Maintenance

Lots of difficulty getting a VM built in VirtualBox. The process that's got us some of the way there has been:

• Move the GHO files to a shared folder (shared in VirtualBox)
• Boot to a BartPE disk with Ghost
• Map the shared folder to a drive
• Restore from that shared folder to the drive in Ghost

However, although the drive seems to have been created correctly, the results are not bootable. I can log on to the Windows install on the drive (and I now have two other ones, due to trying to recover the original using an XP disk), but I still can't seem to boot it. I'm going to keep hacking at this, but we may have to go through the whole process again, with more thought going into it. It's possible I should have restored to a disk rather than a partition. I'll try that tomorrow.

Managed to get the following working, in the following ways:

• Sunbird: exported old data to an ICS file on Windows, then uninstalled Sunbird on Ubuntu, deleted all profiles, reinstalled, then ran it and imported the data. Importing took a while, but it seems to work now.
• Firefox extensions: Added Ubuntu extensions (most of what I need is there).
• Firefox Java: A hard one. This required me to download a snapshot from here (jre-6u12-ea-bin-b03-linux-amd64-22_dec_2008.bin), then unravel it into /opt/, and then point Firefox at its javaws to handle JNLP files.
• Got WinSCP installed under Wine (it's still the best tool for that job).
• Began rebuilding my bookmarks and bookmarklets (they needed prining anyway).

Cloning the old computer to create a VM has now failed several times, so these are the remedies we've tried:

• Removed all software I can do without.
• Cleared out temp files and any other cruft.
• Cleared lots of space on the target drive (an internal drive, as the USB drive didn't work).
• Defragged both source and target drives.
• Ran chkdsk /R on both drives.
• Disconnected all USB devices, replacing them with PS2 devices.
• Logged in as administrator.
• Turned off all non-windows services except the vmware ones.

VMWare Converter has now failed so utterly that we're having to give up on it, and use BartPE/Ghost to create a ghost of the C drive, and try to use that in VirtualBox.

We didn't expect this to be simple, but we weren't expecting VMWare Converter to fail so spectacularly.

Started the process of building the new PC using 64-bit Ubuntu installed by Greg. In the proprietary AMD driver, it seems impossible to specify portrait orientation for dual monitors, so I'm living with landscape for the moment; because of that, I've also switched my old Windows install back to landscape so a ported VM is more likely to work. Downloaded and installed VMWare Converter to convert the old Windows install to a VM on an attached USB disk. The first few tries failed at 2%, so I then went through all the running processes and turned off the firewall and AV checker (after disconnecting the network cable), as well as any processed initiated by VMWare, which is installed on the Windows box. After that, the process seemed to get going, although after 20 minutes it['s still showing 1%, so it may be failing after all. I'll have to let it run overnight to see.

On the new box, I installed OpenOffice 3 from downloaded 64-bit debs, alongside 2.4; and I also installed Midori (to get WebKit), and Opera (which is available in 64-bit). I copied over my Thunderbird profile, and that's working fine; I also started the process of downloading all my working data off Rutabaga. That's trundling along happily (in fact, very fast indeed). I have oXygen running, and I've installed NetBeans, although I haven't run it yet; I want to bring down my NetBeans project files first, and point it at them.

Sunbird is proving problematic, because the repo version is older than the version I've been using on Windows, Pulling the latest off the Mozilla site gives me the right version, but I can't get the data into it just by copy/pasting from my old profile, so I'm going to have to do an export/import via an ICS file to get the data across, once the virtualizing process has finished.

Following the release of IMT 1.8.1.0, I've updated the installations of IMT on R&D desktops (except for the Windows side of the dual-boot machine, which is busy with a Linux dist-upgrade right now). I did an XP SP3 update on one of the machines too.

Wanted to purge any Windows desktops of old versions of IMT now that the Mariage project has been migrated to 1.8, so I booted up the two remaining ones, removed 1.7 and installed 1.8. I did updates on the Vista PC, and on the XP machine I discovered that SP3 had not been installed, so I let that do its thing; then there was another round of updates after that. I also booted up the Ubuntu desktop and let it update itself -- for some reason it can only do that from the command line. I figured I might as well do the rest of the public workstations, so I booted the two Macs and did all the updates on those too, including an excruciatingly slow Adobe update on the dual-monitor Mac. All five of those workstations are now updated.

I had a bunch of files with duplicate extensions (filename.jpg.jpg) and wanted to trim it to one .jpg so I did this:
ls *.jpg.jpg | awk '{print("mv "$1" "$1)}' | sed 's/.jpg.jpg/.jpg/2'
which just printed the results to stdout. I fiddled with the command until it output what I wanted, then I appended | /bin/sh to get this:
ls *.jpg.jpg | awk '{print("mv "$1" "$1)}' | sed 's/.jpg.jpg/.jpg/2'|/bin/sh
which renamed the files appropriately. Cool.

Something similar can be accomplished thusly:
find . -iname "*pattern1*" -exec echo "mv '{}' '{}'" \; | sed 's/pattern2/pattern3/2' | /bin/sh
where: pattern1 is the mask that select which files to process; pattern2 is the string to be modified; and pattern3 is the substitution for pattern2 (leave empty for deletion)

The eduroam infrastructure has been put in place at UVic and apparently works well with iPhones. I have a geek tablet and want to use it too, but there are no good instructions for setting it up. It's worthwhile because the infrastructure is being developed all over the world at educational institutions with the intent that I can roam anywhere and get a signal using my UVic credentials.

Here's how I did it on the n810:
1) The system uses the Thawte Premium Server CA certificate - it was already installed and configured on my device, but if it isn't there, you can get it here: http://www.thawte.com/roots/index.html. The zip contains a bunch of cert files, including ThawtePremiumServerCA.cer. Import it via the Certificate Manager in the n810 control panel and ensure that the trust on the cert is set for WLAN (set in the certificate details).
2) The actual setup is best done through the control panel "Connectivity" applet.
a) Double-click on "Connectivity" and tap the "Connections" button.
b) Tap the "New" button to start the Connection setup wizard.
c) Tap "Next" and give the connection a name (doesn't matter what)
d) Tap "Next" and you will be asked if you want to scan for available WLAN networks. Answer "Yes".
e) When it finds Eduroam, tap "Next"
f) Choose "PEAP" on the next screen when it asks for the EAP type. Tap "Next".
g) When asked to "Select certificate" you will not have a choice (it will display "None"). For "EAP method" choose "EAP MSCHAPv2". Tap "Next".
h) For "User name" and "Password" use your netlinkID@uvic.ca (include the @uvic.ca part) and your NetlinkID password. Apparently you are best served by having it store your password rather than choosing "Prompt password at every login" (it appears as though there is an unresolved bug associated with this feature). Tap "Next".
i) At the next screen tap on the "Advanced" button to access a panel with a tab titled "EAP". Tap that tab and fill in the "Use manual user name" field with your NetlinID@uvic.ca info again. The connection will fail if you don't do this.

Martin and I took a look at using dd to "ghost" a partition on a Mac. On Radish, we ran the command:
dd bs=5120 if=/dev/rdisk1s3 of=/Volumes/Storage/testing/radish.img

The command ran successfully, and 20 minutes later we had a 20GB image. When I tried to mount it, however, it turned in to a 0kb file. Oops! Not sure why; I probably screwed something up.

Next we tried a simpler command:
dd if=/dev/rdisk1s3 | gzip -c5 > /Volumes/Storage/testing/radish.gz

The syntax is pretty simple. "if" is the input, in this case the 3rd partition on disk 1. "| gzip -c5 > " sends the input to the gzip command, using a modest compression level and then writes it, using ">", to "of", which is the output file.

The point here is to try to create a simple, automatable system for building *nix-based machines (like in a lab). Our hope is that we can create a master machine, run a "dd" like command to create an image of the OS partition, rsync it to a server and then rsync it back to lab machines for rebuild. rsync is our weapon of choice because it does its thing by only replacing the bits in a file that have changed. Ostensibly, this means that we can make a simple change to the master machine, re-image it using "dd", rsync it to the server (which will only replace the pertinent bits) and then have lab machines rsync against the updated image (again, only changing the important bits) and then run "dd" again to build the local machine.

There'll be a campus-wide power outage on Sunday, so I've been unplugging everything in sight. Lab C is completely unplugged; Lab B has a class in it, and the CALL folks will handle shutting it down at the end of their day. All machines in R&D are unplugged, including printers, except my own machine, which I'll do last thing before I leave. The server room is a bit more problematic; here's a list of what I know about:

• Squash: no lab classes need it this afternoon, so I've shut it down through Terminal Services access.
• Chou: can't connect to it, and pinging it results in nothing, so I'm concluding it shut itself down at some point.
• Quince: Got the OK from Michael Joyce to shut it down, so it's off. Was able to log in through Putty, but the details in our documentation are wrong. Note to Greg: update the info.
• Idaho: I'll shut this down via SSH when I've done my backups for the day.
• Casper: doesn't seem to be running; no response to pings.
• Parsnip: I didn't really know anything about this server till I found it in the server room, but it seems to be the reborn Crossroads B -- presumably we don't need a Crossroads B, though, since the teacher stations can now run their own Crossroads? At any rate, nothing seemed to be running on it, so I shut it down.
• Machine handling video surveillance in ETCL: I have no idea what to do about this machine, and there are no instructions, so I'm leaving it running in case there are security implications from shutting it down. The UPS should bring it down gracefully when the time comes.

In the server room itself, I left the UPSes connected to the power; they're supposed to handle outages. Nothing else was plugged in except for a power bar supplying one of the KVMs, and I turned that off. Hope I've done all the right things here; we should really have some documentation on how to power off for outages in the server room.