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.
November 6, 2009: Daddy Daughter Day in Peekskill
Dominica was up and getting ready to go around six thirty this morning. I woke up just a few minutes after her and did not really manage to get back to sleep for the rest of the morning. I stayed in bed taking care of Liesl and Oreo – Liesl can’t be left alone or she will fall off of the bed and she needs a bottle periodically in the morning – until a quarter after eight when Dominica left to get onto the road out to Warren, New Jersey for her interview there. She is not scheduled to be there until ten thirty but the car needed fueling and she wanted plenty of extra time in case anything went wrong considering she was driving out there in late rush hour traffic and she has to pass through Newark on her way.
Liesl and I got up as Dominica left and went down to the living room to hang out. I did some cleaning in the dining room and got space cleared so that I could set up my laptop on the dining room table and work from there for the day.
Liesl spent the morning wanting to be held so I either had her sitting on my lap while I worked or I carried her around while I talked on the phone. Boy were my arms tired quickly. Liesl decided that she was going to be a no-nap baby today and stayed awake with me all day.
It was really nice getting a chance to just work from the dining room and spend the entire day with my daughter. We had a lot of fun. The Wiggles were on, of course, for most of the day. I hate to do that but this really was a special occasion. Luckily work was extremely slow today and since I had done such a good job of getting caught up on my emails yesterday I did not have any email thrashing to do today and I was able to stay on top of requests and not fall behind even while never having both hands free at any point in time.
I really did not have a chance to make any food today so my only meal was some banana nut Cheerios. Good thing I like cereal a lot.
Dominica got back around two in the afternoon. Liesl had just laid down for her first nap of the day just minutes before Dominica arrived. So Dominica went straight up and took a nap at the same time as Liesl. They woke up together around three thirty. So, effectively, I watched Liesl and Oreo alone for seven and a half hours while working the whole time. Not too shabby. I call that rather impressive, really.
This afternoon I finally got my official start date in Texas. I am officially switching from my current New York contract to my Texas contract on December 28th. That doesn’t mean that we will not be in Texas before that date but it means that the paperwork is in motion and takes place that day. I also found out that I am getting a raise! not a raise enough to bring me back to my rate from 2006-2008 but a significant portion of the way back. That raise, coupled with the tax advantages of Texas, puts us roughly at the same income that we used to have. Sad to still be making somewhat less after four years (never a single raise, only hold steady and cuts even when getting pristine reviews) but at least it is steady work and we are close to the original rates.
As it is Friday work was slow most of the day and then picked up to “really crazy” by late afternoon. So Dominica took care of Liesl while I worked. Then, when worked was slowing down, we ordered in Italian from our “backup” Italian place. We just felt like something slightly different as we have been stuck eating out or ordering in almost every meal. The house is completely devoid of food at this point but there has been no opportunity to go grocery shopping and even if there was there hasn’t been any time to do any cooking.
We watched a few episodes of Rick Steve’s travel show on Hulu. Good stuff. Then, at nine thirty, I decided to call it a night. The past several days have just been impossible and I really, really need to get some sleep or I am going to be getting sick very soon. I can’t keep up with this kind of schedule.
It was more like ten when I finally got to bed. Oreo came upstairs with me but Dominica and Liesl stayed up for a while longer. Dominica ended up with insomnia and did not come to bed until early in the morning.