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Space Cadet SteveMajor Steve To Ground Control - Can You Hear Me? February 28 Installing Ubuntu from PXE / Network BootI decided to get an old Toshiba laptop without CD or Floppy back up and running again. It can do USB-Floppy boot – but that is so messy. Decided to use Tosh’s BIOS support for PXE boot instead. On the Tosh you can press F12 or configure in BIOS to network boot. Network boot uses a system called PXE (Preboot EXecution Environment) which is a configured combination of DHCP and TFTP servers to publish boot images on a network. I’ve got a handful of machines running various operating systems combined with a WRT54G already running DHCP on the network. I decided use my Vista desktop on the basis of a decent keyboard and monitor to use while researching how to do it. Ubuntu Netboot Install While in the past it has been a PITA to create a network build for any Linux install, every Ubuntu build now has an equivalent netboot. Get the Ubuntu Intrepid version here…
Copy this whole directory and subdirectories. Configuring TFTP and DHCP The shortest path to get to a working DHCP and TFTP installation for Windows is probably Philippe Jounin's TFTPD32 program. I left the DHCP service running on the network router – though they’d tussle a little, only one would have a TFTP resolution. Took only a short while to setup the DHCP pool -but I ran into a wierd issue where the MAC address 46-46-3A-46-46-3A was stealing all the addresses in the pool. DHCP Server tab showed all addresses allocated to the same MAC address, and Syslog showed that it saw the booting machine’s DHCP/PXE discovery ping, but there were no addresses to assign. Unchecking “Ping Address before assignment” appeared to resolve that issue. I set the base directory to the location where I downloaded the netboot files, the rest of the settings were configured as follows:
With the allocation problem resolved the netboot process worked a charm – Ubuntu started installed. October 01 MYSQL x64 + Rails issue.Been playing around with OS/X, Ruby on Rails and recently installed Activestate Komodo - but ran into a crazy issue where mongrel choked on the 1st request. dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: _mysql_init Referenced from: /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle Expected in: dynamic lookup dyld: Symbol not found: _mysql_init Referenced from: /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/mysql.bundle Expected in: dynamic lookup Reading around on the web, plenty of folk had encountered the error. Lots of search hits out there. Originally found Benjamin's Post on his steps to cure the issue. (diagnosed that the bundle was built with the wrong CPU architecture) I couldn't get the ARCHFLAG environment variable to work with gem however. Turned out the problem was much simpler to solve tho'.Careful examination of the error message and the comparison with the gem directory showed a duplicate version of the mysql.bundle in: /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/lib/ Was toying with rebuilding the whole gem from scratch when I stumbled across Leonardo's blog post on the subject. Deleting this bundle restored status quo - thanks Leonardo! June 02 Installing Windows Server 2008 on Santa Rosa Macbook ProLog of installing Windows Server 2008 onto my new Macbook
Installation was surprisingly painless. Looking forward to trying to boot partition from VMWare Fusion October 31 Ladies and Gents - Check your security...While reading a Mac site about the recent Leopard launch I noticed an interesting comment - paraphrased "oddly Leopard turned off my firewall during upgrade"
I went and checked the state of my firewall too - equally oddly after upgrade my firewall was silently disabled too (this was definitely enabled prior to upgrade).
"Mac zealot" naysayers could leap in here and call it unnecessary - it call it defense in depth against possible exploits on public networks like WiFi nodes.
Bad job Apple... October 29 First Few Hours LeopardBraindump after a few hours playing around with Leopard .
October 28 Apple OutlayPrepping for my tour of Spain next week, I took another drive by the Apple store today. I wanted to buy a new MP3 player to replace the 4Gb Sansa that my daughter shanghai'd. I'd seen the new Nanos quite a few times but couldn't resist getting a new IPod Touch 16Gb instead. Naturally, the friction against buying was somewhat reduced when the checkbook was already open, so I couldn't resist the lure of a shiny Leopard case sitting on the shelves too.
Just installing Leopard on the Macbook Pro - about 1hr and 8mins to go. Getting installation started was a snap, popped the DVD, clicked install, restarted and away it went. Getting to a point where it'd show time remaining took a while, it's initial estimate was about 3hrs 20mins though this fell rapidly. More on that later.
[56mins left]
The Touch is slick - good battery life, nice screen, great web browser (though no EAP support in WiFi will be a drag at work), oh and it plays music :-) Just prepping for the daunting task of transcoding tonnes of WMA into MP3 (for ITunes sanctity). Not sure what tools I'll use for that yet - but know that it will take a few days to complete that task.
[16mins left]
I've been writing for less that 10mins, Leopard installs pretty quick - much quicker than my last upgrade install of Vista that's for sure. Apple has been very successful in selling the vision of a cohesive home environment, they've managed to pry more than $3,000 out of me so far - I'm sure there will be more in the future.
[11mins left]
I'll write more about the Leopard upgrade once I've got it up and running. October 07 1st Blog Post From OS/XBeen silent for a while with my head down doing some stuff around search, Codeplex, and the MSDN Magazine - may have something to talk about when you see me next. As the title suggests, since we last talked I bought a Macbook Pro. Yes - I know - yes - I've come to terms with it too. Using OS/X is different in many dimensions. Getting started with my Mac was incredibly quick - surfing the web on wifi within 7 minutes of opening the box. I've taken to using Apple's lightweight "Office" tools too - iWork Pages and Numbers - both tools are much cleaner, more design-oriented, and carry much less all-things-to-all-comers baggage than MSOffice. My reasons for picking up a Mac were two-fold:
The Macbook Pro is a pretty quick machine even with only 2Gb of RAM. Unlike many Microsoft Apple-owners I've resisted putting Vista on the machine. I've installed and started to use Eclipse and XCode on the Mac. I enjoy the slightly different lifestyle, though I still prefer Visual Studio 2005 in many aspects. Something readily apparent is the lack of canonical sources of information (equivalent to MSDN) in this space. On the subject of development - I've just arranged my flights and hotel for TechEd Europe 2007 in Barcelona. I'm there for the developer meeting from Nov 3rd 'til Nov 9th, and will be hovering around the MSDN booth and probably be doing a chalk and talk on MSDN Wiki and Tagging. Afterwards, with a few co-workers we're plotting to drive south to the Costa del Sol, Gibraltar, then maybe jump on the ferry to Cueta on the northern tip of Africa. April 11 *Newsflash* Old Dog Learns New TricksI've been looking for ways to cut the $20 or so each month that it costs to run my Win2K3 file/media/print server. I figured that having it on during that day is not too much of a bind, however leaving it on overnight pumping out noise and heat was a bit of a waste. Power Management is a little bit of well trodden scripting, plus a little BIOS and NIC settings voodoo. Shutting-down or hibernating the machine on a scheduled task was pretty easy. I used scheduled task to spin up a little script to call the
Noodling on waking the machine up took a little more effort. I started by looking at calling Wake-On-LAN applications from my router (DD-WRT with crond scheduler running). This seems a little complex, but luckily I chose to do the BIOS power management configuration 1st. Transpires my machine's BIOS supports wake-everyday at a particular time, a little test prove that it'd start even fully shutdown machines. With a little Wake-On-LAN magic to simplify those out-of-hours startups. (loads of WOL apps out there) I think I'm good to save 40-50% of my power consumption. Deli-cloud: March 12 MVP Summit 2007Today the I & folks from MSDN and DevDiv UE hung out at the MVP Summit in Seattle.
While the room sucked (loud air-conditioning, no projector screen, no presenter podium, no extension cables, crappy round-table layout, to name but a few points...) we had a pretty intense 2 hours of show, tell, and talk about MSDN Wiki, the MSDN Library, and Visual Studio 2005. Many familiar faces were in attendance, and despite many being jet-lagged after transcontinental travel they were very animated too! November 29 Using ADAM with ASP.NET 2.0 & ActiveDirectoryMembershipProviderI've been wrestling with Active Directory For Applications (ADAM) and the ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider over the past few days for a prototype. I've been working towards getting a Trusted Credentials SSL connection from IIS Membership to ADAM as a authentication/authorization store. The path to this goal is pretty tricky - other documented attempts on the web focus on insecure connections. Also the ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider documentation on how this should work is at best called "light". The steps looked like this.
So after 48hrs of debugging I could get LDP to connect to ADAM over SSL. With more detail added by work from Dan and Erlend, I walked through the remainder of the setup then ran into the message below. There was absolutely nothing on the web about this is...
I wasting a lot of time trying things. Again Event Viewer to the rescue - "ANONYMOUS LOGON" events were coming from the ADAM logins - ASP.NET wasn't impersonating the directory privileged AppPool account . By switching on ASP.NET impersonation, everything began to fire on all cylinders. Now onto using ADAM to create SPUser objects for MOSS 2007 :) Big props to Erlend Oftedal, Dan Sellers, for blazing the trail and providing such useful walkthroughs. |
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