jzedward's blog

iTunes Sync Server to Mac

jzedward — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 10:44:14 +0000

Holidays are a good day to catch up on things you’ve been meaning to do fopr ages. I have all of my music on my Home Server (WHS), but iTunes is dog slow if I try to access the 100Gb of files directly and update anything. So I keep a copy of my music on my MacBook locally (it’s nice to have a backup too, even though it’s mirrored on WHS).

I decided to try out a folder sync app, Sykron, which is cross platform. In summary, it works very nicely and I’d recommend it, my WHS and Mac folders are now in sync, and I’ll probably set it up to automatically sync too, so that any music added to the server gets added to the Mac too, and any artwork/genre etc updates will get sync’d back to WHS.

However, to automatically add music to iTunes when it gets sync’d? For this, go to Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes and add the folder update

Next problem, how to deal with moves and renames so they don’t duplicate…

ISA Server 2006 Web Reverse Proxy – challenges

jzedward — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 12:12:51 +0000

I’ve been having a difficult time trying to set up my virtual machines to be accessible from the interweb. Although I have 5 IP addresses, I’d like to set up my sites as www.domain.com/sharepoint, www.domain.com/crm etc rather than sharepoint.domain.com, crm.domain.com.

I looked at Microsoft TMG (Threat Management Gateway) and balked at the complexity, as I remembered ISA Server being quite simple (wrong…). After an abortive attempt with ISA, I tried Squid, but although I could get the s.domain.com and c.domain.com I couldn’t get paths working

Today, I went back to ISA. I set up the site and rules fine, but kept getting an authetication error “isa server is configured to block http requests that require authentication”. It turns out the problem is that I don’t have a security certificate assigned. After some hunting, there is a Microsoft KB to fix it at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924374

I still couldn’t get to my sites from the LAN (192.168.x.x) though; in this case, I had assigned 192.168.0.0-192.168.255.255 as the internal network range. However, this doesn’t define a default route for internal-internal, only internal-external. Simply selecting both the external and internal adaptors as valid adapters for the internal network fixed this.

Finally, I couldn’t get to my site from the outside world (tested on my iPad over 3G). It turns out that my BT external IP addresses were not showing up on the device list on the BT HGV2700 hub, so there was no external route to them. I had to enable DHCP on my external adaptor, and then assign the external IP to the device on the BT router.

Bob Diamond Upset at Missing Forbes Billionaire List

jzedward — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 10:00:53 +0000

Bob Diamond ‘expects to achieve billionaire status within two years’. Following the publication of the Forbes billionaire list, Mr Diamond, Barclays CEO said ‘I think my non-appearance in the billionaires list will silence the critics who think that £24m is an excessive bonus payment. I’m certain that Barclays shareholders and remuneration committee will recognise that being a billionaire is a reasonable expectation for taking on such a demanding role, and in line with compensation for similarly qualified roles. I look forward to a bonus in excess of £250m next year to ensure that I can sustain my commitment to the company.’ Sources close to Diamond say he is ‘gutted’ to miss out on the billionaires list and that morale in the exec team is so low that they are all having a duvet day.

Multi-Platform Video – is m4v the answer?

jzedward — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 09:45:24 +0000

I’ve been working with home media for a very long time, and have a range of recording and playback devices, and settling on a common format to playback on all my devices has been a bugbear.

My recent conclusion has been that H264 mp4 (m4v on Apple) is the best compromise, as it plays nice with iPhone, iPad, PS3, Xbox360 and Media Center. Setting a default for iPad playback (704×576) is also a reasonable compromise of size and quality.

My primary recorded is a Windows7 Media Center machine with 2 x USB and 2 network tuners (HD HomeRun), which records wtv format (a bloated version of MPEG-2), and is automatically set up to compress to wmv and copy Recorded TV to my HP Windows Home Server.

To convert to m4v I have tried many apps, but settled on Handbrake because it

is cross platform, Windows, Mac and Linux
has a wide range of output presets
is free

The first trick is that Handbrake doesn’t accept wtv files, but Windows7 can convert the wtv to dvr-ms (the original media center format) with a right click, which Handbrake *does* accept.

Then drag the file into Handbrake, select the preset (iPad) and go. It’s not as quick as I’d like, I get around 40-50fps on my quad core 4Gb machine, with CPU at 97%, which means a file takes around 1/2 of its running time

I’d like to find out how to batch convert to dvr-ms and run Handbrake, but that’s for next time

Factime Mac and iPhone 4

jzedward — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 12:45:41 +0000

Trying out Facetime on the Mac and foud it pretty frustrating. Start up, where are my contacts? How do I add a contact? Turns out that it only uses the educationally subnormal app that is Address Book, so add some contacts (and set up MobileMe sync) and try again. Nope, can’t connect to an account. Turns out that the iPhone needs to be at iOS 4.1 to support email address calling. So far, so rubbish.

VMware crazy…

jzedward — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 16:31:39 +0000

Having been a committed Hyper-V & VirtualPC user, I have crossed the rubicon to go back to my VMware roots over the last week. I’ve been building a SharePoint Server 2010 farm (domain controller, SQL, SharePoint app server and 2 x web front end servers) and started on VMware Server, but now have an ESXi 4.1 server running (10GB memory, Q6600 quad core processor) and am very happy with performance and management tools, without the overhead of Server 2008. I could have installed the Hyper-V server, but my client’s commitment to VMware and the demands of the market encouraged me to get up and running with ESXi.

I also pushed the boat out to buy a copy of VMware Workstation, to save the need to have a different pc virtualisation tool (though VMware Player does allow the creation of VMs it doesn’t allow a virtual ESXi server).

Next step, an OpenFiler VM providing iSCSI storage

SQL Install – No Mapping Between Account Names and Security IDs

jzedward — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 12:08:10 +0000

Working on a test virtual install of SharePoint 2010, an interesting error on installing SQL 2008 R2, “No Mapping Between Account Names and Security IDs”. Turns out I was dumb in re-using a server image which hadn’t been sysprep’d with the generalise option. See http://macraem.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/no-mapping-between-account-names-and-security-ids-sql-server-install-and-sysprep-generalize/

Installing Windows Server 2008 in a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD)

jzedward — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 11:11:05 +0000

One of the most useful features of Windows7/2008 is the ability to create a virtual hard disk as a bootable disk; in this way you can have multiple bootable operating systems (or configurations) without partitioning – this means that installations can be copied or backed up quickly and easily, and the virtual disks can be mounted and accessible on the other installs as required. This useful feature makes managing a multi-boot machine very easy.

The only downside that I have identified so far is that VHD installs can’t be hibernated, but that’s not an issue for a server o/s as far as I’m concerned.

See Windows IT Pro for instructions on how to create a VHD installation.

I’m installing VMware Server 2.0 on Server2008 for now, so that I can migrate my SharePoint 2010 VM’s to ESXi 4.1 when I get my new network card.

Function Keys in VMware Fusion Mac

jzedward — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 10:02:27 +0000

Installing ESXi in Fusion, I couldn’t use the F11 key, even though I’d changed the Mac System Preferences/Keyboard to ‘Use all F1, F2, etc keys as standard function keys’. Turns out that Vmware Fusion has an option too, in VMware Fusion/Preferences/Keyboard and Mouse/Mac OS Shortcuts, untick the option ‘Enable MacOS Keyboard Shortcuts’ et voila.

VMware ESXi 4.1 on Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P

jzedward — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 09:48:15 +0000

UPDATE – to make this work, I installed the Intel 1000GT network card (NIC) and it worked beautifully, well worth £17

I’d like to do some work on the current VMware product set, having worked there many years ago. I’ve decided to see if I can get my workhorse Q6600 server running ESXi. It has a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P mobo, which has a supported SATA controller, but the NICs are not supported (see the VMware Whitebox and the Whitebox HCL) .

There isn’t a lot of good explanation of how to create a custom ESXi boot disk out there; a lot of the threads assume a lot of knowledge – even as an experienced virtualisation user and unix admin, I haven’t found a good explanation.

In summary, the ESXi installation media has a bootable archive embedded in the imagedd.bz2 file. This imagedd includes the files and drivers necessary to boot ESX, including an OEM file, oem.tgz, with custom drivers for specific hardware.

There is a small cottage industry developing custom oem.tgz packages for specific hardware, however, it’s not well documented which version of ESXi these will run on, as it seems that ESXi 3 & 4 have different driver architectures and there is a change in the file structure between 4.0 and 4.1 (see below).

I’ve downloaded the Realtek 8111c oem.tgz from Customising your ESXi install, but found there were no really clear and simple instructions for how to create and update a bootable USB ESXi installer with a custom oem.tgz. There are lots of shell scripts and makeisofs command line for us geeks, but no simple instructions.

I tried using the Universal USB installer from Pendrive Linux, but got a boot error – the VMware iso isn’t a live cd so may be setup differently. Although there are some good notes on setting up with syslinux at Ubiqutous Talk, I ended up downloading and using unetbootin

Bad news is that I get an error, Unable to load module /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/vmfs3 (scroll down to avoid the Experts Exchange nonsense…), which appears to be an error when the NIC is missing, as if it’s not picking up the oem.tgz package.

I have an Intel 1000GT on order, but was aiming to get ESXi up before it arrived.

So after a few tries this weekend, I seem to be no further forwards. I’ve been using the custom build script for a ESXi oem.tgz, but failing repeatedly. Looks like the issue may be that the oem.tgz is not in the right format for ESXi 4.1 (looks like pci.ids has been moved to /etc/vmware). However, the script does flag this up and I am copying pci.ids across during the build to fix this; once more try, and if it fails I’ll be back to Hyper-V until I get my Intel NIC.