JT's Blog

I’m both excited and sad.  BSG has become a part of my end-of-week fun.  I watch so little TV these days (there’s so little of value to see) that I have really grown used to the weekly ritual of BSG.  Alas!  After this week, no more.

*snif*

Now, to cue up the DVR 🙂

OK, so if you know me, you’re probably tired of hearing me complain incessantly about how my windozeXP machine was nailed by a virus/adware/malware crap recently.  Something called Virtumode as well as some ridiculous program that corrupted all .doc and .jpg and .mp3 files, a mere seconds before the windows popup bubble says “Windows has detected corrupt files, click here to download File Fix Professional 2009” , which clearly is not something by windows.

I mean, would you believe the nerve of these people, infecting your machine with a virus that corrupts all your data, and then selling you the tool to fix it!?  Talk about extortion!

Fortunately, I have a fileserver and I use SecondCopy to constantly sync my data on my desktop with the fileserver.  Then if anything changes, I have it configured to move the original to a “deleted” folder while sync’ing, and keep that for up to 3 generations.  It’s a pretty slick app and it’s saved me on more than one occasion.  Well worth the $20 if you ask me. MAC users can try ChronoSync, not that you’d be attacked by a virus, but I digress.

So back to the point, configuring windows to not run stuff automatically, like when you insert a CD or a USB key or a camera or anything.  First, there’s a registry hack that was the solution to a recent malware attack on USB keys:

Continue reading…

If you’re not a geek and for some odd reason you regularly look at this blog, you’re probably wondering what on earth that title means.

Translation:  set up a windows 2003 server to share data using methods from UNIX rather than Windows.

Why on earth do such a thing you ask?  Why not use OpenFiler or FreeNas?  Why burden myself with a win2k3 machine?  Well, because it does other stuff too.  That’s why.

Basically, I’ve got a decent sized chunk of disk space for my stuff which now includes VMs (Virtual Machines).  I need my ESX server to be able to save VMs here, but ESX does not speak Windoze.

I had a hell of a time getting SFU working (no, not STFU)  SFU=Services For Unix, which is what allows a windows machine to speak UNIX protocols, like NFS.  Basically, I had no idea what I was doing, and it’s a bit too complicated to just BS your way through it.

Turns out, you have to create user and group mappings, which sounds awfully insecure, but ESX only does root (at least, as of 3.5):
Users:  root –> administrator
group: root –> administrators

Then, surprise, it just works.  I actually found the answer here, in a VMware forum.

Now, if only I didn’t need this machine as a Fax / print server / CIFS file share, I could go 100% linux… except for VirtualCenter.  Darn it.