Cut a long story short, I’ve now got a much bigger drive (500 GB) for my macbook. Along with the release of Windows 7 RC1 being released I thought I’d give it a try with boot camp.

Installing is pretty easy, burn the Microsoft ISO to a DVD, and follow the normal guide. I detest the fact that I need to burn another CD, or use my OS X Install DVD (which I can never find) to get the boot camp drivers. If like me you’d like to download them, I’ve given a link below to where you may find them. I just put them on a usb stick.

Once installed, pretty much everything works under boot camp, the only thing I found that didn’t play was the ‘Reboot into OS X’ I get an error. This isn’t a huge problem, as you can just hold the alt key on boot up to select OS X or Windows.

Once I got all that working, I then wanted to get the same build / partition under VMware fusion. Reading a few guides, the best way is to follow the normal guide for XP, but change it so the guest is set to Windows 2008 Server. Again, all working pretty well once you install VMware Tools.

The only problem that I did have, is there was no networking for the guest. The NIC just showed as Ethernet Controller. Nothing seemed to get this NIC working, tried manually installing the drivers from the VMWare tools cd, copying from another Windows 7 guest.

The only thing that seemed to fix it, was to shutdown the guest, and add a second NIC, and boot back up. Windows 7 RC1, installs this NIC with no problems at all, and all is working. Intererstingly, it still wont play with the original one. None the less, it’s all working through it’s second, new NIC, so I am happy with that.

Useful links

• Windows 7 RC1
• Guide to installing in boot camp
• Guide to installing in VMWare Fusion
• Downloadable boot camp drivers

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However today, slightly different, in that my VPN GW had fallen over. Luckily this is a virtual machine on one of my servers in London, so just have to reset the guest via VMWare. Unfortunately, this is on one my older servers, still running VMWare Server 1.x, and also for added fun, I can only access the Host via the VPN, seeing the problem here?

Well I do have a ‘backdoor’. Anyways I digress, whilst I was resetting the guest, I thought I’d take a look at what snapshots I had for it.

After clicking the second button, I quickly remembered, VMWare Server 1.x, only has one snapshot. Oh dear, within  a blink it was restoring to the previous snapshot, with no way to stop it.

Checking further, this snap shot was old, very old, about 3 months old. So it booted back up. Here comes the second fail. The server in question, happens to be the master, of my MySQL servers, so decided to quickly replicate it’s self, wiping all the new data from the other nodes. Is also my primary NS, so replicated those too. It also does a shit load of other things, that I wont go into, but that broke lots too.

Alas, shouldn’t be a problem though, as I have a four hourly rsync of the configs taken, and replicated off site. Here comes the third and forth fail. 3) the MySQL dumps, appear to have stopped working, looks like there was a regression in one of the scripts. 4) I’d been working on the offsite nas a few months back, and didn’t want the rotation of backups to occur whilst I was doing the work. You guessed it, I forgot to switch it back on. Fuck!

These are all my own fault, I have no way to deny. I spend most of my working day fixing other people’s silly mistakes like this, and setting up systems / procedures so this doesn’t EVER happen, you’d think I’d actually tick a few things off my personal to do list, huh?

Nevermind, managed to fix it all in the end, well mostly… fail fail fail fail fail

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VMware Server 2.0 installation error – boche.net – VMware Virtualization Evangelist.

For a server on a domain, you’ll need to do this on the DC, naturally.

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You know, I always have a load of shit, I think I should blog about, but when I get 5 to actually sit down and type something up, I’ve either forgot about it, or well think it does indeed sound shit so forget about it.

Friday saw a few drinks after work, which led to 2 bars, 2 clubs and ending up losing a wad in the casino…. this is when you realise that first shot was a bad, very bad idea. Nevermind, had a good night [what I can remember of it anyways].

Spent the weekend working, and starting to play with Gentoo. I’m sure I’ll rant more about that all later. Today found an absolutely brilliant tool, that I had kinda been looking for a while. I run a couple of servers, that run Windows 2003, and VMWare Server 1.0.7, mostly just as R&D machines. I could look into setting up a nice ESX cluster, but I just haven’t got around to it. Also on the list to look play with is Xen and KVM. KVM especially looks quite interesting, just been bought out by RedHat, and boasts that it can run more on your hardware than VMWare can.

Anyways I digress, what I currently do is pretty bad in way of backing up my VM Guests, in that I will every now and again, turn one off, copy it’s directory on the host, switch it back on, and move that copy offsite. Whilst it works, and is better than nothing, it’s not really ideal as it causes an outage when I do it. I know with Windows Shadow Copy it can copy/mirror drives [including any locked files] but what I wanted to be able to do was the odd locked file, i.e. the vmdk that’s locked. Bring in hobocopy. Does exactly what I was looking for, you can tell it a source and destination file or directory, and it will use the Microsoft Shadow service, and mirror it for you, complete, and intact. Perfect! it even has the functionality to do incrimental backups using a state file. Wouldn’t work for VMWare files, as it would just see the file as being changed, even though only 1meg of the 100GB file has changed, it would still copy the whole flat file. Baring that, an excellent tool. Now just to setup a schdule to make a mirror, and rsync it offsite, and a nice enterprise offsite backup, for nothing

Tonight I went out with a few friends, to The Royal Albert Hall, to see cocknbullkid when my friend told me about it, I kinda didn’t believe it, but yes it was true. Very good artist, even if the sound levels were a bit off, and the set seemed a bit short, really enjoyed it. Then off to soho for a coffee. Was a bit weird walking around soho sober, looks totally different to when you’ve had 10 double black russians Just for proof, picture below of the comp’ed ticket I / we managed to blag at the door

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