November 8, 2009: Oblivion Sunday

Crap, I am way, way behind on SGL again.  How does this happen?  The past several weeks have just been insanely crazy.  A complete lack of sleep time and working hard trying to get in some family time and enough time relaxing so that I don’t get all stressed out.  We leave for more than two weeks of travel is a week and a half and that is definitely making things a lot harder.

I was up early this morning and got down to the kitchen and managed to completely clean the kitchen, do the dishes, clean around the living room and more long before Dominica and Liesl even woke up.  We’ve gotten really behind on cleaning and getting some done early this morning was very important.

Today was a busy Sunday for work.  I ended up having to work later than usual.

We have definitely gotten tired of our “television” selection and Dominica has gotten really into watching me play Oblivion on the Playstation 3.  I am about ninety hours into the game and have been playing the Knights of the Nine expansion section and that got Dominica hooked on the storyline.  So now she is really enjoying watching me play

Having Dominica watch me play Oblivion actually works really well because she helps me scout out the dungeons, keep moving towards goals and when I am getting stuck she is on the Oblivion wiki looking up information so that I can keep moving.  We are an Oblivion playing team.

Windows Server 2008 R2 on Xen

Having poked around in the forums I have found that no one seems to believe, at least not at the time of this writing, that Windows Server 2008 R2 can be deployed on Xen or, if it can, that you cannot do so using the Xen package available in Red Hat Linux 5.  I am proud to announce that Windows Server 2008 R2 does indeed run just fine on RHEL 5.4.  I believe that the update to the latest 5.4 package is likely required here and, as Server 2008 R2 is 64bit only, you have no choice but to be running on x64 hardware.  But work it does and 2K8 R2 on Xen on Red Hat Linux is very much a reality.

Connecting VNC with virt-install in RHEL 5.4

If you have been using virt-install for a while and have update to RHEL 5.4 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) or CentOS 5.4 then you will likely have noticed that the virt-install utility has changed its behaviour.  No longer can you simply run virt-install without any other parameters.  To run the way that the utility was run traditionally you need to use the new –prompt flag.  Easy enough.  But now graphical console information is not prompted for and if you are installing Windows you will need that graphical console.  What to do?

What is needed is the –vnc flag to turn on the VNC console.  We will also use the –vncport flag to set the port so that we can easily access our system.  Here is an example command to start our installation using the default VNC port, 5900:

virt-install –prompt –vnc –vncport=5900

Of course, if you have another process (likely another virtual machine on either Xen or KVM) using port 5900 then you will need to choose an alternative port.

November 7, 2009: Operation Petticoat

I woke up at about three thirty this morning!  Three thirty, can you believe that?  I tried going back to sleep for a little while but gave up and went down to the office so that at least I could spend my morning being productive rather than just laying in bed wishing that I could call back asleep.  This is the price that you pay for going to bed too early, I guess.

The Hudson Valley is covered in a thick frost this morning.  The cold weather is officially here.  I like the look of the world as we approach winter but once the snow starts to fly I’m going to be really, really anxious to get to Texas.

I had a lot of time to get stuff done this morning.  I got caught up on the last two days of SGL.  Definitely do not want to be falling behind here again.  It is so hard to catch up once we start down that path.  And I did some serious cleaning in the kitchen.  What a disaster the kitchen has become.  We have cardboard boxes stacked almost to the ceiling because they did not do cardboard pickup this month.  Ugh.  Not the month for that to have happened.  Stuff keeps getting shipped to the house and there is nowhere to put all of the boxes.  We literally can’t get to anything in the kitchen because of all of them.

We have our next “installment” of Torchwood Season One here on BluRay from Netflix today.  So we took the ninety minutes that it takes to make it through that entire disc.  Given BD technology it is unbelievable that they are only putting ninety minutes on a single disc.  What a waste of plastic and manufacturing resources.  Talk about living in a waste economy.

The show itself was really good, as always, although the episodes on this disc were very dark and much less happy than I like my television to be.  Hopefully this isn’t a trend.

This evening, while testing out video transfers to the house media server, I found out that Dominica has never seen Operation Petticoat which I could not believe.  So we watched that.  Definitely one of the all time cinema classics.  Such a great movie.  I don’t know how she has never seen that.  I could have sworn that we watched it together at some point.  I try to watch it every so often.  I can still remember watching it as a small child with my parents.

Very likely, when I first watched Operation Petticoat it was very likely around 1985.  Just as a big, round number as I don’t really have any clear recollection as to when I first watched it.  I could have been a bit younger but find it unlikely that I would have been much older.  At the time the movie felt quite old – something from another era.  But, in reality, it was only as much time from the time that that movie was made until the first time that I watched it as it has been time from then until now!  So the movie has doubled in age since I started watching it.  Weird.

Change Windows Password from the Command Line

Whether you are on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 or some other recent version of the Windows NT system you have probably gotten into a situation where you wanted to change your password but did not have a means of issuing a remote Ctl-Alt-Del to bring up the password change dialogue or, for one reason or another, you need to make a password change via the command line.  In UNIX this is the normal mode of password changes but in Windows this is a poorly known skill but an important one.  This is especially important on Windows 2003 machines as the normal password management dialogues may not exist.

To change your password simply:

net user username password

So for me that might be “net user scott mysecretpassword” and voila, password changed.  Very, very handy.