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Ivan Versluis June 29th, 2008

Since two weeks I am becoming Ubuntu fan and I am missing some of my windows applications. Nero is one of those and thanks to Nero they ported their burning solution for Linux also. Download the trial from Nero.com website here.

Start a  new terminal session and run dpkg to install the Linux version of Nero Burning Rom.

Go to Applications / Sound & Video/ Nero Linux and start the burning solution.

Pretty straight forward; right? Think about when installing Nero on Windows ;). First we have this 100MB+ installation source and than install the complete suite of tools; with Linux installation I get what I want.

Continue Reading »

Tags: howto, install, linux, Nero, screenshots

• Nero , Ubuntu
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Ivan Versluis June 28th, 2008

After installing the latest updates and reboot the auto mount feature for Windows NTFS volumes and my USB disk drive failed. If you open File Browser and try to open one of your harddisks you may have same problem as I did.

Cannot mount volume. Error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied. Details A security policy in place prevents this sender from sending this message to this recipient, see message bus configuration file….

I reboot the machine couple times; tried to find a solution though google but no real work around for this problem. I found one specific bug published for adding additional host in hosts file https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/consolekit/+bug/242186, because /var/log/daemon.log was filling up with Jun 28 17:46:56 workstation1 console-kit-daemon[5892]: WARNING: Failed to acquire org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit events.

I got frustrated in getting my personal share online. The folder was sitting in one of my 500GB SATA disk. Right click and choosing mount volume did also fail. I opened a terminal and started to query my physical disks with:

Create new folder in /mnt/ named sda1 and manually mount the volume.

If you want to have the volumes automatically mount after each time you reboot than you need to add additional entries in /etc/fstab. The following lines were added in my fstab configuration. Make sure the folders are created in /mnt.

• Ubuntu
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Ivan Versluis June 28th, 2008

I am using the following CSS font-family setting for Networknet.nl font-family:”Lucida Grande”, “Lucida Sans Unicode”, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;. When opening Networknet.nl blog on a Linux machine Firefox displays my blog as show below; the fonts are not corresponding with my style sheet. Why ;)? My Ubuntu has no Lucida Grande fonts installed. Common Windows Fonts are not installed by default  on Linux and some can be installed afterwards. After installing the msttcorefonts package I was  still missing the Lucida Grande.

The msttcorefonts contain the following fonts:

• Andale Mono
• Arial Black
• Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Comic Sans MS (Bold)
• Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Impact
• Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
• Webdings

These can be installed with running sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts .

I found a good post how to get the Lucida Grande font but than I was forced to install wine and safari applications. If you own a Windows installation and than you can copy the fonts from your C:\Windows\Fonts directory and place them /usr/share/fonts/ttf and that’s what I did.

Don’t forget to get them configured. Run sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig. After restarting Firefox my blog was pretty much as on Windows.

Font is OK now, but still some things with spacing. Anyway this is how I quickly got my Windows fonts on Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 desktop machine.

Some links for Linux and Fonts

http://packages.debian.org/stable/x11/msttcorefonts

http://www.convexhull.com/mandrake_fonts.html

http://avi.alkalay.net/linux/docs/font-howto/Font.html

Tags: font, howto, linux, lucida

• Ubuntu
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Ivan Versluis June 25th, 2008

I am running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition 64bit edition and after I installed VMWare Workstation 6.04 Linux x64 edition I got the following error when trying to start my virtual machines sitting on a NTFS USB disk volume.

VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0)
Failed to allocate page for guest RAM!
A log file is available in “/media/USB_DATA/NET-DC-01/vmware.log”.  Please request support and include the contents of the log file.
To collect data to submit to VMware support, select Help > About and click “Collect Support Data”. You can also run the “vm-support” script in the Workstation folder directly.
We will respond on the basis of your support entitlement.

Please click OK and locate the vm file. Open the vmx file with nano or another text editor and add the setting below. Save the file and try to start the virtual machine again.

This setting doesn’t use named-file - use for VMs on USB-disks or other slow disks
Windows: useNamedFile= “FALSE” causes memory to be backed by the host’s swap space.
Linux: useNamedFile= “FALSE” causes a hidden file to be created in a temporary directory, which is immediately deleted when you power off the VM

Tags: 64bit, allocate, Error, failed, linux, page, Ubuntu, vcpu-o, VMWare, workstation

• VMWare , Workstation
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Ivan Versluis June 25th, 2008

This morning my Cacti appliance warned me by email that the windows root volume was getting above the 90% threshold. I configured this a while ago for getting notified in front.

When installing and configuring this Windows server I didn’t plan the configuration in the right way and my free space for C:\ volume is limited. If you install a fresh server again think about having one volume using the complete physical RAID disk space and not having one 18GB disk as I used now. My main problem is that server has 4GB of RAM and paging file is sitting on C:\.

I was not able to move the paging file nor could I  move the production virtual machine another volume. I went to C:\Windows and found a lot of blue directories which were used by the Automatic Updates. It used more than 500MB.

To safely remove Hotfix Backup files and the Add/Remove Programs Registry entries go to here and download the tool. Run the tool and remove all hotfixe backup files.

After you run the tool; go to c:\Windows and delete all blue marked directories. They all should start with $ sign.

Now we have on directory we need have closer look. Mine on this particular server grow to 600+ mb. Go to C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download and verify your size.

Stop the “Automatic Updates” service or run “net stop wuauserv” from cmd.

Delete all subfolders within C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download. Restart the “Automatic Updates”  service. You can safely remote these. The procedure can be executed on a Windows XP or a Windows Server 2003 system.

Tags: clean, delete, hotfixes, remove, Security, Windows

• Microsoft , Windows XP
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Ivan Versluis June 23rd, 2008

When I try to open the “Active Directly Sites and Services” MMC console I got the following error message.

Naming information cannot be located because: The clocks on the client and server machines are skewed. Contact your system administrator to verify that your domain is properly configured and is currently online.

My Hyper-V host is running in a workgroup and not being member of a AD DS domain. Therefore it is not syncing the time with a managed NTP time service. One of my remote domain controllers is running on this host and I am having issues to authenticate myself on the AD DS running as virtual machine. The best option in this case is to disable the time synchronization within the virtual machine options. Another option is to fix the host time, but if you are selling the Hyper-V as a service to customers than you won’t be member of their domain

Right click the virtual machine; choose settings within the Hyper-V management console. Go to Integration Services and uncheck “Time synchronization”. 

After the reboot the domain controller synced the time with the correct values.

• Hyper-V , Windows Active Directory
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Ivan Versluis June 12th, 2008

If you need to create 5 or more of Virtual Port groups on a vSwtich and you don’t want to use the VI client than logon on the service console and run the commands below.

For creating a new Virtual Port Group use:

Assigning a special VLAN to this a Virtual Port Group:

With these two simple commands I was able to push my sh script and create same “Networking” configuration on dozen of my ESX servers.

esxcfg-vswitch [options] [vswitch[:ports]]

  -a|–add              Add a new virtual switch.

  -d|–delete           Delete the virtual switch.

  -l|–list             List all the virtual switches.

  -L|–link=pnic        Set pnic as an uplink for the vswitch.

  -U|–unlink=pnic      Remove pnic from the uplinks for the vswitch.

  -M|–add-pg-uplink    Add an uplink to the list of uplinks for a portgroup

  -N|–del-pg-uplink    Delete an uplink from the list of uplinks for a portgroup

  -p|–pg=portgroup     Specify a portgroup for operation

                        Use ALL to set VLAN IDs on all portgroups

  -v|–vlan=id          Set vlan id for portgroup specified by -p

                        0 would disable the vlan

  -c|–check            Check to see if a virtual switch exists.

                        Program outputs a 1 if it exists, 0 otherwise.

  -A|–add-pg=name      Add a new portgroup to the virtual switch.

  -D|–del-pg=name      Delete the portgroup from the virtual switch.

  -C|–check-pg=name    Check to see if a portgroup exists.  Program

                        outputs a 1 if it exists, 0 otherwise.

  -B|–set-cdp          Set the CDP status for a given virtual switch.

                        To set pass one of “down”, “listen”, “advertise”, “both”.

  -b|–get-cdp          Print the current CDP setting for this switch.

  -m|–mtu=MTU          Set MTU for the vswitch.

  -r|–restore          Restore all virtual switches from the configuration file

                        (FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY).

  -h|–help             Show this message.

Tags: commandline, ESX, howto, Script, vlan

• ESX
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Ivan Versluis June 11th, 2008

You have a Windows File Server and you want to migrate the windows shares. What options do you have to complete this job? A) recreate them or B) migrate them from ServerA to ServerB. Sometimes option A is the only one you have but in most cases you want to keep those Windows Shares available as they were before and using some kind of script would be nice. Microsoft published a KB125996 article based on following procedures and my option B:

• Reinstall Windows over an existing installation (a clean install, not an upgrade).
• Move all of your data drives from one server to another.
• Install Windows to another folder or drive on a computer that already has Windows installed.

I am performing a clean installation of a application server which has several file shares associated for application functionality. I don’t want to recreate them manually and I am using the next steps to complete this task.

a) Verify the shares you want to migrate and the drive letter location is the same on both servers.

b) Export the Shares key from HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares

reg export HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares LanmanServer.reg

c) Make sure the user and group still exist in the domain! When migrating from DomainA to Domain B make sure you recreate all users and groups. Copy LanmanServer.reg to ServerB and import the registry file.

Reboot the file server and verify the share with “net share” command; also check the System Eventlog for any warnings or errors.

Tags: file, howto, lanmanserver, Migration, move, server, shares, Windows

• Migration
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Ivan Versluis June 8th, 2008

SQL Server 2008 delivers on Microsoft’s Data Platform vision by helping your organization manage any data, any place, any time. It enables you to store data from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured documents, such as images and music, directly within the database. SQL Server 2008 delivers a rich set of integrated services that enable you to do more with your data such as query, search, synchronize, report, and analyze. Your data can be stored and accessed in your largest servers within the data center all the way down to desktops and mobile devices, enabling you to have control over your data no matter where it is stored. SQL Server 2008 enables you to consume your data within custom applications developed using Microsoft .NET and Visual Studio and within your service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process through Microsoft BizTalk Server while information workers can access data directly in the tools they use every day, such as the 2007 Microsoft Office system. SQL Server 2008 delivers a trusted, productive, and intelligent data platform for all your data needs.

Before you evaluate and install Microsoft SQL Server 2008 on a Windows Server 2003 server please make sure the following requirements are available:

• Windows Server 2003 SP2
• Microsoft .Net framework 3.5
• Windows Installer 4.5 Redistributable

If you are ok with those than go and install the SQL server 2008. My installation took me 15 minutes and the performance was awesome within a Virtual Server 2005 R2 virtual machine. Check out my screencast with installation screenshots.

Tags: 2008, installation, machine, Screencast, server, sql, virtual

• SQL Server 2008
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Ivan Versluis June 4th, 2008

For weeks my local Infopath 2007 installation failed to open forms located on SPS server. See warning below.

InfoPath cannot open the following file: http://sharepoint/ChangeMgmt/Forms/abc.xml InfoPath cannot open the form. To fix the problem, contact your system administrator.
Form template: http://sharepoint/ChangeMgmt/Forms/solution.xsn. There is an error in the form’s cache. To correct the error, open the form again.

This was my solution is solving the problem. Before you start clean the Internet Explorer Cache!

For Windows Vista

• Locate C:\Users\%Username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\InfoPath\FormCache2 and delete complete folder. If this fails than rename the subfolders to something else like abc and try again. I got a warning and the action failed if I did not rename the folder.
• Run C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12>INFOPATH.EXE /cache clearall

For Windows 2000/XP

• Locate C:\Documents and Settings\%Username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\InfoPath\FormCache2 and delete the folder.
• C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12>INFOPATH.EXE /cache clearall

After these steps my Infopath forms opened again

Tags: 2007, cache, Error, form, howto, infopath, office, solution, warning

• Office 2007
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