Archive for the ‘Home Network’ Category
February 12, 2008
What a handy tool; if you download the app you can select which Microsoft OS/Applications you need patches for and it will download them all via the Windows online catalog to a source directory and then compile a script to auto install them all - it will even generate a .ISO file and handle dependencies and reboots - v.handy (and more efficient) if you need to quickly present it to a bunch of virtual machines with no Internet access or are on a site with slow internet access.
Excellent; now as far as I know Microsoft have no mechanism for doing this other than downloading all the patches manually… even with the Vista RTM images I built last week it had nearly 100Mb of OS patches alone!
Screenshot of the available options in the app - download it here
OS Updates - multi-language too
Office Suite Updates too
You can even get all the patches for everything and it will compile it into a DVD .ISO image - I’ll definitely be using this - hopefully you can use the info it downloads to slipstream update a vista .WIM image - will have to try that in a couple of weeks.
(original link from a post on slashdot)
Posted in Dial up killer, Home Network, Home Office, IMAGEX, Microsoft, Office 2007, SYSPREP, Unattended, Vista, WAIK, Windows, Windows Update, Work | 1 Comment »
February 10, 2008
I’ve not done anything with my home ESX server this week as I’ve been busy with work; so this will be interesting - it’s been powered up all the time with all the VM’s spinning; but not doing very much.
CPU Utilisation
Memory Utilisation
Disk Utilisation
Whist running this set of VMs.. (the CPU stats for VMEX01 and VMEX02 are a bit skewed as I added this bit after the original post and they are both running seti@home (hence increased CPU)
So, nothing interesting to see here - but might be worth bearing in mind for some kind of sizing estimate; this is a single core CPU (HT enabled) PC with 4Gb RAM and a single 500Gb SATA disk
Hopefully I will get some time this week to load up SETI@Home or Folding@Home and see what that does 
it should be a good test to see how well the hypervisor manages CPU timesharing between hosts.
Posted in Cheap ESX PC, ESX, Geeky, HP, Home Network, Home Office, Performance Stats, VMWare, Virtual Center 2.5, Windows | 1 Comment »
February 7, 2008
My home office setup has a 20″ widescreen Dell TFT which I use with my laptop an elevated docking station - my laptop has a rather low screen resolution as it’s quite small so this is a great dual monitor setup. The widescreen is handy for keeping a web browser open for referring to online documentation or and working on documents or large Visio diagrams.
The only gripe is that a lot of web pages (like the BBC) waste a lot of the widescreen real-estate as they format (or don’t re-format) for different screen resolutions.
The Split Browser Plugin for Firefox (my favourite browser) that allows you to essentially have multiple browser sessions and sub-tabs in one full-screen Window.
it has load of options - if the screen layout gets a bit confusing you can bring all the split pages back to one window with multiple tabs and vice-versa.
Screenshot
The (also useful) IETab plug in means some of those sub-pages can also be rendered using IE - but all within Firefox.
Firefox has such a good community of developers and I have always been able to find a plug-in that does exactly the odd-feature I “need”.
Brilliant.
Posted in Geeky, Home Network, Home Office, IETab, Plugin, Split Browser, Vista, Web Annoyances, Widescreen, Work, firefox | No Comments »
February 3, 2008
Goal: keep a single .WIM file, Multiple instances of the same build in the .WIM file
Build001 non-sysprep’d version for maintenence with all latest patches and corp apps
Build002 sysprep but no domain for home workers/3rd party
Build003 sysprep + domain joining and scripted OOBE for corp machines
Build004…etc. tweaks to the sysprep - for different domains/customers or OOBE settings like language etc.
Build a bootable WinPE DVD with ImageX and the large .WIM file stored on it so no network connectivity required to install (at this stage) just a single DVD.
Reboot from Win PE to start Vista MiniSetup/OOBE
I hit a problem as when I restored build001 to my reference machine it wouldn’t boot and immediatley gave a 0xc000000e error
This was because my automated build DVD runs diskpart with a scripted set of commands (WIPEDISK.TXT) which includes the clean command
WIPEDISK.TXT
select disk 0
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=ntfs quick
assign letter=c
exit
|
This caused problems in this instance because The clean command erases the partition table ID.
If an image has not been-sysprep’d it still looks for the original partition table ID (which diskpart removed) hence the stop error at boot.
Sysprep’d images don’t have this problem as the “/generalize” switch resets this dependency on the partition table entries and mini-setup runs at 1st boot to fix it up.
So, if you need to do maintenance on a non-sysprep’d reference image then
- You need to restore it via imageX and your usual process (in my case a bootable PE DVD)
- It won’t be able to boot - it will give an 0xc000000e error
- Boot the reference machine from your original Vista install DVD and choose to repair
- This puts back the partition table ID and it will boot again
- Once it’s booted you can carry out any online maintenance, add extra software etc. to customise it
- Then sysprep /generalize /oobe /shutdown your reference machine
- Map a drive to your master .WIM file, or a USB disk etc.
- Append the changes to the master .wim file (remembering to use the /APPEND switch; if you just use /CAPTURE you will OVERWRITE your .wim file and be very sad.. Did it twice before I learnt to backup the .WIM file before hand!
- Then re-master your DVD - with the appropriate files - I just inject the .WIM file to the Windows PE DVD I made using PowerISO.
Rinse and repeat.
Thanks to this post http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1099145&SiteID=17 and this post http://www.svrops.com/svrops/articles/winvistape2.htmI figured it out…eventually!
Posted in Automated Installation, Home Network, IMAGEX, Microsoft, SYSPREP, Security, Unattended, Vista, WAIK, Windows, Windows PE, Work | 1 Comment »
February 3, 2008
I need a DVD that automatically applies a .WIM image when WinPE boots - no prompts; just want to press F9 for the BIOS Boot menu and walk away until build is finished.
I built a WinPE 2.0 image the usual way, but I want to add files to it (easy with PowerISO) but I want it to do something when it starts up..
To do this I had to customise the BOOT.WIM file which you use to generate your WinPE ISO file, note you need to edit BOOT.WIM not the WinPE.WIM file.
I used the /MOUNTRW switch for imageX (more details here) to mount the BOOT.WIM file - if you look in it’s WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 directory there is a file called STARTNET.CMD - this is mostly the same as a batch file so you can put whatever commands you want in here, in my case I edited it as follows;
wpeinit
CALL D:\tools\buildPC.bat
wpeutil reboot |
Once the changes are made you can save the changes back using the /UNMOUNT and /COMMIT switches - you’ll then need to rebuild the Windows PE .ISO using OSCDIMG.EXE.
You can then inject files into the .ISO file you’ve generated - you could put them in the BOOT.WIM as above but its quicker and easier to do this via PowerISO (or similar tool) if you are going to need to make changes, rather than recompiling the BOOT.WIM and .ISO files.
This is the BUILDPC.BAT batch file that STARTNET.CMD calls, it prepares the disk and deploys the image file to the local HDD.
|
@echo off
diskpart /s d:\sources\wipedisk.txt
d:
cd\tools
Echo applying image
imagex.exe /apply d:\sources\MasterImageFile.wim 1 C:
Echo Image Downloaded, rebooting.
|
Save the file and burn.. job done.
It’s a good idea to use a virtual machine to test the .ISO file out - and is cheaper than wasting lots of DVD/CD-R’s while you are fine-tuning!
Posted in Automated Installation, Home Network, IMAGEX, VMWare, Vista, Windows, Windows PE, Work | No Comments »
February 1, 2008
I thought I’d post some performance graphs from my cheap HP D530 ESX server using the Virtual Centre console (which incidentally, is good for getting this info quickly and simply).
Screenshot of the UI for querying performance stats.
View of currently running VMs - a mix of Windows 2003/2008 VMs
Current Overall ESX Host statistics (with a clone from template going on)
As I noted elsewhere on my blog it has 4Gb RAM and a single 2.8GHz HT CPU - and with this VM load it gives an average CPU load of 25-30%. Almost all of these VM’s are idling but all respond in good time to network access/TS etc- not bad at all for a desktop PC!
CPU usage for the last 24 hours
The big spike around 22:00 was when I cloned up a whole load more VM’s - seems to have upset the stats so need to try and have a look at that..
It’s also interesting to note that I added 4 Windows 2003 VM’s last night but that hasn’t actually increased the overall CPU average - ESX must be quite efficient at time-slicing all those idle VMs.
I had 3-4 “deploy from template..” operations going on at the same time and it really bogged down the performance of the VM’s (usable, but only just..) but it is just a single SATA disk drive so I can live with that.
Deploying 1 VM at a time had little or no impact - slight CPU spike to ~50% as you’ll see to the far right of the chart as I kicked off another one just now.
When i get time I’m going to drop some jobs into the VM’s that will tax the virtual CPUs a bit more and compare results - maybe some Folding@Home activity Mmmmm that would definitley tax it.
Posted in Home Network, Microsoft, Performance Stats, Run ESX on a cheap Desktop PC, VMWare, Virtual Center 2.5, Windows, Windows 2008 | 3 Comments »
January 31, 2008
All running well, we had a power cut the other day but the PC didn’t automatically power back on when power was restored; I wonder if there is a BIOS setting for that - PC’s always used to have something along those lines.
Bit of manual intervention to switch it on and it was back and running.. no ill effects and all the VM’s started up normally.
I’m hammering it a bit now and have some Windows Server 2008 RC1 templates setup as I need to try out the new Terminal Services functionality so I’m hoping to build a small 2008 TS farm under ESX - no customization wizard available yet for 2008 
Maybe will see how Windows built in NLB works under ESX Mmmm.
So, will see what performance is like when I have a lot more going on..
Posted in Home Network, Microsoft, Terminal Services, VMWare, Windows 2008, Work | No Comments »
