Righteous Hack

Installing Windows 8 on this tablet went off without a hitch. For a severely under powered device it is actually running Windows 8 very well. After reading numerous comments around the net about how slow it was running Win8, I was curious to find out for myself.
So far I have only found 2 issues. The first being the Windows 7 N-Trig drivers were not compatible with Win8. Secondly the Dell Atheros Wifi drivers were also not compatible. The N-trig issue was an easy fix. N-Trig has drivers on their site at n-trig.com that are compatible with Win8. The wifi on the other hand took some more tinkering. After a couple hours of learning the new UI and figuring out where everything was I decided to take the time to get Wifi up and running. The Dell A06 driver install package as I mentioned above is not compatible with Win8. However it does have the required driver packaged up inside. Before unpacking the install application I tried to install it under Windows 7 compatibility mode which also did not work.

Here are the steps I took to get the wifi driver installed:
Execute the installer package and it will extract the files into your Temp folder and the Atheros Installer.msi will be located in one of the {insert random number and text here} folders. The installer itself will throw an error stating that you must be using Windows 7.
Before you hit OK, using windows explorer browse to your C:\Users\yourusername\AppData\Local\Temp\ folder and find the Atheros Installer.msi. Copy or move that file to wherever you want, just make sure you remember where you put it. It is now safe to hit OK on the Dell Installer.
The installer will most likely clean up the temp folder automatically and you would not be able to find the file after hitting OK.
Use msiexec to extract the contents of the installer.
Open up a command prompt with administrator privileges. Once there the following command will be used: msiexec /a filepath to MSI file /qb TARGETDIR=filepath to target folder.
Now look in your Device Manager you should have an exclamation point listed next to SDIO Device. Click on that and update driver. Choose the folder you extracted the msi to and Windows will take care of the rest.
If for some reason you already have a driver listed for your dell mini card you will have to uninstall the driver and reboot. Upon reboot follow the above instructions.

For a myriad of reasons, I have been looking at alternatives to VMware ESXi for a few months. Virtualizing a few machines here and there has proven educational. Learning the ropes of working with qemu/kvm, libvirt, and virsh has been challenging at times, but overall a pleasure to work with. Working with kvm is great although it takes some getting use to coming from a VMware/ESXi centric environment.

Up to this point all of the virtual machines that I had worked with were new systems. After some research and a few backups of my current VMs running on one of my ESXi hosts, I decided to migrate a few production VMs. Here are the steps that I used to move virtual machines over from a licensed vSphere 4.1 installation to a Linux host running qemu/kvm.

For starters, be sure that you have full backups of any VMs that you plan on working with. With that out of the way, you are ready to start:

1. Remove all snapshots from the virtual machine across all virtual disks.

2. Uninstall VMware Tools and then perform a clean shutdown of the guest operating system.

3. Copy the virtual hard disk(s) over to the qemu/kvm host. The virtual disk is typically the largest file within a VM’s directory and will usually be named something like ‘guestname-flat.vmdk’

4. On the qemu/kvm host, change to the directory containing the .vmdk file. Assuming you are using qcow2 disk images, run the following command to convert the .vmdk: kvm-img convert -O qcow2 guestname-flat.vmdk newguestname.qcow2

5. Create a new VM on the qemu/kvm host and choose the recently converted disk image as your existing drive/image. It is important that you create your new guest with the same or similar settings as it had before. I recommend cloning the MAC address over to the new guest for added simplicity with NIC detection, assignment, and third party software licensing.

6. Attempt to boot the system. Depending upon your guests virtual disk settings and other factors, the system may hang during boot. Edit your virtual machine and set the controller type to SCSI assuming that was the controller type back on ESXi.

At this point your system should be up and running on the new host. I did find notes and suggestions that qemu/kvm can run vmdk files/disk images, but there seemed to be a handful of caveats so I decided to convert the vmdk’s over to a native format.

–himuraken

FreeDNS
Purchase trans
Initiate trans
beer!

Whether you are participating in MoveYourDomainDay or just want to get away from the terrible user interface that GoDaddy uses, there are a few good things to know.

1. Make sure your whois info has a proper email address listed. DO NOT change anything else or you risk locking up that domain for an additional 30-60 days.

2. Unlock your domains with the GoDaddy DomainManager.

3. Send authorization codes via email to the administrative contact by choosing Send By Email under the Domain Info area of the DomainManager.

If you are switching over to NameCheap, they offer great instructions on their site here. Currently, to entice additional business and to fight SOPA, NameCheap and Gandi.net are donating a portion of each domain transfer to the EFF.

–himuraken

Ever needed to test your ability to send or receive faxes? Usually, no one is around to send you a test, or you’d prefer not to bother a client with testing your equipment. HP has a little known service that you can use to test faxing in both directions for free. Simply send a one page text only fax to 1-888-hpfaxme (1-888-473-2963) and wait a few minutes. After a short while, you should receive a fax back from HP.

The official HP page for this service can be found by clicking this link.

So several months ago, I like the rest of the world, was notified that end of life (EOL) for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala would happening. In the news blurb/mailing list, wherever I found it, I walked away thinking that security updates would cease to exist.

In preparation for the upgrade, I went ahead and cloned the 9.10 server and proceeded to upgrade the server to Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. This went off without a hitch from what I could tell and I scheduled the upgrade of the production server with my last client running 9.10.

Without fail, life happens, clients have things come up, and the upgrade never happened. Fast forward to present day and time, and my client tried installing a package using apt-get and received a slew of errors. Looking into the issue a bit further and I found the repositories gone. Interestingly enough, when EOL occurs for an Ubuntu release, it really ends, and not just for the security patches.

So one is left wondering, “how can I sudo apt-get install update-manager-core & sudo do-release-upgrade when I can’t even do a simple sudo apt-get update?” Solution: EOL upgrade. There are several different ways to go about this, the best are detailed here. At the time of this writing, the link is a little unclear about how to get 9.10 to 10.04 so here is the quick and easy way:

1. Backup your current sources.list:
sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list ~/sources.list

2. Create a new sources.list:
sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list

3. Add/paste in archive release repositories substituting CODENAME for release jaunty, karmic, etc:

## EOL upgrade sources.list
# Required
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ CODENAME main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ CODENAME-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ CODENAME-security main restricted universe multiverse

# Optional
#deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ CODENAME-backports main restricted universe multiverse

4. Update repositories and install update manager
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

5. Initiate the upgrade
sudo do-release-upgrade

6. Enjoy!

–Himuraken

Bought my signifigant other a Galaxy Tablet for an upcoming trip and decided to get her up and running with WiFi tethering. I tether my laptops to my Droid’s frequently and love it. Long story short, it wasn’t as straight forward as I had hoped. After several hours of frustrating work trying to get a wifi only Samsung Galaxy tablet connected to an ad-hoc network, I finally have found a solution. The problem is that I needed to be able to connect the tablet to one of our rooted Droid 1 phones which are running wifi tether. This is quite difficult (thanks Google) to do because Android filters out and hides ad-hoc networks. After trying many things including switching out the wpa_supplicant for a different one via Root Explorer, I have found the following to work well. Keep in mind that simply allowing the OS to connect to ad-hoc networks would be ideal.

Be sure to have a working setup of wifi tether running on your phone if that is where you are sourcing the ad-hoc connection.

Step 1: Root your tablet using Z4root and reboot as required.
Step 2: Install ZT-180 on the tablet from the Android Market.
Step 3: Configure the ZT-180 application to connect to the SSID of your wifi tether application.
Step 4: Switch to ad-hoc mode within ZT-180 and enjoy

It appears to me that the ZT app acts as a proxy between the tablet and the ad-hoc peer.

Truly shame on Google here, there are so many user forums filled to the brim with requests and issues. I can only begin to think of the number of people who have to void warranties and/or for go support by rooting their devices to do something the iPad allows by default.

–himuraken

When working with virtual machines, it is often advantageous to over allocate and under utilize resources. When it comes to virtual hard disks, this is even more common place. On low use or low demand servers, I always use thin provisioning. This saves disk space by only using physical disk space when the guest actually uses the virtual disk. But what about those disks that were created using the thick option, or brought over as thick automatically during a P2V conversion? Time to convert your thick virtual disk to thin.

As always, I recommend backing up all of your data and knowing what you are doing. Test this in a non-production environment.

Converting disks from thick to thin is actually quite easy and can be accomplished using these steps:

1. Log into your ESX host using SSH and cd into the VM directory that contains your virtual disk.

2. Shutdown the VM so that we can get exlusive access to the virtual disk.

3. Run vmkfstools -i yourthickdisk.vmdk -d thin yourthindisk.vmdk

4. Edit the settings for your VM and remove the existing drive. Add a new hard drive and choose the existing drive option.

5. Boot the VM and enjoy.

Note: Dont forget to go back to ESX server and remove the old .vmdk and -flat.vmdk files once you are sure that your VM is operating normally off the thin disk.

–Himuraken