Daz's bits and bobs …bytes bits
Getting the KMS count up over the initial threshold is a pain when you only have one server or one workstation to start with. Typically you need at least 5 servers or 25 client machine requesting activation before it will work.
This guy here as created a nice .exe that will trick KMS into thinking it has received all the required requests…
There are some good windows web proxies about. The only problem with them is they sometimes dont natively act as a transparent proxy. i.e. typically you’ll need to set your client machines to a specific IP and port.
I’ve used squid historically when setting up transparent proxies (mainly since it actually has a transparent mode) and this has worked well. Recently i thought i’d have a go at some of the windows solutions to see how they pan out.
netsh is going to be the tool to assist in this case. Here is a typical use for netsh;
netsh
>add v4tov4 listenport=80 connectaddress=127.0.0.1 connectport=8080
This should grab all traffic that hits your machine bound for port 80 and redirect to port 8080.
You’ll also need to make sure that routing is enabled, so your machine can act as a gateway between the requests and the real outbound gateway (typically your dsl modem)
This command will confirm if TRIM has been auto-enabled by windows 7
fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify
DisableDeleteNotify = 1 (Windows TRIM commands are disabled)
DisableDeleteNotify = 0 (Windows TRIM commands are enabled)
If you would like to force it on;
fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0
I’ve had some problems since my upgrade to virtualbox 2.2.0 on OpenSolaris. After some time all of my linux boxes seem to just die. The virtual machine just stops responding. Strangely there was no problem with my windows vms after the update.
From what i can tell it looks like the upgrade turned off “IO APIC” – this is the bit that seemed to cause the problem. Re-enabling this on all of my linux boxes seems to have fixed the problem. I’ll continue testing for another week and update this post if any problems re-occur.
Updated : 01/09/2009
Here is a bit more on IO APIC from the virtualbox wiki… (from a windows perspective)
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows
The hardware dependent portion of the Windows kernel is dubbed “Hardware Abstraction Layer” (HAL). While hardware vendor specific HALs have become very rare, there are still a number of HALs shipped by Microsoft. Here are the most common HALs (for more information, refer to this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309283):
Hal.dll (Standard PC)
Halacpi.dll (ACPI HAL)
Halaacpi.dll (ACPI HAL with IO APIC)If you perform a Windows installation with default settings in VirtualBox, Halacpi.dll will be chosen as VirtualBox enables ACPI by default but disables the IO APIC by default. A standard installation on a modern physical PC or VMware will usually result in Halaacpi.dll being chosen as most systems nowadays have an IO APIC and VMware chose to virtualize it by default (VirtualBox disables the IO APIC because it is more expensive to virtualize than a standard PIC). So as a first step, you either have to enable IO APIC support in VirtualBox or replace the HAL. Replacing the HAL can be done by booting the VM from the Windows CD and performing a repair installation.
Updated : 5/09/2009
I’ve had even more problems with opensolaris crashing completely after upgrading to the newer versions of virtualbox (3.0.4), and have since reverted back to 2.2.0 which has fixed alot of the hanging issues i have encountered
This is something i do in the lab so all of my vm’s are able to access iso’s etc (very handy for quick builds). Quite handy doing it through windows since its easiey enough to setup a windows network share to the same location and update various files via that.
This site has some good clear instructions : http://vmetc.com/2008/02/19/create-a-nfs-share-for-vm-iso-files-with-windows-2003-server-r2/
This is similar in windows 2008 — screenshots of settings below…
