to connect the repository was already saved as a profile in my putty and was having a different private key assigned to it than the one I should use for gitosis. So I renamed the profile and guess what, it worked like a charm !!!. 

pfSense custom install.

Just finished building a development environment for customizing pfSense. First ISO is done, installed the image on a virtual machine and was successful. Still have some problems with the default configuration and some other issues. 

USB HDD not detected on windows 7 64bit Home Premium.

Phew .... At last my new USB pendrive and 1 TB USB HDD started working at last. Windows was complaining about "Driver not found" whenever I connected the disk to my laptop - no matter what I do - tried auto detecting, tried troubleshooting tool of windows, tried manual install using "Browse for driver software on your computer" as per the instruction of Seagate, but non worked. 

At last I saw a post regarding Vista on Windows Forum, - http://bit.ly/lcqGca - The answer from GearFyre helped me at-last. Below is the quote from his post.

I found the USB device that was in error and right clicked it to get "update driver".
I chose to find the driver myself and had to browse to the c:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\usbstor.inf_xxxxxxxx directory before it would locate anything.

 Although I gave "c:\windows" when I tried installing the driver manually, windows didn't find the driver. But when I gave the full path to the "usbstor" as directed by GearFyre, it detected everything and installed the driver properly.

Small script to backup IBM Informix raw data from SCO Unix to an FTP server

Yesterday I got access to a broken SCO Unix Server, having IBM Informix database. The database had lots of data on raw disks. Luckily I got the server to boot to single user mode, from there I got access to the locations of files using 'divvy' command.

Auto login to FTP server setup using .netrc in the home directory of user "root"

# sh
# cat > /.netrc <<EOF
machine 192.168.20.100
user ftpuser
pass ftppassword
EOF

Start the backup, first taking the list of files and then looping through the list and while doing the backup using dd. The backed-up file is ultimately moved to an FTP server

# mount /backup
# cd /backup
# find / -name \*data\* -user informix > /tmp/files
# for i in `cat /tmp/files` ; do
>  dd if=/dev/$i of=/backup/$i > /tmp/ddlog
>  echo "bin\nput $i\nquit"|ftp 192.168.20.100
>  rm /backup/$i
> done