Windows on Shane Cunningham

XenServer connect to Windows console

Sat, 07 Sep 2013 05:47:53 +0000

Connecting to a Linux console in XenServer is is easy as xl console, but slightly more difficult with a Windows VM since the terminal can’t display the Windows GUI. SSH tunneling and VNC to the rescue. First, grab the VNC port the Windows VM uses with the following command. You’ll need the dom-id of the Windows VM. xl list or xe vm-list name-label=YourWindowsNameLabel params=dom-id to find it.

console

xenstore-read /local/domain/dom-id/console/vnc-port
[root@xenserver ~]# xenstore-read /local/domain/31/console/vnc-port
5902

So the Windows VM has the console running on 127.0.0.1:5902. From your local machine we will need to setup an SSH tunnel to this port.

Windows VM loses time sync

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 16:19:14 +0000

I experienced a weird time sync issue today with my Windows VMs. I went to stream something to my PS3 from a network share, but I received an error. I thought the share had just lost connection and I needed to reconnect it. When I tried that I received a couple errors, extended error or something and an error stating the time in Windows was different than the server I was trying to connect to. That’s when I noticed the date being reported was 9/12/12, which was 3 days behind. I logged into my DC and tried to sync with a couple Internet time servers, but those still resulted in a date that was 3 days behind. Manually changing the time and date resulted in Windows completely ignoring what I entered and going back to 9/12/12.

CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -22

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 21:40:25 +0000

I am constantly forgetting one or more Samba/CIFS packages that are required to mount a Windows network share. The return codes don’t really provide very much useful info. Even when searching Google there was not a whole lot for return code -22. For CentOS, I found installing the following package solved my CIFS error.

yum install cifs-utils

Reading Windows .DMP files

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 05:02:00 +0000

A few months ago I needed to read some .DMP files and realized that I didn’t know how. I can troubleshoot fairly well and I have always figured things out without needing to go into the dump files. I knew this particular problem was hardware related but I wanted to see what the dump files had to say anyways. It seems kind of strange that Microsoft creates these files when things go bad but makes it difficult to obtain useful information from them. After some Googling I found the following, hope it helps.

Use PuTTY to connect to Amazon EC2

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 10:15:00 +0000

Another I’m going to post because I’ll forget…I was messing around with Amazon EC2 and had some minor issues connecting using SSH and PuTTY. Here are the simple steps I used to connect to a CentOS EC2 instance.

Open SSH in the Security Groups section of AWS Management Console.

Download PuTTY and PuTTYgen. Open PuTTYgen and load the .pem key you downloaded from Amazon when you created the instance.

Save private key as “id_rsa-gsg-keypair.ppk”, ignore pass phrase prompt.

SSD

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 08:58:00 +0000

I finally took the plunge and bought my first SSD. Newegg had a sale on the Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB and I decided to get it. After installing Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 and a few drivers, I still have 91GB left. Not too bad and now all I need to do is figure out how to carve out some space to dual boot Linux. Below is my first benchmark, no tweaking but from what I have read with Windows 7 and TRIM enabled, you don’t need any.

Intel HD graphics driver causing reboots

Sun, 29 May 2011 08:10:51 +0000

I haven’t purchaed a dedicated graphics card yet for my new build so I’m using the Core i5’s built-in GPU. This updated GPU is a major improvement over past integrated GPU attempts. After installing the latest Intel HD graphics driver I found my system in a reboot loop every time it went to load Windows. Weird since this was a new Windows install with Intel drivers that had been out since December. After some Googling I found Windows 7 needs to be updated to Service Pack 1 for these graphics drivers to work properly. I guess I should have done that first anyways, but oh well. So if your having issues with the Intel HD graphics driver rebooting your system after installing, update Windows 7 to Service Pack 1 first.

Linux for everyday, Windows for gaming

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 07:58:54 +0000

I have an old Acer laptop, circa 2006. It’s a decent machine, 1.7 GHz Centrino Duo, 2 GB RAM, 15” screen. It came with Windows Vista Premium that we have been using since day one (don’t shoot me). I know there are a ton of complaints about Vista, but for the basic things we use this laptop for it has done a decent job with minimum trouble. However, there were a number of things about it that made me consider a switch to Ubuntu 10.10.

Booting from wrong drive

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 11:05:17 +0000

I went to do a bare metal backup of my Windows Server 2008 R2 box and to my surprise it wanted to backup like 1.3 TB. This was unusual since it was a new install and all of C: was a few gigabytes. Turns out, somehow, the bootloader and boot files were installed on my 1 TB data drive.

bcdedit command will display your bootloader settings. I found a dead simple (and free!) GUI tool to edit these settings, EasyBCD 2.0.2. It doesn’t list Windows Server 2008 R2 as a supported OS, but I can confirm it works on it. Choose BCD Backup / Repair - Change boot drive.

Windows Update Error - Code 80073712

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 01:26:36 +0000

My main desktop PC was dormant for some time and I recently just got it back up. When I tried to install all the Windows Updates that had accumulated I started to receive error Code 80073712. After trying to install them multiple times I Googled the error code but found the solutions did not help. This fix didn’t help since I didn’t have the pending.xml file on my system.

After some more searching I found a free tool from Microsoft that fixed my problems. Microsoft Fix it 50202 will reset your Windows Update components. I ran the default fix but you can also run an Aggressive mode too. I had to search for new updates a couple times after running it but eventually I was able to install all the Windows Updates.