Having trouble booting this version of the network installer for Debian under Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1? Supply it with the following kernel options at the “Press F1 to install” screen: 8042.noloop clock=pit If you want to know why this works then carry on reading.. Still here? This is probably quite boring, so I don't blame you if you give up half way through! Generally an OS gets the current time from the CMOS during startup, and then sets up a timer to generate periodic interrupts.

I thought I should round this set of blog entries off, as it'll clear up some discussion I've had on various forums about this job prospect. About 2 weeks ago I got the results from my interviews with Blizzard. I received several phone calls from them whilst I was out and about for my current employer. Eventually I got an email from my contact asking what number was best to get me on and I responded, apologising and detailing my details.

Why is csccmd 1.1stillnot publically available for download (yes, it is massively different from version 1.0)? I first required this excellent facility a little over 2 years ago now - having used it multiple times to extract files from the CSC since, without having any problems, I can only assume its because its been forgotten. This is a bit of a shame, especially given the amount of trouble I had to get that file officially then, apparently it's even worse now - unless you have no qualms with “other” resources.

A few days ago ‘Centro’ got renamed to the Essential Business Server (EBS). This seems like a bit of a cock up, to say the least. Maybe I should step back. Not many people are familiar with Centro. I mean EBS. Once upon a time (way back in 1997) there was BackOffice Small Business Server, a product developed by Microsoft for the small business, bundling many of the commonly used features into a nice little product.

At work we use Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 a fair bit. In some circumstances, particularly when running a Windows guest, the virtual hard disks can grow exceedingly quickly. Thankfully, there is a provided set of tools to help with this problem. A precompactor and a compactor. You run the precompactor to zero out the free diskspace, you then pause or shutdown the virtual machine and run the compactor. This is all well and good, unless the virtual machines are running in a production environment and you need to do this at 2am in the morning.

Those of you interested in Live For Speed, and fancy a blast from the old* days, or want to see what pre-S2 was like, might be interested in checking out this threadon the official forums. I've simply patched the executables to look at the new master address, ensuring the executable size remained the same and with a little bit of luck discovered that the master server is still serving requests from older clients to unlock.

Regardless of who you are, or what you do, you're a member of some sort of community. Most people invest time, money and more, often to simply give back. As a result of this some members come to expect a certain level of mutual respect from their peers and possibly even the creators / developers of said project. When this respect is broken it can often lead to ill feeling within the community.

Some of you may be aware that I “maintain” a how to guide for the Live For Speed community, briefly detailing how to run a dedicated server. Within this guide is a section on running it on a Linux based system, under Wine. As good as this guide is (obviously - as I wrote it :P), there are a few issues that I feel need to be addressed, predominately; Most distro's packages of Wine have X.

For the last few years I've had a computer running 24/7, under the desk in my room, serving the various domains and services under my control. As of a few nights ago ‘ezra’, as it was known in it's last incarnation of hardware, was turned off. Overall it felt like quite a sad occasion as the mini-itx box had served me well, and saved my bacon in a number of situations.