A Blast From the Past

An old friend whom I have not talked to for over a year suddenly emailed me asking how I was doing. I am the kind of person who does not like in the past which is rather ironic given that one of my interests is history. Should I ignore her and keep on moving forward or try to relink the connection? Life is filled with decisions like this.

Difference between Netbackup and Backup Exec

My experience with data backups so far has been with simple methods for small networks mostly workgroup. I have used programs like SecondCopy2000, Corbian Backup, and batch files. I want to know more about enterprise level backup application packages. I have heard about Backup Exec because I have supported networks that use it but personally I have never managed it. Today, I heard about Netbackup. Because both are sold by Symantec, it begs the question: what is the difference? Obviously these two programs are not competitors, at least not of a one-to-one kind like Office and OpenOffice. The best answer I have found so far was this little snippet:

Netbackup is more expensive than Backup Exec. What do you get for your money?
The most obvious difference between Netbackup and Backup Exec, is that Netbackup is designed for BIG business. Backup Exec is aimed more at small and medium business. Over recent years, Backup Exec has gained features to make it more scalable and manageable, and improve its functionality. Specific example of this are the Central Admin Server Option, and the addition of encryption capabilities. Recently Netbackup has been adding packages (the non-Enterprise versions) which target small and medium business.

State of the world in 2007

I know, it's a vague title given how big the world is. Other than having to keep up with the blistering pace of technologies, I am a bit of a news junkie. Certainly 2007 is not a slow year for news. I can spend all day trying to recap what has happened in the world this year, but there were a few events that I followed closely.

Politics is always on the news. Being an American, I follow what politicians are doing "in the interest of the American people". Given that there are two main camps in American politics, no one can ever satisfy everyone. Without going into details, I just want to say that politicians do what politicians do: trying to stay in power at the cost of ethics and fair play. It's hard to separate the politician from the person doing the job. I myself have to do things that are against my character because it is my job. I can name a few politicians who did despicable things, but did they do it out of political expedience or because of a personal character flaw? No one is perfect, but the political image has to be without blemish. I think the average person expects too much from politicians. As long as these people do not commit something that is so atrocious, we have to keep their actions in perspective.

It's good to be back

It's good to be back. The last 10 months have been hectic to say the least. First of all, I changed jobs. That in itself is a major life change, but on top of that I started my own tech support business. So now, I have a regular full-time job in addition to running my own business. Let me tell you, starting a new business is hard. So much planning, so much paperwork. Hope 2008 is more fun -- not that 2007 is not fun. It has its moments.

I plan to post more thoughts on issues outside high tech.

Running VMWare Server as a service

I found this posting concerning this matter. A service in Windows is a application that loads up before any user logs in.

I cannot find instructions on how to run Server as a service. any pointers?You don't run Server as a service. Well, I guess actually it already IS.You configure individual guests to run as a service. Edit VM settings-->Options Tab-->Startup & Shutdown list item. In top section, specify either System, or a specific user account (and password) to run the guest as. In the bottom section, specify what action you want this guest to take on host powerup and shutdown.>Is there no way to run WS as a service? Not built into the product. You can hack it using NTSRV or SRVAny. But it's not a clean/complete way.

Run Vista for 120 days before activation

I got this tip from the Internet.

This particular method, which has been widely discussed on the Internet, consists of a single command run in an administrative prompt: slmgr –rearm. slmgr is a script packaged with Windows Vista that lets administrators perform different tasks with the machine's licensing information.

Using the command, admins can, among other things, add or remove product keys (handy if you need to change the key from the command line), erase the product key from the Registry so that it cannot be read and used maliciously by a third-party program (since the license key doesn't need to reside in the Registry anyway), and "reset the licensing status of the machine." This last function is what -rearm does, and you can do it up to three times.

Note: The commands take several seconds to execute, so if you run slmgr and nothing seems to happen at first, that's nothing to worry about.

Here's the obvious question: If the 120-day grace period was possible in the first place, why didn't Microsoft simply allow Vista to run for 120 days without a key from the get-go? In theory, that would have made it possible for folks to reinstall Vista every 120 days to get around ever paying for a license key (that is, if you don't mind having to scrape your data and applications and reinstall those as well every four months). But in a professional environment, this is, needless to say, seriously asking for trouble, not to mention a horrible disruption of work.
So I suspect the reason the total grace period can be extended to 120 days has something to do with the way other Microsoft products, such as SQL Server or Windows Server 2003, have trial editions that can run for 120 days before needing a full license key. Perhaps the reason for the 120-day total was so that Microsoft could have a ready-made mechanism within Vista's released-to-manufacturing (RTM) code to allow the easy "baking" of a 120-day trial version of the OS without having to change a great deal. In any event, no one with any pretenses of legitimacy should run Vista without a license key.

Final note: Apparently the Enterprise edition of Vista will not work with this function, since it's licensed from a local volume licensing key (VLK) server, and will not run for more than three days without a key. Three days is also the grace period for an "out-of-activation" machine, i.e., a Vista machine that has had its hardware modified or license tampered with in some way.

Fusion and VMWare Server compatibility

I created a guest Windows 2000 Pro SP4 using Fusion build 36932. I then tried to open this guest OS in VMWare Server version 1.0.1. I got an error message saying that this guest OS was created by "Fusion that has more features" and the "boot" did not proceed any further. However, Fusion build 36932 has no problem opening a guest OS (FreeNAS appliance) which I assumed was built under VMWare Server 1.0.1. So at the time of this writing, Fusion is better than VMWare Server in terms of being able to open guest OSes. The current build of Fusion however does not support several features that VMWare Server supports, namely Snapshot and ISO mounting. I do not know how well does VMware Workstation v 5.5.3 or v6 beta and Player supports guest OSes created by Fusion. Frankly I cannot keep up with all this neck-breaking pace development of virtual machines from VMWare. :-) But I love it.

Virtualization on top of virtualization

I wanted to have both VMWare Workstation 6 and Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (both are free and in beta) at the same time on my XP Pro machine. I was concerned that they would conflict. Actually, I found no info on the Web if there is a conflict or not. So I decided to install VMWare and VPC on SVS. This way, I can keep the two programs separated by "turn on" one or the other when I need to use it. Unfortunately, the virtual NICs in VMWare did not installed at all on top of SVS and VPC works initially, but when I restart the XP host and then relaunch VPC, there is an error about some driver and VPC would not launch. In short, I cannot install either VMWare and VPC on top of SVS. I will push ahead and install both VMWare and VPC without SVS and see if they do conflict.

Virtual machines on non-Intel non-AMD platforms

I recently bought a mini-ITX motherboard and tried to run VMWare's Workstation and Server and Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 beta. The host OS is Windows XP Pro. Although I can install VMWare and Virtual PC virtual machine programs on the host XP, I get the blue screen of death for any XP guest OS I tried to install. The blue screen crash is on the guest OS, not the host OS. The documentation for VMware and Virtual PC clearly states that these will run on x86 Intel and AMD CPU. Although the CPU on the mini-ITX motherboard is x86, this case it's a Via CN700 EBGA CPU and the motherboard is Via VT8237R Plus chipset purchased though mini-box.com, VMWare and Virtual PC do not work. The CPU clocks in at 1GHz and there is 1GB of DDR2 533MHz RAM.

This is a disappointment because I had been thinking of using this low-power consumption system to run my 24/7 web/FTP server. I plan to run the server with the virtual machine so that if there is a problem, I can fix it easier.