Webs’ Random Ideas

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Something I forced myself into, not really what I wanted to do. Below is the troubles I found and what I did to fix issues.

First the problem… Upgraded to a new mobo with Nvidia chipset. Not a big deal but the new ones have a new system for managing SATA ports. Rather than treating all SATA ports as independent ports and letting the user configure to his/her content, the new Nvidia system is to have the first 3 or 4 ports act as individual SATA ports and the last 2 as RAID ports. Now you can use the last two ports outside of RAID but only if you run ALL the SATA ports in AHCI mode. If you run ALL the ports in regular SATA mode then you can only use the first 3.

What’s the big deal? I have 4 hard drives that need to be independent of each other because three of them are used for a file server. So this new mobo I have kind of put me in a bad position. Luckily I created the file server in VM because I was worried about changing hardware and hard drives down the road and wanted a system that would be robust. Anyway, I figured a mobo with 5 SATA ports would give me what I need. So frustrated and broken after hours of pain I set my mobo to AHCI. Vista would not install. No matter what I did Vista did not like AHCI mode. It would allow me to do SATA mode, but I needed all 4 hard drives.

So I ran in AHCI and installed Linux (funny thing, Linux could care less what mode my SATA ports ran in as it took all three, Vista only took SATA mode). Once installed I ran updates and rebooted and installed VMWare Server. Follow this badass guide for doing this too. Once this is done you can run VMWare, I also recommend creating a test VM to play around and make sure VMWare works for you in Linux.

The next thing I had to do was add my hard drive with my 11 VMs to VMWare. In VMWare you need a place to store the VMs. I do this with a separate physical disk. Not a bid deal, but it wasn’t mounted in Linux so I didn’t know what to add to VMWare. So I installed pysdm. Copy the code below into a terminal window:

sudo apt-get install pysdm

Once installed run pysdm with the following:

sudo pysdm

Then you can mount and configure your mounted drives as necessary. The other issue for me was that my drives are NTFS drives so I had to make sure things were setup correctly. So I clicked the sideways triangle thing next to the drive I wanted to mount and clicked the listing under it (this is the partition Linux recognized). Then click assistance and below is a screen capture of my settings:

After hitting okay on the screen above, you should be back to the main screen. At this point I had to make sure “rw” showed up under options toward the beginning of the line. For some reason “ro” was showing. This means the hard drive is being mounted as read only, not good. So if necessary change this right on the options line.

Once you have mounted the drives and applied the settings copy the location from pysdm. Now we need to try navigating to these mounted drives. Open “Computer” by going to “Places” (at the top of the taskbar up top on Ubuntu’s taskbar) and then click “Computer”. By default Computer will not show you the actual location, but just folder names on its taskbar. Click the icon that looks like a notepad with a pen on the left of the window under the first two taskbars. This should show you the full location of the folder you are viewing. Paste in the location you copied from pysdm.

If you can view the files success! I made it this far, but getting my FreeNAS system back up in running without losing any files is still a big step…

Copy your file server (FreeNAS in my case) folder in your drive or folder that holds your VMs. Copying your VM folder is a last resort fail safe. I just copied the folder and then pasted it in the same location which creates a folder with all the same files, but a different folder name. If you screw up you can just copy the files from the backup to start out from scratch again. I had to use it a bunch of times.

Open your folder with the VM you are fixing. Find the VMX file and open it in gedit. This file is the config file for VMWare. It holds everything about the VM in it. I followed this guide to figure out what I needed to change. Lets open the file and take a look:

gedit FreeNAS64.vmx

Notice that right off the bat the top of the file has a line showing it is configured for Windows. Make sure you see the following at the top (for me it was the second line):

.encoding = “UTF-8″

Then you will need to delete any locked files according to this guide. Look for files with “.lck” at the end. Delete them.

Once done add the VM from the webapp for VMWare and power it on. When I did I jumped up and down for like 5 minutes. Seriously I have like a couple hundred gigs of files and lost none of it!! Everything came back up

Just follow a similar process to get your other VMs up and running.

I was in the middle of postig last night but the power went out. Which is weird because our little inside block was the only area that went down. Houses across the street were just fine.

At least it happened at the end of the day so my computer rebuilding was not inhibited at all.

With it being sunny, beautiful, and high 70’s it’s hard not to be outside. And being able to post from my iPod also helps.

I hope everyone else is enjoying their summer too.

Lately I have been spending a lot of time at work trying to find this wireless rogue. A rogue is a wireless device that is not supposed to be in a given wireless environment. The device itself can be an AP, client, Bluetooth device, or anything putting out RF.

So I got a spectrum analyzer to analyze 2.4ghz to find this rogue. The analyzer will show anything communicating in this frequency. But the problem is that I am hunting down this rogue in a factory that produces engines. So lots of metal things that bounce RF signals everywhere.

What to do? The analyzer shows the signal decently strong at 70-90dbi, but will then fluctuate up 150 (which is a weak signal) and at random intervals. Which then makes finding the rogue damn near impossible. When the signal is at 80 it doesn’t seem to matter what direction I head, the signal never gets better than 80 but if I head out far enough in one direction it will eventually get worse.

Why are we even tracking this rogue? WiFi in the area where I think the rogue is located sucks pretty bad. In other words I think this rogue is blasting RF to the point where other WiFi devices have a hard time competing on the same channels.

More later…

Wordpress blogging from an iPod (or iPhone) is soooo easy and works great. Just go to the app store and search for “wordpress”. Then install and configure by entering your admin account username and password. For this I recommend creating a separate account so your admin credentials aren’t getting passed.

Then you can view and create posts and pages. Obviosly typing ain’t the easiest, but I did all of this from my iPod.

This is my test.

Well the list of stuff to unpack is slowly dwindling down. The basement is really all that is left. We started positioning everything and I figured out where to place things and then there were tornadoes all across Iowa. We didn’t get hit (thank you Mother Nature) but we did get lots of rain. And someone patched together our basement window. And it lets in water, pretty badly. And guess where I setup my computer desk and such?

Nothing got ruined but I had a lot of stuff already placed and it’s just my bad luck that I placed the stuff right where the water pools on the floor. I figured the warning signs of flooded water were from biblical Iowa flooding. Apparently not. So we got more re-arranging to do. Ugh!

The new home is nice though. Cozy, quite, close to everything we need, close to a bike trail, and work. The only “close” that is missing is friends. But at least we will only have to be here for a year.

I would never in my life expected this quality Blues music from this band.

Very creative. And true…