Austin Maliszewski's Blog

While sorting through some of my old computer stuff, I found something very interesting: a set of 5.25″ floppy disks and a manual for Windows.

That’s right, for Windows. Windows 1.0 to be exact.

Apparently someone in my family bought a Zenith Z-100 or Z-200 computer in 1986 which came bundled with Windows 1. This machine was almost IBM Compatible but not 100%. However, the disks that it came with work fine on an IBM Compatible machine.

According to the manual, I need an 8086 or 8088 with 320K memory, two floppy drives, and a CRT. It also says that I can consult the Software Consultation computer bulletin board by modem at (616) 982-3503 if I need help.

For the heck of it, I dug out my 5.25″ floppy drive and copied the disks into disk images and set it up in VirtualBox. And it’s fast. In fact, it loads so quickly that I don’t even get to see the Windows splash screen. I’m going to have to look for some slightly more authentic hardware to run it on. I think I’ve got an original Pentium 65MHz box somewhere around here. I know I used to have one. It was my first PC.

Some things never change. Notepad hasn’t changed (much) in 25 years:

OMG, I can multitask!

Paint’s changed a lot:

I guess there wasn’t all that much to control back then:

Don’t forget to end your Windows Session:

At Payton, we use Ghost to help us administer all the client PCs in the building. Each family of PCs gets its own image (with some minor variations since certain departments require specialized software that can’t be easily managed using GPOs) which is deployed every few months from a central server with multicast.

In the past, we’ve always booted the PCs with Ghost Boot CDs which allowed them to connect to the GhostCast Session. We didn’t have good luck with Ghost Console working properly, so we always did it this way. (Though I really want to start using WDS). However, recently, we acquired 100 notebook PCs that don’t have optical drives. Obviously, this was a problem. We were either going to have to use a USB CD drive or a USB floppy and neither would have been pretty for imaging 100 PCs.

There are several ways of network booting for Ghost. I’m going to go over two ways. One is with all free or shareware software and the other, is the way we ended up doing it and that’s with 3Com Boot Services since Symantec Ghost 8 Corporate includes it. Let me say that that software is a piece of work. It has a UI dating from the Windows 3.11 days. However, it actually works, when you get around its quirkiness. (I picked the 3Com route because you can configure the PXE server to run in DHCP Proxy mode which was critical since we don’t have any control over the DHCP server.)

Instead of me going over everything with the free/shareware software way, let me just provide a link. His instructions are great and got me a working setup. (Just don’t use any of the included software, it’s a few years out of date). Link from Damian Jackson at Lilydale Heights College. Point of Interest: The only drive letter that the Ghost Boot Wizard is willing to work with for creating the floppy image is A:/. You might need to disable your system’s actual floppy drive if you’re not using real disks (or don’t have physical access to the server). That took me hours to figure out.

It’s also probably not worth me going over the 3Com Boot Services way since it comes with a perfectly good manual on the CD. However, there are a few things which are covered in the manual, but not inherently obvious if you don’t read the manual. The rest is straight forward and you probably won’t have to read the manual. This is the brief version of everything.

First off, you need to create a Network Boot Image using the Ghost Boot Wizard. You can probably figure this out. Make sure to use the PXE Network Driver. I made two images. One has no command line parameters (which I called Ghost Manual) and the other has the parameters “-ja=[sessionname] -sure” where [sessionname] is equal to the name we use for our GhostCasting sessions. This I called Ghost Automatic since it automatically connects to the session.

Now you need to prep 3Com Boot Services. On your Start Menu under 3Com Boot Services is the 3Com Boot Image Editor. Open that up and select “Create a PXE menu boot file”. Create your menu file. Here’s what mine looks like.

PXE Boot Menu in 3Com Boot Image Editor

When you’re done go ahead and save it. You can name it if you like or just leave it as “mba.pxe”. The next step is to edit the BOOTPTAB file. Which you can do by opening the appropriately named BOOTPTAB Editor. This whole BOOTPTAB thing is a little clunky. The default BOOTPTAB file has a couple of entries. Go ahead and nuke those. Now, go to Edit and Add Host. This is where it gets a little weird. This is how you fill it out:

Adding a new host into BOOTPTAB

Yes, those are really question marks. You can also specify a MAC address, but putting in all question marks serves as a wildcard to allow all clients. Hit “Ok.” Now your BOOTPTAB file should look like this:

Sample Configuration

Go ahead and save that. Now, you can launch the PXE Server and the TFTP Server. (Both must be running. You can make them services if you’d like.) When you first launch the PXE Server it will check to see if the PC you’re running it on is a DHCP server. If it’s not, it will ask you if you’d like it to be a DHCP Proxy. Tell it that you would. You’re all done on the server side.

Now, go to one of your client PCs and tell it to boot from LAN. If you did everything correctly, you’ll get a menu that looks something like this (depending on your configuration).

PXE Boot Menu

Happy Ghosting!

So, it’s summer, and in theory, since school’s out, I’m supposed to have more time. Actually, I seem to have less. I’ve been so busy lately (with some really neat things and some boring things) that I haven’t had time to blog about them.

So, in the next few days, I’m going to force myself to blog about a couple of things.

1. Terminal Services: Yes, I will actually post that guide to setting up TS and making it work.
2. Network Booting Ghost
3. Doing a network boot when you don’t control the DHCP server.
3. SSL Certs are a PITA and kind of stupid
4. Windows 7 and 2008R2
5. Books
6. TI Nspire CAS stuff

I’ve been using the Windows 7 RC the past few days and I’m generally impressed with how well it runs. For one thing, it runs quite comfortably on only 512MB of RAM. It even runs nicely in a VM, with no real performance issues. It’s highly usable, even when virtualized, which is more than Vista can say. It’s also really pretty. The UI is really nice, in a way, it’s much more like OS X. The taskbar has been totally redesigned, it’s now like the dock in OS X.

Within the next week or so, I’m going to switch my primary PC to Windows 7 and we’ll see how it goes. I’ll write more later.

For the past few days, I’ve been fighting trying to rearrange the order of RemoteApp programs in Web Access. I figured out that it was sorting based on the name of the RemoteApp’s RDP file. I just couldn’t figure out how to change the name of an App’s RDP file without breaking everything. Tonight, I was installing a new app onto one of my TS machines and I happened to notice that when you right click on an App in RemoteApp manager and select properties there is a field called alias. This alias field corresponds to the name of the RDP file. When you change the name here, it will rename the file and update Web Access. By changing the names here (and knowing that Web Access goes in alphabetical order of these aliases) you can rearrange the order of RemoteApps in Web Access.

Last week, I had a user come by the tech office who needed to open and print a document created with OpenOffice.org. While we’re a pretty open environment at Payton, we are somewhat Microsoft, and oddly enough we didn’t have OpenOffice installed anywhere, since the only machines that run Linux are servers and we have Microsoft Office on all the workstations. I downloaded and installed it to my personal machine and converted his documents and he was on his way. However, this got me thinking. There had to be way to open OpenDocument files in Microsoft Office. This is what I came up with: The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office (http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/). It’s free and it works, so it fits the bill for me. My only real complaint is that you need a Sun account to download the plugin (although you probably already have one).

Conveniently ESXi includes a way to increase the size of a virtual hard disk. However, like everything else in ESXi it is neither easy to find nor easy to make work. To save you the effort, here’s how to do it. First, you need to delete any and all snapshots. It won’t work if you have any snapshots. (Don’t worry, deleting them just merges them into the flat disk and deletes the deltas. You won’t lose any information.)

If you have snapshots on the virtual drive you can tell ESXi to make the change. ESXi tells you it resized the disk but it never actually does it. (It doesn’t give an error message, it just doesn’t work). I’d recommend shutting down your VM just in case, though you’re supposed to be able to do it to a live VM the thought is a bit scary for me.

Go to your VM’s Getting Started page in Infrastructure Client and click on “Edit virtual machine settings”. On the left side, there’s an option that says “Hard Disk” and a number. Click that. That brings up this menu:

VMWare ESXi Properties Menu. VHD Settings

On the right, you’ll notice that you can adjust the disk capacity. You can make the drive larger (or smaller) as needed by adjusting the New Size tab. It’s not recommended that you mess with any of the other settings as changing them can confuse your operating system and prevent it from booting. That’s it. You’re done, now you just need to resize the partition so that your OS can make use of the new space.

(While it may seem like I’ve been bashing ESXi, it really is a great product. Once you get it running and figure out its quirks it’s one of the best virtualization solutions around. And it’s free. For what more can you ask?)

So, in the middle of December, I wrote a posting praising Microsoft for the way TS 2008 turned out. This was based on my theoretical knowledge of the software. However, I’ve actually gotten around to setting it up. My opinion of the service has really been confirmed. It’s great stuff once you manage to get it setup. That’s where there’s a bit of a problem. Getting it setup isn’t hard, it’s just not easy. The main point, on which I was stuck for a while, is that you absolutely must have an SSL Certificate signed by a Microsoft Approved CA (or jump through some hoops, more on that later). It’s not like a regular website where you can just ignore an invalid certificate. RDC requires that the certificate come from a trusted CA. There are hundreds of these; more get added every month or so through Windows Update. You can, however, trust yourself as a CA. Then you can get around having an SSL Certificate, however, that’s cumbersome for IT people and borderline impossible for normal people. (Note: This is a way to check to see if the setup is working before you buy that certificate. Plug to GoDaddy for the $29.99/yr certificate that is MS trusted.)

I’m going to document a complete setup in the coming days.

A few weeks ago, I replaced my Gateway Tablet PC under Best Buy’s extended warranty no-lemon policy. In exchange for that computer, I got one of HP’s newest tablets, the TouchSmart tx2-1025dx. My initial impression is actually really good. I’ve never really liked Vista, but on this PC it just works. Granted, this is a really powerful PC. It’s got 4GB of RAM, 320GB of HD and a decent AMD dual core 64-bit processor. This said, the integration of touch into the operating system is great. This machine has multitouch technology on the display. Basically, it’s like a big iPhone/iPod Touch running Windows Vista. This is all really well integrated into Vista.

This PC has nTrig’s latest capacitive and active digitizer where you can use both your fingers and a electrostatic pen. The pen is quite good. My only complaint about the pen is the lack of an eraser, but I’ve heard that one’s in development. The touch screen is also really good. I find myself using the touch screen pretty often. Heck, I find myself in tablet mode far more often than I did with the old PC.

All in all, I’m really impressed. This could very well become my primary PC, especially, if it becomes my notebook.

Moving a WordPress installation from one server to another or from one host to another is actually quite simple. There are several ways in which to do it.

Way #1:

1) Install WordPress on the new server using its installer.
2) Replace the newly created database with your old one.
3) Edit the wp1_options table to reflect any changes in your hostname.
4) Copy any remaining file elements such as themes (without the proper theme all you’ll get is a blank page) and uploads.
5) Go to yoursite.tld/wp-admin and update the database if necessary.
6) Done!

Way #2:

1) Copy your WordPress directory to your new site.
2) Copy over your database to your new site.
3) Edit the wp-settings.php file to reflect your new database information
4) Edit the wp1_options table in the database to reflect changes in your hostname.
5) Done!

I took way #1 because it was easier for me. I didn’t really have any uploads, and only one theme, so it was easy enough just to copy those and the DB. I also needed to upgrade my version of WordPress, so I killed two birds with one stone anyway.