2007: A year in review

I'm sorry, but this is going to be a second in a string of three posts that are totally for my own personal gratification, which will give me some sort of accountability. I guess if you don't like it you can sod off :P

At the start of the year I made this post outlining my goals for 2007. Luckily there's a "new" internet meme to describe my success in many of these goals.

Epic fail.

Increase my fitness

Never did join a gym, but I have increased my overall strength and muscle mass.. Not sure how well that equates to my fitness though.

Succeed in getting things done. Whether this is via the GTD methology or otherwise is irrelevant
Give back to the Apache HTTPD project
Make some significant in roads with the alternative live for speed server

Failure. I'm still getting a billion and one great ideas and then not finishing them. The introduction of Lightning to Thunderbird over the last 2 months has helped with this a lot though.

Finish producing the soon-to-be-open-sourced-web-based helpdesk software

I'm still working on it, although it's actually in use at my current employer.

Produce that bloodly Firefox GPG extension that I've been banging on about for the last few years

I got beaten to the punch by the FireGPG guys (failing that I used my supreme super powers to influence the FireGPG team to create this, in which case I'm counting it as a win).

Skin this blog

I did this twice, so I guess you can count it as a double win.

Take and pass LPIC-1 (at least)

Failure. I've still not taken the exams.

Enrol in a course at open.ac.uk

Failure, but only because of a change in perspective.

Spend more time with friends
Cherish more moments and not let as much get to me. Yes, I get it. I'm eeyore sometimes
Be tidier

I'm counting these as a win.

The interesting thing is how my perspective on things has changed over the year. I'm now not so hung up on a degree, or lack thereof, I've been to a number of interviews and got offered jobs which has boosted my confidence and shown me that I really am good at what I do and that despite the fact that users really fuck me off, I actually enjoy what I do.

Naturally there are always cock ups you don't expect over the year, but I hope I'm better at bouncing back from them now.

Converting a physical system to a Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 SP1 R2 virtual machine

Converting a physical machine to a virtual machine can be a bit of an arduous task under many virtualisation solutions, and the various Microsoft solutions are no exception. Microsoft have released the VS Migration Tool Kit, however this unfortunately requires ADS 1.0 to be deployed. In my instance this isn't suitable. However, what you should realise is that it's simply possible to make an image of the hard disk, restore it and then quickly wap Windows on top again, as the quickest hands-free fix to sort any BSOD or driver issues (if required).

Today I've done just that, using Clonezilla, an open source clone of Symantec / Norton Ghost based on Debian. I'm sorry Redhat-lovers, but I think the world is trying to tell you something when awesome tools are created from a Debian base ;) Now the obligatory distro bashing is out of the way, we can continue.

This is the first time I've used Clonezilla, and I've got to say that I'm very impressed. You can send and receive an image to and from a variety of filesystems, both network and local, and is capable of compressing the files quite nicely. If you're running a server you can also do some clever multi-cast magic for casting a number of machines simultaneously. Nice.

I won't bore you further with how awesome Clonezilla is, and I'll get to the nitty gritty. I saved and restored my image to and from an SMB (Windows) share, which you may find a bit tricky if you're not up together with the ins and outs of running Linux on MSVS2005SP1R2. I've written about this before, but rather than point you at a previous article, and tell you what to ignore, I've popped my steps together below. The reason for this is that all you need to do is get the networking up and running, as the "GUI" is simply an curses interface, and the clock issues shouldn't matter as you're doing this over a very short space of time.

  1. Burn the Clonezilla CD, boot it and make an image of your machine to your chosen SMB share. There are plenty of tutorials for this if you get stuck. I won't give you a step by step guide, I'm afraid.
  2. Create a virtual machine and set it to boot from the Clonezilla iso or CD. Turn it on.
  3. Select whatever boot option you need to, and once in to the GUI drop to a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+Fx, where Fx is an F key. F1 is the GUI, so I'd suggest F2).
  4. Login as root:sudo su
  5. Run:ifconfig -aYou should see eth0, unconfigured. If you don't then you need to modprobe tulip
  6. Edit the network interface (I'm using VIM, but replace with your favourite editor):vim /etc/network/interfacesand add the following at the bottom, to get it running on DHCPauto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcpSave and close.
  7. Restart the networking stack:/etc/init.d/networking restartCheck that you've got an IP assigned to eth0, by usingifconfig
  8. Flip back to the GUI, Ctrl+Alt+F1, and do the restore.
  9. See if you can boot, if not pop Windows back over the top, and you're good to go.

Thanks to mypapit gnu/linux blog, via PlanetSysadmin, for bringing this awesome tool to my attention.

Bah humbug

No doubt your RSS reader will be filling up with many of these, but I just want to wish everyone a very merry Christmas, and to congratulate Bjorn on the arrival of his new baby girl, Julia.

Win an ASUS eeePC with LUGRadio

That's right, the kind guys at EfficientPC, via LUGRadio, are giving the listeners an opportunity to win an ASUS eeePC..

In Pimp My LugRadio, the LugRadio Christmas competition, you can win an Asus EEE PC! Listen to the show to find out how! (54.34)

Listen to season 5, episode 7 for more details!

Be aware that LUGRadio is known for bad language and a very British sense of humour, so if either of these things offend you have been warned.

Keeping track of the new hotfixes for Microsoft software

Keeping track of the new hotfixes from Microsoft can be a bit of a pain in the arse. Just installing them blindly on a box from the update services, when they come around, is just a little too cavaliere although there are a number of various resources to help; various webpages, tools, etc.

However, Microsoft have just opened up a new hotfix 'blog here with the following schedule.

  • Every Monday, we post the list of published hot-fix related KB articles for Windows Client products in the past 7 days;
  • Every Tuesday, we post the list of published hot-fix related KB articles for Windows Server products in the past 7 days;
  • Every Wednesday, we post the list of published hot-fix related KB articles for Internet and Developer related products in the past 7 days;
  • Every Thursday, we post the list of published hot-fix related KB articles for Exchange Server products in the past 7 days;
  • Every Friday, we post the list of published hot-fix related KB articles for SQL Server products in the past 7 days;

You might find this a bit more palletable, if you're deep into a feed aggregation addiction.

Go on. Add it to the rest of your Microsoft security and update related feeds. I dare you.