Geek projects, tidbits and things I'm working on at the moment…

So I’m playing around w/ a SAN for home use. We’ve virtualized about 80% of our infrastructure at work but most of our VM hosts are standalone with local storage only. So, I’m spending a lot of time at home recently building a SAN on OpenSUSE 11.3 with high hopes of getting iSCSI to play nice. Part of this equation is getting another box to run vCenter Server which will need access to the iSCSI LUNs the VM hosts see.

Hence the title. Windows has a utility called Diskpart.exe which will allow you to turn off auto mount BEFORE you connect your Windows’ iSCSI initiator to your iSCSI target.

Open up a command prompt and type:

C:\Users\yournamehere>diskpart


Once you’re in the diskpart tool, type ‘automount’.

DISKPART> automount
Automatic mounting of new volumes enabled.

Then finally, ‘automount disable’.


DISKPART> automount disable
Automatic mounting of new volumes disabled.

This will keep your OS from trying to mount your iSCSI volume and mess with your VMFS partition!

Keep in mind, this means any new volumes your system sees will need to be mounted manually w/in the disk partitioning tool.

While you’re in there, type just a ‘?’ and see the whole list of commands you can play with. See the Microsoft KB article below for a more thorough introduction!

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415

I do a lot of virtualization both at home and at work. Several times I’ve needed a way to extend the activation period of Window 7 because I’m not done w/ a project.

Enter Windows Software Licensing Management Tool.

If you open up a command prompt by right clicking it and selecting, “Run as administrator” you can run the slmgr.vbs command such as…


C:\Users\yournamehere>slmgr /rearm


This can buy you some valuable time before you delete that VM and start on something else. This command ‘rearms’ the activation period and I believe you can do it for a total of 3 times before it stops working. Also, try adding a /? on the end to see a handy dialog box w/ the other available options.

I’ve always been a big fan of keeping my fingers on the keys versus using a mouse to get things done. I think everyone learns the clipboard hotkeys first before picking up others but even I learn a few new ones from time to time. That having been said, here’s a couple new ones that came out w/ Windows 7|Vista I’ve been enjoying.

• Win + Up arrow: Will maxamize your currently active window.
• Win + Down arrow: This will minimize the current window unless it’s maxamized, then it will simply restore it.
• Win + T: This will allow you to preview items on your taskbar. Just hit enter for it to get focus.

A couple of my day to day favs aren’t new to Windows 7 but they are:

• Win + E: This will open up Explorer view for browsing your system. This has got to be the one I use most often.
• Win + D: This does a “Show Desktop” which is very useful for when things start to get a tad bit cluttered.
• Win + R: This brings up the “Run” dialog box which is handy for those times you need to run something quickly.
• Win + L: Probably my all time favorite. This will lock your screen so the interns won’t mess with your system!

Here’s a couple URLs w/ more information:

http://lifehacker.com/5132073/the-best-new-windows-7-keyboard-shortcuts

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126449

http://lifehacker.com/5390086/the-master-list-of-new-windows-7-shortcuts

This post is out of sequence but I told myself I’d throw it up while it’s still fresh. About a month ago I redid my entire email server from scratch when I started having some hardware issues. This post is on one of those bug-a-boos of switching from a physical server to a virtual world. TIME. Seems keeping vmguests synchronized with the correct time is an issue and wrecks havoc upon Dovecot (even when vmware tools are installed!) So, one of solutions was to not only install the vmware tools on my vmguest but to also install ntpd. This is good and bad…

  See, ntpd checks the time rather frequently and all it takes is a sync of > 75 seconds and Dovecot kills itself. Thankfully, it left a message in the log file.

dovecot: Time just moved backwards by 109 seconds. This might cause a lot of problems, so I’ll just kill myself now. http://wiki.dovecot.org/TimeMovedBackwards: 1 Time(s)

The URL provided in the error message was very illuminating and gave some recommendations from there. I installed the script that used lsof and was pretty much good to go. I did a couple of tests to ensure it wasn’t just restarting it once per minute then did the old crontab -e command and placed the script in the root’s cron jobs file stored at /var/spool/cron/root. Life is good. I’ve always been a big fan of netstat but lsof also gives some very valuable information on tracking down rogue issues.

Well, I’ve finally started my blog. This shall prove interesting! I’m hoping to document my projects and post photos when I’m out and about. Major changes are coming as I adjust my themes & plugins.