I have never claimed to be an expert on, well, anything. However, I do like to try to learn something new every day and I usually stick to the "nerdy" stuff. I recently decided that I wanted to improve the way I backed up important data at home. At work, we script it and tar it and set the archive bits and get the emails...that always seemed like overkill to me. That is until I accidently ruined two, (YES, 2) removable HDD's in one night, including a one week old 1TB Seagate drive that I had bought on sale...bummer!
I am not at an endstate yet in my search for the best backup solution for the home network. One thing I have been playing with is Robocopy...and oh what fun it has been.
My setup:
- A new (non-dropped on the floor and ruined) 1TB GoFlex network storage drive.
- Many computers...but testing from the one with Windows 7 Professional.
Source:
c:\users\myusername\Desktop\CIS577
Destination:
\\GOFLEX_HOME\GoFlex Home Personal\Dave_School\CIS577
Goal:
To back up school, family, and other documents on an automatic and easy basis...not to mention reliable. I should mention here that the Seagate software for the GoFlex comes with a backup solution that is fairly easy to use and customize. (Secretly, I just wanted an excuse to again play with Robocopy...remind myself of its functions and limitations).
Command (From ELEVATED Command Prompt):
$>robocopy c:\users\myusername\Desktop\CIS577 \\GOFLEX_HOME\GoFlex Home Personal\Dave_School\CIS577 /LOG:BackUpLogs\PicsBUlog /SAVE:BackUpJobs\PicsJob /B /V /E
- The /E is probably redundant with the /B, but I wanted to add it to ensure the directory recursion.
- The /LOG option points to a folder in the current working directory and the name of a command file for this particular backup job
- The /SAVE option points to a folder in the current working directory and the name of the logfile for this particular backup job
- The /V, like almost any other command line program....Verbosity...YEAH! :-)
If I want to run this job as a service or just in the background, I can add the /MON option (/MON:#) with a number representing the number of changes made to the source that will automatically trigger the backup job again. Careful though...if you add this from a normal command prompt...you may be waiting AWHILE for anything to happen if you are not actively changing the source location.
So Robocopy has been fun to play with today. I created jobs to backup all of our pictures from our recent trip to Gatlinburg and it is running better than copying through the GUI....yeah!
Showing posts with label Windows 7. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Windows 7. Show all posts
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Friday, June 25, 2010
Windows 7 and VMWare
I have had the "distinct" pleasure of building a group of virtual workstations and using different versions of Windows operating systems in their creations. I have some open questions still and have even presented them to VMWare in the hopes they will answer the questions and save me what may turn out to be days of research/trial-and-error. However, I have had some interesting issues and thought I might post them here.
The biggest issue that I had with creating the virtual Windows 7 boxes (AND Windows Server 2008 R2) was that I was getting this error message:
"A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, DC, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now."
Before explaining the fix that I "found" for this error, I should probably include the other hardware and software I am working with for this little project:
- 1 ESX Server installed on a Penguin server
- 1 Penguin Desktop - Vista
- 2 Windows 2003 R2 Servers (one for the VMWare vSphere/vCenter Server, one for the VMWare Connection Server
- 1 IGEL Thin Client with both RDP (5 and 6.1) support and VMWare View Client installed.
- ALL VMWare software is at least release 4.0.0.
- Guests (Virtual) OS's
- XP 32-Bit
- XP 64-Bit
- Vista 32-Bit
- Vista 64-Bit
- Windows 7 32-Bit
- Windows 7 64-Bit
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 (HAD to have at least one Linux box. :-) )
So, with all of that, I am in the process of testing different functionalities. The desire is to have a set of virtual workstations that I can push to the thin clients and that support streaming video, bi-directional audio, memory-intensive applications, and all of this with as minimal network impact as possible. I will discuss the overall evaluation results later in this post, or at a later date. :-)
Now back to the Windows 7 installation problem. The error message that I recieved:
"A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, DC, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now."
is an artifact of the type of CD/DVD drives and drivers that Windows 7 recognizes during install. This message will actually appear after files have started copying to the local hard drive. That said, this message can be returned to a user under more than one situation, making it a pain to troubleshoot.
If you research this error message, a lot of what you will find is that people automatically assume that it is a bad ISO file. While this could be true, this was not my problem as I was using a disk, not an ISO. However, it may be good to list some of the reasons for this message, and how I determined that they did or did not apply. If you are reading this and just looking for the fix...scroll down further. :-)
Some Causes of the Error Message:
1) Trying to install from a corrupt ISO file.
- This did not apply to me as I was loading from a DVD. However, I will acknowledge that I re-downloaded the ISO and re-burned the DVD a second time just to rule out a bad ISO, and number 2 below.
- If you are using an ISO, there are some things you can do to verify that it is comoplete and not corrupt: Check the Hash value of the ISO, Check the size of the ISO, and do this against the listed Hash and Size values from your download site.
2) A Faulty DVD.
- While this was possible in my case, I ruled it out (See number 1 above).
3) A bad CD/DVD Driver on the host system.
- One would think that this would be the biggest culprit, given the error message. However, the biggest solution found on the net is number 1 above.
- This was in part my problem. When I installed the ESX Server, I didn't give much thought to drivers for hardware as I really didn't know at the time how far I was going with the server itself. Bottom line here is that I need to find a Windows 7 "approved" CD/DVD Driver and install this on the ESX Server. As a side note here, the ESX Server runs on a Linux Kernel (the exact version escapes me right now).
4) A bad CD/DVD Driver on the virtual system.
- This was in fact the other part of my problem. Contrary to popular belief, VMWare vSphere 4.0 is not "perfectly" compatible with Windows 7. In fact, as I may post later, there are some other issues that arose during this evaluation that were specifically related to the lack of complete OS support for Windows 7.
So, HOW did I fix this problem and create some virtual Windows 7 workstations????
I went the LONG way, on purpose (I'll explain in a bit).
THE FIX:
On a seperate machine on my network, I had already had a small virtual network setup inside a VMWare Server. Using this setup, and an ISO of Windows 7 Ultimate 32-Bit, I created two working virtual machines running Windows 7. Once I had created these two, it was a somewhat simple matter of getting the virtual "machine" onto the ESX server.
There are multiple options for transfering a virtual machine to an ESX server.
One option is to FTP directly to the ESX server and upload the virtual machine, and then run the VMWare converter tool. This is not the option that I chose. The ESX server does not come with FTP enabled by default and I did not feel like enabling FTP nor doing some of the things required for security compliance. For those curious, there is an RPM from VMWare for FTP, "vsftp," that can be used.
The method I chose took only slightly more work than FTP'ing directly to the ESX server. However, it was clean and worked. What I did was transfered the virtual machine folder (YES, the WHOLE FOLDER) to the Windows Server 2003 that contained my vCenter Server. After doing this, and I wish I had some screen shots, I logged into the vCenter Server itself using the vSphere Client. Once logged into the vCenter Server, I was able to browse the datastore that exists on the ESX server. Browsing the ESX Datastore through the vCenter server allows for the uploading of a file OR Folder. I obviously chose the folder. After the upload was complete, I browsed into the folder I just uploaded and selected the ".vmx" file. Right-clicking on this file will show the option to "Import this machine." After some conversion time, VOILA, my ESX Server now contained a working virtual machine using Windows 7 Ultimate.
I realize that this might not be the most optimum fix for long term issues requiring Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2. However, it was more important to prove that there was a method, other than FTP, that would allow me to create a virtual machine outside of the ESX Server, and them move it to the ESX Server.
The biggest issue that I had with creating the virtual Windows 7 boxes (AND Windows Server 2008 R2) was that I was getting this error message:
"A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, DC, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now."
Before explaining the fix that I "found" for this error, I should probably include the other hardware and software I am working with for this little project:
- 1 ESX Server installed on a Penguin server
- 1 Penguin Desktop - Vista
- 2 Windows 2003 R2 Servers (one for the VMWare vSphere/vCenter Server, one for the VMWare Connection Server
- 1 IGEL Thin Client with both RDP (5 and 6.1) support and VMWare View Client installed.
- ALL VMWare software is at least release 4.0.0.
- Guests (Virtual) OS's
- XP 32-Bit
- XP 64-Bit
- Vista 32-Bit
- Vista 64-Bit
- Windows 7 32-Bit
- Windows 7 64-Bit
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 (HAD to have at least one Linux box. :-) )
So, with all of that, I am in the process of testing different functionalities. The desire is to have a set of virtual workstations that I can push to the thin clients and that support streaming video, bi-directional audio, memory-intensive applications, and all of this with as minimal network impact as possible. I will discuss the overall evaluation results later in this post, or at a later date. :-)
Now back to the Windows 7 installation problem. The error message that I recieved:
"A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing. If you have a driver floppy disk, DC, DVD, or USB flash drive, please insert it now."
is an artifact of the type of CD/DVD drives and drivers that Windows 7 recognizes during install. This message will actually appear after files have started copying to the local hard drive. That said, this message can be returned to a user under more than one situation, making it a pain to troubleshoot.
If you research this error message, a lot of what you will find is that people automatically assume that it is a bad ISO file. While this could be true, this was not my problem as I was using a disk, not an ISO. However, it may be good to list some of the reasons for this message, and how I determined that they did or did not apply. If you are reading this and just looking for the fix...scroll down further. :-)
Some Causes of the Error Message:
1) Trying to install from a corrupt ISO file.
- This did not apply to me as I was loading from a DVD. However, I will acknowledge that I re-downloaded the ISO and re-burned the DVD a second time just to rule out a bad ISO, and number 2 below.
- If you are using an ISO, there are some things you can do to verify that it is comoplete and not corrupt: Check the Hash value of the ISO, Check the size of the ISO, and do this against the listed Hash and Size values from your download site.
2) A Faulty DVD.
- While this was possible in my case, I ruled it out (See number 1 above).
3) A bad CD/DVD Driver on the host system.
- One would think that this would be the biggest culprit, given the error message. However, the biggest solution found on the net is number 1 above.
- This was in part my problem. When I installed the ESX Server, I didn't give much thought to drivers for hardware as I really didn't know at the time how far I was going with the server itself. Bottom line here is that I need to find a Windows 7 "approved" CD/DVD Driver and install this on the ESX Server. As a side note here, the ESX Server runs on a Linux Kernel (the exact version escapes me right now).
4) A bad CD/DVD Driver on the virtual system.
- This was in fact the other part of my problem. Contrary to popular belief, VMWare vSphere 4.0 is not "perfectly" compatible with Windows 7. In fact, as I may post later, there are some other issues that arose during this evaluation that were specifically related to the lack of complete OS support for Windows 7.
So, HOW did I fix this problem and create some virtual Windows 7 workstations????
I went the LONG way, on purpose (I'll explain in a bit).
THE FIX:
On a seperate machine on my network, I had already had a small virtual network setup inside a VMWare Server. Using this setup, and an ISO of Windows 7 Ultimate 32-Bit, I created two working virtual machines running Windows 7. Once I had created these two, it was a somewhat simple matter of getting the virtual "machine" onto the ESX server.
There are multiple options for transfering a virtual machine to an ESX server.
One option is to FTP directly to the ESX server and upload the virtual machine, and then run the VMWare converter tool. This is not the option that I chose. The ESX server does not come with FTP enabled by default and I did not feel like enabling FTP nor doing some of the things required for security compliance. For those curious, there is an RPM from VMWare for FTP, "vsftp," that can be used.
The method I chose took only slightly more work than FTP'ing directly to the ESX server. However, it was clean and worked. What I did was transfered the virtual machine folder (YES, the WHOLE FOLDER) to the Windows Server 2003 that contained my vCenter Server. After doing this, and I wish I had some screen shots, I logged into the vCenter Server itself using the vSphere Client. Once logged into the vCenter Server, I was able to browse the datastore that exists on the ESX server. Browsing the ESX Datastore through the vCenter server allows for the uploading of a file OR Folder. I obviously chose the folder. After the upload was complete, I browsed into the folder I just uploaded and selected the ".vmx" file. Right-clicking on this file will show the option to "Import this machine." After some conversion time, VOILA, my ESX Server now contained a working virtual machine using Windows 7 Ultimate.
I realize that this might not be the most optimum fix for long term issues requiring Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2. However, it was more important to prove that there was a method, other than FTP, that would allow me to create a virtual machine outside of the ESX Server, and them move it to the ESX Server.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
HTTP 404.8 ERROR
While working on a recent project involving web services, I started to get HTTP 404.8 errors, which I will discuss in a minute. The odd thing about this error is that it "just started." The project I was working on did not involve any "new" technology that I haven't already used on this box.
My current environment consists of:
- Windows 7 Pro
- Visual Studio 2008 Pro
- IIS 7.5
The HTTP 404.8 ERROR:
- Hidden Namespace. The requested URL is denied becuase the directory is hidden.
What does this mean???
This error is apparently returned when a directory is listed in the RequestFiltering/HiddenSegments of the applicationHost.config file for IIS. The fix for this is partially found at (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942047). I say partially becuase it is still up to the user to determine which directory is the problem. However, I will still post the fix instructions here, with the caveat that this "might" not be the solution to everyone else's problem with this error.
Steps:
- Open Notepad as an Administrator (right click on Notepad, select "Run as administrator")
- Open the file named "%windir%\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config.
- Find the element and then the child tag
- Here's the annoying part...at least for me.
- In the section, find the directory that is causing you the problem. For me, it was the "App_Code" directory that had somehow become a problem.
The unanswered question here is: "What caused this error in the first place?" What was I doing when the error was returned? I was trying to use a Web Service instance in a project I was working on. This Web Service instance has been used in multiple projects and this 404.8 had never been returned before. In fact, when I recieved this error, I attemped to see if other Web Services I had recently created returned the same error when I tried to access them through my main application; the same error was in fact returned by all Web Services when accessed through the application, but not when I used the "View in browser" option for each service in VS2008. As frustrating as this was, I was under a serious time crunch to get the application working, and as such I have still not had time to properly research why this error started happening.
I do strongly believe the error to have been caused by some update to either Windows 7, IIS 7.5, or (even less likely) Visual Studio 2008. The update had to have been applied since the middle of February, as that is the last known time that the Web Service in question was successfully used. I may post a question to the forums on these, but it depends on time. Maybe somebody reading this can tell me why this error just "magically appeared" one day.
My current environment consists of:
- Windows 7 Pro
- Visual Studio 2008 Pro
- IIS 7.5
The HTTP 404.8 ERROR:
- Hidden Namespace. The requested URL is denied becuase the directory is hidden.
What does this mean???
This error is apparently returned when a directory is listed in the RequestFiltering/HiddenSegments of the applicationHost.config file for IIS. The fix for this is partially found at (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942047). I say partially becuase it is still up to the user to determine which directory is the problem. However, I will still post the fix instructions here, with the caveat that this "might" not be the solution to everyone else's problem with this error.
Steps:
- Open Notepad as an Administrator (right click on Notepad, select "Run as administrator")
- Open the file named "%windir%\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config.
- Find the
- Here's the annoying part...at least for me.
- In the
The unanswered question here is: "What caused this error in the first place?" What was I doing when the error was returned? I was trying to use a Web Service instance in a project I was working on. This Web Service instance has been used in multiple projects and this 404.8 had never been returned before. In fact, when I recieved this error, I attemped to see if other Web Services I had recently created returned the same error when I tried to access them through my main application; the same error was in fact returned by all Web Services when accessed through the application, but not when I used the "View in browser" option for each service in VS2008. As frustrating as this was, I was under a serious time crunch to get the application working, and as such I have still not had time to properly research why this error started happening.
I do strongly believe the error to have been caused by some update to either Windows 7, IIS 7.5, or (even less likely) Visual Studio 2008. The update had to have been applied since the middle of February, as that is the last known time that the Web Service in question was successfully used. I may post a question to the forums on these, but it depends on time. Maybe somebody reading this can tell me why this error just "magically appeared" one day.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Windows Rocks???
Normally, I would say that I prefer anything *nix to Microsoft. However, I think I may be equally pleased with Windows 7 as I am with *nix...much to my own surprise!
I had played with the 7 beta when it was first made available, but only enough to do a clean install and look around the GUI. I had quickly decided it looked too much like Vista (which I don't mind so much now) and went back to other tasks. This may have been a mistake.
This last weekend, I decided to re-build one of my boxes in order to have a dedicated development and analysis box. My other dev environment had become too congested as I was admittedly lazy and used it for many other non-dev tasks.
I had a list of software I just had to have, for both personal preference and for school requirements. The major items were:
- SQL Server 2008
- Oracle 11g
- Visual Studio 2008 Pro
- Eclipse (with multiple platforms and tools)
- Android SDK
- NetBeans 6.8
- Visio 2007
- Cisco VPN client
- IIS 7
- UDDI SDK
- Tomcat 6
I was reluctant to slap all of this onto Windows 7 Pro. However, the box I was using was sold to me by Dell with Vista, and an AMD processor later found not to support Vista, and some of the drivers I needed for the box were not compatible with XP Pro. Thus, my decision to try to use Windows 7 Pro.
Windows 7 Pro installed clean AND faster than half of the software listed above. The total time to install 7, the software above, some minor other software, and ALL patches was about six hours (including beer breaks!). I was able to verify that IIS and Tomcat 6 are playing well together, I easily tested my dev tools by slapping together some quick code, and my DB's are accessible, secure, and working well!!!
Bottom line: as much as I love *nix, Windows 7 Pro (So far) ROCKS!!! The only pain I had was that I had to slap on an older .Net Framework in order to register the Microsoft.Uddi.dll.
I had played with the 7 beta when it was first made available, but only enough to do a clean install and look around the GUI. I had quickly decided it looked too much like Vista (which I don't mind so much now) and went back to other tasks. This may have been a mistake.
This last weekend, I decided to re-build one of my boxes in order to have a dedicated development and analysis box. My other dev environment had become too congested as I was admittedly lazy and used it for many other non-dev tasks.
I had a list of software I just had to have, for both personal preference and for school requirements. The major items were:
- SQL Server 2008
- Oracle 11g
- Visual Studio 2008 Pro
- Eclipse (with multiple platforms and tools)
- Android SDK
- NetBeans 6.8
- Visio 2007
- Cisco VPN client
- IIS 7
- UDDI SDK
- Tomcat 6
I was reluctant to slap all of this onto Windows 7 Pro. However, the box I was using was sold to me by Dell with Vista, and an AMD processor later found not to support Vista, and some of the drivers I needed for the box were not compatible with XP Pro. Thus, my decision to try to use Windows 7 Pro.
Windows 7 Pro installed clean AND faster than half of the software listed above. The total time to install 7, the software above, some minor other software, and ALL patches was about six hours (including beer breaks!). I was able to verify that IIS and Tomcat 6 are playing well together, I easily tested my dev tools by slapping together some quick code, and my DB's are accessible, secure, and working well!!!
Bottom line: as much as I love *nix, Windows 7 Pro (So far) ROCKS!!! The only pain I had was that I had to slap on an older .Net Framework in order to register the Microsoft.Uddi.dll.
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