Lynch Consulting Blog - Windows

Windows File Sharing (SMB/CIFS/Samba) over SSH

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 13:35:00 --1000

While working with a client recently setting up a Netgear VPN so he could securely access his internal file server. The VPN setup was straightforward but every time the VPN client connected to the VPN server the VPN server/firewall would crash - leaving no connectivity. In order to come up with a reliable solution to this we decided to use the SSH server we had available and tunnel the windows sharing across the local port forwards, much simpler and more reliable. Thanks to this article it was a breeze to set up. Steps are as follows:

Create loopback adapter on windows
Configure loopback adapter on windows
Reboot
Configure SSH connection
Test it all out

Create loopback adapter on windows

We'll give your computer an additional (fake) IP address, and we'll port forward to that address instead of the computer's real IP. Windows XP will continue to do file sharing on the real IP address. We'll assign it an IP of 10.0.0.1 (that's what we configured putty to use above.)

System->Control Panel->Add Hardware
Yes, Hardware is already connected
Add a new hardware device (at bottom of list)
Install the hardware that I manually select
Network adapters
Microsoft , Microsoft Loopback Adapter
(Go through the installation procedure.)

Configure loopback adapter on windows

Open your new fake ethernet adapter (Network Connections) , enter a made-up IP address (I suggest 10.0.0.1, which is a privately routable address that most folk don't use.)
Enable Client for Microsoft Networks.
Disable File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks
Enable Interent Protocol (TCP/IP)
Click on properties for TCP/IP.
Enter your chosen IP address (10.0.0.1), subnet mask (255.255.255.0). You can leave gateway blank.
Under advanced->WINS, Enable LMHosts Lookup and Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP

Reboot

In order to make it all work now it he appropriate time to reboot so windows initialises everything correctly.

Configure SSH connection

Download Putty
Enter IP address
Enter Auth Key (if using SSH keys)
Enter Port forwards for: (these connect the ports on you local machine to
- 10.0.0.1:137 to 127.0.0.1:137
- 10.0.0.1:138 to 127.0.0.1:138
- 10.0.0.1:139 to 127.0.0.1:139
- 10.0.0.1:445 to 127.0.0.1:445
Save the config.

Test it all out

Now to connect you need to do the following steps:

Open putty, load the settings and connect.
Open Exporer and type in: \\10.0.0.1\

You should now be connected to your remote windows system over a secure encrypted tunnel. Cheers, Mark

Clear MSSQL Query Caches

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 22:12:00 --1000

Found this useful little snippet for when you are load testing MSSQL Servers. You can use it to clear the query cache - to ensure you are starting from a level playing field. Or if you are tuning queries in a application and want to ensure they are not cached run it before each run:


dbcc freeproccache
go
dbcc dropcleanbuffers
go

Cheers, Mark

DVD to iPod conversion - Linux, Mac & Windows

Sat, 17 May 2008 01:21:00 --1000

I've been looking for a while for a way to convert DVD's and other movies that I have into iPod format and have been failing miserably. That is until today, when I came across the unusually named HandBrake. It does exactly what is says on the tin and makes it very easy to copy dvd's. Initially I used it from my Mac and it worked flawlessly. I also tried the Linux version on Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) which has no GUI but it is pretty simple when you get the hang of it. Here's a typical command line:


 HandBrakeCLI --preset="iPod Low-Rez" -i /media/cdrom -o myvideo.mp4 -t 2

This reads from /dev/cdrom and uses the handy "iPod Low-Rez" preset which fixes it all up nicely for the iPod. And here's one that takes the second title:


 HandBrakeCLI --preset="iPod Low-Rez" -i /media/cdrom -o myvideo.mp4 -t 2

The wiki has more information on command line usage. Happy iPodding. Cheers, Mark

Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Analytics standalone with Prism

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 07:32:00 --1000

I came across Mozilla Prism the other day and while I'm still deciding if it's going to be a permanent addition to my machine so far so good. Prism is a cut down version of Mozilla which is designed to run single sites from icon - what's the use of that you may ask? Well it allows you to have an icon on your desktop for Gmail or Google Calendar or docs or analytics and get to it nice and quickly. It also free's up some much needed screen real-estate as all the other toolbars relevant for a web-developers browser can get in the way and are not used when you are using you email and calendar. Additionally - as web developer I tend to restart firefox more often than some - and having my email seperated from that is nice. Give it a try and see if you like it. On Ubuntu Hardy you can do the following to install it:


#install calendar
sudo apt-get install prism-google-calendar
#install google docs
sudo apt-get install prism-google-docs
#install gmail
sudo apt-get install prism-google-mail
#install analytics
sudo apt-get install prism-google-analytics

On other platforms (windows,mac or other linux versions) you can go to the Prism site and download it. For the different applications check out the Bundles section or the User contributed bundles section. Obviously this shares a lot of similarities with the adobe AIR platform albeit not as full featured. It will be interesting to see what further development plans there are for the prism platform. Cheers, Mark

Pretty network diagrams and flow charts with Open Source software.

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 07:31:00 --1000

I had been using Dia for all my charts and diagrams, and it does a very good job. The only downside is that it doesn't produce very pretty charts of the like of Omnigraffle. However, inspired by this article, I'm starting to use a new solution, Inkscape, that fulfills my criteria that works on Linux, Mac and Windows.

	Dia	Omnigraffle	Inkscape
Can create pretty pictures	No	Yes	Yes
Cross Platform (Linux, Mac, Windows)	Yes	No - Mac only	Yes
Open Source	Yes	No	Yes
Open file format (to work with version control)	No - Binary	No - Binary	Yes - SVG
Export to PNG	Yes	Yes	Yes

Now you may argue that Inkscape is not a diagraming tool but a generic drawing tool. This is true, but with the addition of a few templates of pre-drawn items it become a very good diagramming tool. I've created a few simple flow chart elements which I use and also scoured the net for some SVG icons for network based diagrams which were sourced from Gnome (via Ubuntu) and from Quantum Bits.

Templates Previews

Download

Download the svg templates (right click - Save As):

Give it a try - it's very easy.

Cross platform Database IDE

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 05:29:00 --1000

Ever since I've moved to using Linux full time I've been looking for a solid Database IDE. I've tried and tested quite a few.

Aqua Data Studio

This is my current DB IDE of choice and has some significant features in the new version 6.5 that means I'll be staying with it for a while, particularly as it runs on Linux, Macs and Windows identically.

Schema Comparison - very handy for keeping development and production db's schemas in sync.
Charts & Pivot Tables - makes it easy to create adhoc graphs withouth having to resort to Excel/OpenOffice Calc
Morph to Delimited List - A simple but powerful function that saves a lot of time. Allows you to take the results of a sql query and convert to comma seperated list. I've done dozens of adhoc CF scripts to handle this before :-)
Subversion Support - As we use subversion for our code it's handy to have it built in.

MySQL GUI tools (Query Browser & Admin)

These have some very nice functionality but have always found them to be pretty unstable - they just crash a lot with no explanation.

Navicat

This is pretty good option, but the Linux version is the poor cousin to the Windows & Mac versions.

Love to hear any comments feedback or suggestions.

howto document your code with ASDoc

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 20:52:00 --1000

Last night I was trying to document our AS3 code, using ASDoc, for a project that we have been working on. For those of you who don't know, ASDoc is a command line utility which allows you to generate code documentation in HTML format. A good example of what ASDoc output looks like would be, Flex 2 Language Reference. Documenting code wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, so I thought I'd share this with you and hopefully it will save someone some time. I use an Intel Mac and this is what you need to do to get your basic code documentation generated successfully:

1. In your terminal window go to your Flex SDK bin directory. Typically this is located under /Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 2/Flex SDK 2/bin

2. From "bin" directory run this command:

./asdoc -doc-sources=/Users/marko/Documents/workspace/yourFlexProject/  -source-path=/Users/marko/Documents/workspace/yourFlexProject/

If you have any external Libraries in your Flex project you will need to include them in your command: -external-library-path=/path_to_your_swc/myLib.swc The key thing to remember for Mac users is that you need to run the command from Flex SDK bin directory and use -source-path option to tell the compiler where the source is located. -doc-sources will tell the compiler to generate output for the current directory and all subdirectories recursively. If you run this utility from any other directory other than "bin", you will get NoClassDefFoundError. I haven't tried running ASDoc in Windows yet, but it should be very similar to running it on a Mac. And since ASDoc is a command line java utility, you would think it would run on Linux too. Well, for all you Linux users out there, this is the message I got from the compiler: Error: Could not create toplevel.xml: Unknown OS for ASDoc. ASDoc will only run on Windows and Mac OS X. That last sentence is pretty self explanatory :) ASDoc is nicely documented here. Cheers
Marko

HOWTO Add 1680x1050 resolution to Windows VMware Server clients

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 03:04:00 --1000

I make extensive use of VMWare Server on my laptop for Flex and Flash development as Adobe haven't released Flash and Flex for Linux yet (hint hint). When I'm flicking back and forth between Windows and Linux I typically leave the Windows window at 1024x768 which allows it to have no scrolling and still fit on my 1680x1050 screen. However, there are times when you just need more screen real estate in windows and as the VMWare driver doesn't come with a native 1680x1050 resolution you need to make some minor registry edits to get it working. A bit of searching got me to an knowledge base article but the instructions didn't work for me, as the registry keys didn't exist there but were located pretty close. So without further ado (there's been quite a bit already I admit).

Start->Run and type regedit
Select the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\{device id}\0000. Note the deviceid is a big horrible uuid, and there may be multiple ones. Use the one that has a key "Device Description" of VMWare SVGA II
There are a load of Resolution.x lines, add a new "Binary Value" 1 higher than the highest resolution. Eg Resolution.11
Enter the binary value of: 31 36 38 30 78 31 30 35 30 which is ASCII for "1680x1050"
Close regedit and reboot.
After reboot you should have a new resolution available to you.

For other resolutions you can use the following numbers keys:

ASCII	Value
30	0
31	1
32	2
33	3
34	4
35	5
36	6
37	7
38	8
39	9
78	x

Cheers, Mark

IE6 and IE7 running side by side

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 06:59:00 --1000

I knew it was possible to do, but not this easy. I've added it here for my own reference IE6 & IE7 side by side. Also useful link to evolt standalone browsers archive. Essential for debugging IE6 CSS issues.

VMWare partial snapshot recovery HowTo

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 06:10:00 --1000

I recently came across a Vmware server machine that was had a drive that kept expanding until it filled the entire host machine's avaiable space. The machine in question had a number of drives including a 100GB and a 200GB partition and the host machine had a 600GB partition to hold all this. After digging around a bit I discovered that the drives were performing snapshots. Which means that they main drive was frozen in time and all changes were written to another file. This should have been an easy fix, tick a box in the admin to remove the snapshot. However, in the admin for the machine there were no snapshots registered and no way to remove them. A bit of hunting found a couple of articles on the subject:

However, I used the following approach to fix the problem which seems to be simpler than the techniques documented above. Note: make sure you have a backup before proceeding - my 600GB backup took 6 hours but was worth it.

Step 1: Make a backup to another drive (internal or USB)
Step 2: Check that you can boot your VM from the backup.
Step 3: Identify and document all disk names and files
- Document all drives, paths and scsi/ide nodes
- Create a text file in the root of each drive - you can then check for this to ensure you have the correct snapshot.
Step 4: Use the following command to convert a snapshotting disk to a new clean disk:


vmware-vdiskmanager -r sourceDisk.vmdk -t 3 destinationDisk.vmdk

Step 5: In VMWare remove the disk for this machine and then add back your new disk. Make sure you use the same SCSI/IDE node numbers.

Note 1: It is important to select the correct snapshot as the source disk. For example: sourceDisk.vmdk could have a number of snapshots, sourceDisk-000001.vmdk sourceDisk-000002.vmdk. Have a look at the timestamps to determine the active one. Note 2: If you get the following error:


Failed to open the disk 'sourceDisk-000001.vmdk' : The parent of this virtual disk could not be opened (23).

Don't panic - as long as you have the backups you will be fine. Have a look in the sourceDisk-000001.vmdk and make sure the "parentFileNameHint" path is correct. I.e. if it is an absolute path and you are trying to restore it from a different location (i.e. your backup) you can correct it or simply make it a relative path. Note 3: It is also very helpful to edit the network settings for the VM to ensure that the network is Not Connected on boot. Particularly if there are mail services or similar running on the machine. This allows you to boot the machine safe in the knowledge that it is completely isolated from outside influence.

Resources

Another useful document which helped out what the file reference on the vmware site - What Files Make Up a Virtual Machine? Hope it helps. Cheers, Mark

Batch Convert PDF files to Flash Paper

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 08:32:00 --1000

For a current project I need to convert a whole heap of pdf files into FlashPaper so that we can display them inline in the site. After a quick google I found a useful example using ANT by Darron Schall. ANT has been on my list of stuff to check out for the last while - however, it's real strength is that it is cross platform. For this project I found it a bit overkill so I just put together a little VB script to handle it. This script is also simpler to set up on non-technical users machines as you don't need to have Java, Ant and Ant contrib set up. The following script reads file in from a folder "in" and outputs them to a folder "out". It does very little error checking but works for me . Hope it helps.


' Script to convert PDF files to Flash Paper using the flash printer
' Reads files from folder "in" and outputs to folder "out"

flashPrinter= """C:\Program Files\Macromedia\FlashPaper 2\FlashPrinter.exe"""
inPath = "in\"
outPath = "out\"
delayMsec = 10000  'wait to let flashPrinter complete


If "CSCRIPT.EXE" <> UCase( Right( WScript.Fullname, 11 ) ) Then
    'WScript.Interactive = false
    WScript.Echo "To use this script enter: cscript " & WScript.ScriptName & vbcrlf & "or right click and select 'Open with Command Prompt'"
    WScript.Quit 1
End If 

Dim strMbox

Set objFileScripting = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
'Return folder object
Set objFolder = objFileScripting.GetFolder(inPath)
'return file collection In folder
Set filecollection = objFolder.Files

strMbox= MsgBox("Ready to process " & fileCollection.count & " files",1)
If strMbox = 2 Then
	Wscript.Echo "Cancelled"
	WScript.Quit 
end if

	For Each filename In filecollection
    		filename=right(filename,len(filename)-InStrRev(filename, "\"))
		if InStrRev(filename, ".") then 'remove extension if there is one
    			FilenameNoExt=left(filename,InStrRev(filename, ".")-1)
		end if
		
		' Run the flashprinter for each file
		command = flashPrinter & " " & inPath & filename & " -o " & outPath & filenameNoExt & ".swf"	
		Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
		'objShell.CurrentDirectory = 
		Wscript.Echo "Processing: " & inPath & filename & " --> " & outPath & filenameNoExt & ".swf"
		objShell.Run(command)
		'Wait some for it to complete
		
		Wscript.Sleep delayMsec

    	Next

Wscript.Echo "Done"
WScript.Quit

Feel free to use it and if you have any improvements please let me know. Update: changed comment from // to ' which makes it barf. That will teach me to comment it after I write it.

Disk space monitoring script for windows

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 09:48:00 --1000

This is the first VB script I've done in a long time - but I think it's probably pretty handy for some people so here it is - be kind :-) It is a simple script which modified from an original one from http://www.adiscon.com/ which checks all the fixed disks on a windows machine and can email the results. The modified script is slightly more abstracted and doesn't require any additional components to send the email. It should be useful for monitoring disk space on DB servers or web servers that have log files on busy websites. It is split into two parts - the library which holds all the functions and the config main code.

lib_diskspace.vbs

This is the library of functions


' Constants for drive types
Const Unknown = 0
Const Removable = 1
Const Fixed = 2
Const Remote = 3
Const CDROM = 4
Const RAMDisk = 5

' Send a mail message
Sub SendMail(Sender, Recipient, Subject, Message,Server,Port)
 Set objEmail = CreateObject("CDO.Message")
 objEmail.From = Sender
 objEmail.To = Recipient
 objEmail.Subject = Subject 
 objEmail.Textbody = Message
 objEmail.Configuration.Fields.Item("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/sendusing") = 2
 objEmail.Configuration.Fields.Item("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserver") = Server
 objEmail.Configuration.Fields.Item("http://schemas.microsoft.com/cdo/configuration/smtpserverport") = Port
 objEmail.Configuration.Fields.Update()
 objEmail.Send
End Sub

' get current computer name (from system environment variables)
Function GetCurrentComputerName
 set oWsh = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
 set oWshSysEnv = oWsh.Environment("PROCESS")
 GetCurrentComputerName = oWshSysEnv("COMPUTERNAME")
End Function

' get free space report
Function GetFreeSpaceReport 
 set oFs = WScript.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
 set oDrives = oFs.Drives
 for each oDrive in oDrives
  Select case oDrive.DriveType
  Case Fixed
  GetFreeSpaceReport = GetFreeSpaceReport & oDrive.DriveLetter & ": " & Round(oDrive.FreeSpace/(1024*1024)) & "MB free (" & Round(100 * (oDrive.FreeSpace/oDrive.TotalSize),2) & "%)" & vbcrlf
  End Select
 next
End Function

diskspace.wsf

This is the main script that should be edited to your configuration, and added to your scheduled tasks.

Hope it helps.