Virtualizing my home windows server using ESXi 5.

 Software  No Responses »
Dec 082011
 

Due to having some time on my hands I thought I would set about virtualizing my home server, a Dell Optiplex 280, 2 1TB SATA disks running windows Server 2008 R1, to allow for some testing of different server / client and generally messing about without the need to constantly pull out hard disks and the rest. Here is my process for selecting what turned out to be a good low budget virtualization setup.

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.

Continue reading »

Share

Download FLV / Flash movie from whatever website

 Porn, Software  1 Response »
Nov 292011
 

After trying numerous different download programs, browser extensions, greasemonkey scripts with varying success to download primarily flv films from various NSFW sites I finally found that Chrome will give you the direct URL for the movie.

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…

Share

uTorrent using two internet connections

 Software  2 Responses »
Nov 222011
 

After trying for some time I finally got uTorrent to use two internet connection at the same time, though, I must say it definitely falls in the category of hack.

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.

Share

Windows Server 2008 R1 GPO Preferences Drive Mapping Terminal Session

 Software  No Responses »
Sep 222011
 

After spending a good few hours screwing around with Windows Server 2008 R1 and Terminal sessions with GPO Mapped Drives I finally found that drives would not be mapped without the reconnect option enabled.

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.

Share

Name Movie

 Dot Net 4, Software  No Responses »
Sep 172011
 

I wrote a quick vb console utility to rename folders into a nice format for movie downloads. When run Name Movie will parse all folder in its current directory and rename them into the format:

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

Share
 Posted by at 12:33 pm

Windows Server 2008 Standard boot failed on bfzonfal.sys

 News, Software  No Responses »
Feb 252011
 

To my horror after the builders have been screwing around under the stairs I found my server displaying the rather disconcerting message

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.

Share

Find Users

 Dot Net 2, Software  No Responses »
Feb 142011
 

I wrote this because I needed to know what user was logged onto what PC when remotely connecting to a supported server.

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.

Continue reading »

Share

Server Up

 Dot Net 2, Software  13 Responses »
Jan 172011
 

I wrote this utility as in the small business where I work we had no blanket tool for proactive monitoring of services that are supported by our company.

Server Up Image 1

Main Page

Server Up Image 2

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.

Continue reading »

Share

Communicate Problem

 Dot Net 2, Software  No Responses »
Jan 082011
 

A small utility that I wrote to help people on the helpdesk communicate information to prevent the duplication of jobs and to provide call handlers the information required to resolve the call before it become a job. Source code included. VB.NET 3

Example Notify Balloon

Example Notify Balloon

Main Form

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.

Continue reading »

Share
 Older Entries  Newer Entries