Virtualization Software

Seeing as VMWare ESXi 5 is free and I decided to give it a shot. I have already been using VMWare player for some time and found it to be very good. ESXi 5 has some hardware requirements, and if you are an Intel fanboy like me then they are as follows:

1. Processor is 64bit.
2. Processor supports: VT-x
3. Processor supports: VT-d: for direct mapping of a piece of hardware for an individual virtual machine.
4. Computer BIOS Supports virtualization of the above.

Hardware Selection

Processor

Here are the intel processors I looked at (Processor, Release Date, VT-x Support, VT-d Support):

1. T7500: Q3’06, VT-x: YES
2. Q9400: Q3’08, VT-x: YES, VT-d: YES (Quad 2.6=10.4)
3. E5400: Q1’09, VT-x: ?, VT-d: NO
4. E5800: Q4’10, VT-x: YES, VT-d: NO (Dual 3.2=6.4)

I decided that a Q9400 processor was for me.

Case, Motherboard / Base Unit.

My preference for hardware is Dell, second hand they are cheaper than putting a machine together from scratch, even from second hand components. So what Dell’s have what I need? This wiki page gives the breakdown for the models. I was looking for:

1. Relatively modern.
2. Supports the Q9400 processor.
3. DDR3, 4 slots.
4. SATA, 4 internal controllers.
5. Mint Tower

I selected the Dell Optiplex 780. A search on ebay found it to be £300. By best offer I got it for £275.

Ram

I got 2x 2x4gb DDR3 1333 totalling 16GB, from kikatek, cheaper than ebay by £5 per stick for the branded Corsair XMS3. (£50)

New HDD

Western Digital Green 2TB. Seeing as the 1TB drives have gone up in price to around £70 because of Thailand I looked at 2TB and found one on ebay for £80. I would have normally paid £35 for a TB so £80 for a 2TB was still inline with the old price.

Installation Considerations

1. I wanted the 2 gig disk to contain the EXSi installation and virtual machines for testing and use.
2. I didn’t want to virtualize the data disks (2 TB of data across 2 disks). I wanted to be able to use standard NTFS tools to check for errors in the event of disk failure / faults seeing as I am using second hand disks.
3. I needed certain usb devices to be attached to certain VMs.
4. I needed certain Hardware to be used exclusively by certain VMs.

Installation

1. (New machine) Put in the 2TB drive.
2. (New machine) Enabled BIOS support for virtualization.
3. (Old Machine) Downloaded and Burnt ESXi 5 to CD
4. (New machine) Inserted and installed ESXi 5 CD.
5. (New machine) Booted and entered setup to change name and assign static IP.
6. (Old machine) Downloaded the vSphere Standalone Converter.
7. (Laptop) Downloaded and installed vSphere Client.
8. (Old machine) Standalone converter: chose to convert my old server but excluded the data drives and send to ESXi Server. (With the data drives it would mean sending 2TB of data across the network and take forever.
9. Turned off both machines.
10. Took out 2xTB drives from the old server and put in new.
11. (New Machine) Turned on.
12. (Laptop) Accessed ESXi and in / configuration / security: Enabled ESXi Console and SSH Server.
13. (Laptop) Using Putty connected to ESXi and ran through these instructions to enable passthrough to disk for my data drives and now virtualized windows server.
14. (Laptop) Started up the VM of my server using vSphere Client, Logged in via Console, waited for all the hardware to be installed. Installed VMTools via vSphere, setup the new virtual network adapter.
15. Ran some tests and found everything to be working, yay.
16. Proceeded to create numerous other virtual machines of various OSes without ever having to unplug anything swap anything or move from my laptop.

Conclusion

Well after selling the 500GB drive (£45) and memory (£20) that came with the new Optiplex. And my old server (£60). This project cost £200.

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Here is how

1. Find your tube.
2. View the tube
3. Right click somewhere and select “inspect element”
4. Click “Network”
5. Refresh the tube page.
6. Play the video.
7. Located the flv in the list it will be the one with an expanding bar indicating downloading on the right
8. Right click and “copy link address”.
9. Now you have the address put it into something like free download manager to rip it from the site in no time. Or just put it into the address bar to have your browser download it.

This process works on everything I have tested it on so far. youtube, DrTuber, XHamster, Redtube, YourPorno and well it seems to work for them all…

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What’s the Problem?

Well core of the problem is that on one system you can’t make use of two default gateways, concurrently, they can be configured however whichever gateway is configured with the lower metric will be used no matter what. All in all that means you may have two network adapters connected to two different routers but only one will be used for net traffic.

What’s the solution?

A virtual machine. Download VM Player and setup a copy of windows XPin it. Run uTorrent in there using the second network adapter in bridge mode.

Step By Step

1. Install uTorrent
2. Configure uTorrent to always use the same port number.
3. Start some torrent.
4. Download and install VM Player.
5. Install a copy of windows XP as a virtual machine (cause it’s small).
6. Disable the “VMware bridge protocol” from all of your network adapters but for the adapter what is your secondary connection to the internet.
7. Configure the VM’s network adapter to use bridge mode.
8. Launch your virtual machine.
9. Download and install uTorrent in the VM.
10. Download the exact same .torrent file, or copy it to the VM (use a usb stick is easiest).
11. Now the torrent has started on both the host machine and the virtual machine add the hosts machines ip for the secondary network adapter and port number for uTorrent as a peer to the list in the virtual machine. It may well find it anyway if local peer discovery is on.

What’s the result?

With the above your host and virtual machine both download the torrent via the two different network connection and pass what they download to each other. When the download is finished, you can delete the torrent and data from the vm completely and just have the one on the host machine remain. If your two network connection are roughly the same you will half the download time for a torrent. yay. Now getting those 360 gig rainbow tables doesn’t take 3 days.

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So there you go, if you are having similar problems, ignore the help stating the reconnect is the same as persistent connections, it is required for them to be mapped at all.

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Movie Name (XXXX)

Where XXXX is the year the file was produced. So

13.Assassins.2010.RERip.XviD.AC3-ViSiON

becomes:

13 Assassins (2010)

Link to download.

This is freeware, blah blah

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Windows can not load due to bfzonfal.sys being missing or corrupt

Well a search on google for said driver found a massive total of zero.

ZERO? the collective brain of the online world has never heard of bfzonfal.sys

Well I though it sounded a strange name. After a significant amount of drinking and cursing of builders and lamenting of never having taken a backup I decided to go out and get more drunk.

On return I had an enlightening thought, just shove the windows 7 ultimate CD in as the server CD has long since been covered in builders rubble and run up a command prompt.

navigate to system32\drivers and found the bfzonfal.sys driver to be 0k. Ok so I moved it elsewhere, c:\ seemed good. rebooted and all good, yay!

To celebrate I got more drunk and puked out this blog in the hope someone else my find this useful.

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Example Output


Find Users v0.1 (c) 2011 Chris

Computer               Username               Desciption
TREEBEARD          *                         Window 7 64 Ultimate
STORMCROW        Chris.KINGS          Kings Server
BOMBADIL            Maxy                     Maxy's Laptop

Press any key to exit


Purpose

To find the users who are logged onto network connected Windows Workstations from a server logged on a domain admin account.

Features

Multi threaded.
Console application

Performs a “net view” and parses the output.
Checks the last user logged on via a remote registry check
Failing the above checks “\\computer\c$\Users” for the most recently modified directory
Failing the above checks “\\computer\c$\Documents and Settings” for the most recently modified directory
Failing that labels the computer with a * to denote probable remote registry/remote admin share/firewall problem.

This whole app basically acts as a net view++ console command giving the user logged onto the machine

Limitations

List does not return sorted, but speed at which a response is collected.
If net view returns nothing so will this util.

Legal

Use this at you own risk. I am not responsible for anything that happens from you running this software.
You can modify and use the code however you want.
You can distribute the code in whatever way you want.
This is freeware.

Donate

I give this out for free but if you find it useful then please:

Download

Here

Source code in VB.NET included, binaries included, compiled for .NET 2, though can be change to whatever if you want.

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Main Page

Popup example

Purpose

A simple utility that scans ports and provides a balloon tooltip notifying the user of ports that are unavailable

Feature

Runs upto 64 concurrent threads checking if ports are open.
Displays in a listview that can be sorted by column.
Name and group a service.
Enable and disable particular  services from scan.
Auto scan every 15 minutes.
Source code included.
Imports from Remote Desktop Manager rdm files
Minimises to system tray
Records last seen open and last seen closed times.

Limitations

Doesn’t make coffee for you

Legal

Use this at you own risk. I am not responsible for anything that happens from you running this software.
You can modify and use the code however you want.
You can distribute the code in whatever way you want.
This is freeware.

Donate

I give this out for free but if you find it useful then please:

Download

Here

Source code in VB.NET included, binaries included, compiles for .NET 3, though can be change to 4.5 if you want.

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Example Notify Balloon

Main Form

Purpose

To provide the ability to anyone in a group of people to communicate a piece of information that will be distributed to other users of the utility in the form of a toolbar popup. The need I had for this was that working on a helpdesk as I do, I may know of a problem that if the call handlers knew about then they could tell people phoning up that the problem they are facing will be resolved in time rather than creating duplicate jobs.

Use

You can create an issue.
You can acknowledge an issue.
You update an issue.
You can delete an issue.
Updated issue need to re acknowledged by others.
Summary is only displayed in balloon popup, Full text is displayed in the utility.

Features

Clients check for issues every minute
Popups with unacknowledged issues are shown every 15 minutes

Limitations

You can only have 255 chars in a popup, there is no check, additional will be cut.
Utility must be run from a network drive that all people have access to as this simple utility reads from a text file located in the same dir as the exe.
There is no log
Anyone can delete an issue, there is no log

Legal

Use this at you own risk. I am not responsible for anything that happens from you running this software.
You can modify and use the code however you want.
You can distribute the code in whatever way you want.

Donate

I give this out for free but if you find it useful then please:

Download

Here

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