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Archive for August, 2009

Hyper-V – you may not have permission!

Sunday, August 16th, 2009


So I decided to replace VMWare ESXi with Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. The main reason for this was disk support. My home setup is pretty much cobbled togther from bits I had at hand. ESXi only supports SATA (or SCSI) disk and no support for USB drives, and I only had a couple of small SAta disks, but some large IDE and USB disks. I didn’t really want to buy a new large SATA disk, so I thought I would try Hyper-v.

Lets skip to now, and I have a working Hyper-V setup, with all my disks in, great, but what a saga it was getting here!

When I installed ESXi, it just worked. Installed it, downloaded the client, ran it, all good. Hyper-V was not the same simple process. I installed the Server 2008 r2 Hyper-V only server, which is essentially a Server 2008 Core install (cmd line only), with just the Hyper-V bits installed, to have as small a foot print as possible. This is great, but obviously means you need to admin it from another machine, not a problem. So I downloaded the Windows 7 Remote Admin Tools, installed them and launched the hyper-V console, that would be it you would think, oh no! You get an error about not having permissions to access the server. After much searching it turns out to remotely access the server you need to enable all sorts of firewall, DCOM and azman rights, the list is pretty large. Fortunately one of the developers on the Hyper-V project has developed a script to do most of these for you (outside of his job I might add, not paid by MS!), this can be found here – http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/HVRemote.

So I ran this tool, all ran fine, and so I thought that was it. I didn’t get the authorisation error, but then when I did connect, I got an error that “You might not have permission to perform this task”, ever so helpful. So I messed around for hours re-running scripts, changing settings etc, and then i fixed it. The error, that I was accessing the machine through an IP rather than a host name! Yes I should have checked it earlier, but what a stupid error, adn error message.

But, its up and working now, so lets see how it is.

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New site for Exchange Control Panel

Thursday, August 13th, 2009


I’ve created a CodePlex site for the Open Source Exchange Control Panel Project (got to get a better name!). Theres not much on it at the moment but hopefully it will give people who are interested the chance to express their interest and start some discussion.

Its located at http://ecp.codeplex.com/

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Open Source Exchange Control Panel – Part II

Saturday, August 8th, 2009


As you may have seen in a previous post, I have been working on developing a control panel for Microsoft Exchange. This was done as part of my University dissertation; It was completed back in May, and obviously did well as it got me a First.

This control panel was aimed at small businesses with no IT departments, and uses PowerShell as the backend to communicate with Exchange. This works great in small, low use environments. However when you start getting multiple users, using it a lot PowerShell becomes a bottleneck. I’ve since learned that using the HMC interface, or other Exchange API is probably better suited to this, and I want to look at doing this.

There are a number of control panels that cater for Exchange out there now, and I’m sure do it better than I could, so I’m not pursing this project to try and sell it and compete with them, I think the community needs a good, open source control panel for Exchange that lets small companies administer Exchange easily, whether its for use in the office, or hosting companies that want to start offering hosted exchange services, but can’t afford the exorbitant charges for other control panels, on top of there Exchange licenses.

It may be that the code I already have is no good, that we need to start again and re-think the whole design (in fact I think its quite likely, the code was produced by myself, with no outside input, thank you university supervisors for that), but what I have already gained from this project is knowledge, about the inner workings of Exchange, that can be used to go forward.

So I’m looking for help, from anyone who wants to get involved with a creating a simple, easy to use, Open Source control Panel for Exchange 2007, and maybe even getting in first for Exchange 2010. I’ll donate whatever code I have that is useful, but anyone involved in this would be on an equal footing, everyone’s ideas are worthwhile and I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who know more about this than me.

So, if you’re interested in joining and getting this project going, send me an email, mail [@] samcogan dot com, or leave a comment here. Hopefully there are some others who are as interested and excited about this as I am.

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Macbook Pro & Windows 7 RTM – Select CD-ROM Boot Type

Saturday, August 8th, 2009


I decided today to upgrade my Macbook Pro to Windows 7 RTM. It’s been running the release candidate for some time now, with no issue. However when I came to boot from the RTM CD, I found a problem. This problem only seems to be related to the 64bit version on the Macbook, I believe the 32bit version is fine.

When you boot from the CD you’re presented with a CMD window that says:

1.
2.
Select CD-ROM Boot Type:_

Obviously this is very helpful. Apparently this is due to the fact the Macs use EFI boot, which Windows 7 now supports, but the wrong version.

To fix this you’ll need a copy of ImgBurn to create a new Macbook compatible CD to use.

Essentially the process is:

1. Insert Windows Install disc into DVD drive

2. Using the build mode of ImgBurn, go to the advanced tab, then bootable disc and then select your DVD drive in the extract boot image drop down list. Go ahead and extract the boot image and store it somewhere on your hard drive.

3. Go to the information tab and add your DVD drive as the source file

4. Options tab, check that file system is ISO9660 + IDF and UDF revision is 1.02 (should be anyway by default)

5. Go to Advanced tab, sub tab Restrictions and further sub tab ISO9660: Set Folder / File length to Level X and tick the four check boxes at the bottom (allow more than 8 directory levels, Allow more than 255 characters in path, Allow files without Extensions, Don’t Add ‘;1’ Version number to Files. (Note it’s this bit that actually solves the problem the rest is effectively just duplicating the existing disc)

6. Move to the bootable disc tab: Click the tick box to make the image bootable, emulation type to “none (custom)” and the browse and select the boot image you previously extracted from the windows disc. Finally set Sectors to load to 4.

7. Click the big create iso button to create the bootable iso.

8. And use that iso to burn a new install disc.

This then booted fine for me.

Thanks to an excellent article by ‘Dangerous Dave’ to help solve this problem here.

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