VHD Attach 1.00

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This is small tool that adds Attach and Detach option to contextual (aka right-click) menu of Virtual disk (vhd) files. That enables those operations to be done without trip to Disk Management console. Detach option is available on hard drive contextual menu also.

Additionally program can be used as classic utility in order to see various information about virtual disk, even without attaching it.

Do notice that this program only works with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Older operating systems are not supported.

As always, this program is freeware.

Sheraton Air

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Due to airplane troubles, I was late for connecting flight and, since there were no flights that day, Lufthansa offered me a lodging. Here I must commend Lufthansa since whole process was done without any pain or suffering regardless of fact that there were quite a few of stranded passengers asking all sort of questions.

I got room at Sheraton Airport in Munich and it was arranged for shuttle bus to pick me up. After an hour someone finally appeared and started throwing bags inside. It took something like fifteen minutes to get to the hotel and then we went through check-in procedure. That took a while since there was only one guy at reception but he was fast so it wasn’t as bad as it could be.

Once I got my room (number 256, but on first floor - quite strange) I took a quick shower and went down for a free dinner. Well, it was not actually free, it is just that Lufthansa payed it and not me.

What greeted me was pasta and some sauce. Generally I do not have anything against such provisioning, but in this particular case it seems that pasta stayed out for a while. It was completely dried and pretty much worst pasta meal I ever had.

Since I needed to go very early, I got an early-bird breakfast and they even gave me free Taxi ride to airport (if you want to go before 6:30, you usually need to pay).

Final conclusion? Service is great - only if food was any good.

Windows Virtual PC and FreeNAS

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I already wrote a little about new, Windows 7, edition of Virtual PC. I was mostly satisfied with changes but I did notice that it was quite simplified.

Unfortunately one of things that was removed was support for operating systems different. Naive version of me though that this was due fact that Virtual PC is compatible with them out-of-box. I was wrong.

While in good old Virtual PC 2007 SP1 you got asked upon creating of virtual machine whether you want to use Windows or “Other” inside of it, that question is gone now. And while I could install FreeNAS in Virtual PC 2007, there is no way of installing it in new Virtual PC. Installation just hangs.

I cannot say that this is purely Microsoft’s fault since FreeBSD has few issues with hardware handling itself, but it is very annoying when something that worked before just stops working. Even worst, code that handles FreeNAS is probably still somewhere deep inside of Virtual PC. It is purely design decision that caused it not to be accessible from user interface.

While on real systems I use Hyper-V Server for running *nix-like thingies (and that works great), that is not real option (since it does not exist) for testing on my laptop machine with Windows 7. On it I am currently playing with VirtualBox. This tool does have unsure future (Oracle-Sun trading) and sometimes I need to go to command line to accomplish simple things (VHD support), but it does allow me to install whichever OS I want.

FreeNAS on Alix1d

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I always had a thing for file servers. Usually, I would just take some old machine, throw few hard drives inside and consider it done. However, as I got married, noise of computers became issue. I was just something I didn’t notice before - all my “servers” were noisy like hell. In order to keep wife happy, I decided to invest a little into small machine without any fans. My final decision fell onto PC Engine’s alix1d system board with box1c. While this is not most powerful machine, I considered it’s 500 MHz CPU and 256 MB of RAM enough for a task at hand. I just slammed small 2.5" hard drive inside of box and it was ready to serve.

My first idea was to install Windows Home Server, but there were two problems with it - MSDN subscription didn’t cover it at the time and it’s system requirements (1 GHz processor / 512 MB of memory) were too high for this machine to handle. After some testing, my initial installation was done with Windows Server 2003 and I had it going for quite a while (more than a year actually). However, Windows were not lively on this machine (probably has something to do with slow processor and not enough memory). Since that machine was used only to share files, my though were on giving it a little boost by installing Windows XP on it.

At that time I was preparing setup for one Hyper-V server and in order to do file sharing I decided on FreeNAS. This free solution was quite good for NAS tasks at hand especially because it could fit inside of 128 MB of RAM. That way, I would give it enough to work with and impact on other Hyper-V machines would be minimal. It took me a while to notice that it could be solution for my problem also.

Since my machine has support for Compact Flash, I decided to install FreeNAS on it. With Windows 2003 on hard drive, this would also mean that my original installation will be left intact and a backup solution in case of any problems.

I decided on version 0.7 RC1 which was latest version that I already tested to work in Hyper-V so that gave me confidence to try it on real machine. I was surprised with CD booting process that was painfully slow and after a while it would just stop at:

Using device=/dev/fd0 fstype=msdos to store configuration.

It would stay there no matter how long you wait. Upon pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del it would complain about parsing errors in config.xml and go into shutdown. My first thought was that there is some error on CD. However, same thing repeated with other CD’s with different versions. Only than it occurred to me that I should run it in safe mode.

Once I selected safe mode, CD install was still slow, but it worked. However same issue occurred with booting process on installed version. Only difference was that it was left hanging at:

Starting devd.

Safe mode still helped but since this machine was to be left unattended, it wasn’t really a solution.

Next step was to disable things in BIOS one-by-one and culprit was found in ACPI power management. Once that was turned off, booting process went without a hitch.

I have it installed for a month now and I must say I am satisfied. Temperature of hard drive went from 50°C to 40°C just because of using flash media as system drive and having data drive sleep most of time. While level of comfort is little bit different (scripting in tcsh vs. programming in C#) and, although sometime I miss my remote desktop, this little guy does it’s duties well.