Arthur's Journal

I had to migrate my virtual machines folder to another drive to free up space. Since I have quite a few virtual machines, I did not want to add them back manually. Doing a quick Google search did not turn up where the favorites (inventory) list was located. Digging around under my profile I was able to find the location of the list which is located at:

%APPDATA%\Vmware\Inventory.vmls

You can open this file in a text editor to make the necessary location changes. The file will look something like this:

.encoding = “windows-1252”
vmlist2.config = “D:\Virtual Machines\CentOS\CentOS.vmx”
vmlist2.DisplayName = “CentOS”
vmlist2.ParentID = “0”
vmlist2.ItemID = “2”
vmlist2.SeqID = “2”
vmlist2.IsFavorite = “FALSE”
vmlist2.IsClone = “FALSE”
vmlist2.CfgVersion = “8”
vmlist2.State = “paused”
vmlist2.UUID = “00 00 00 00 4b 20 a2 e6-fc 94 24 02 20 13 b2 7f”

Just as a reminder, make sure you make a backup of the file and that Vmware Workstation is closed before saving.

Introduction

I needed a backup solution that would back up multiple servers to a single location. In order to accomplish this task I created a small Linux machine running CentOS with a cron job that will remotely connect to these machines using SSH and run the backups. Once the backup job is complete it will then push the files out on a network share to be stored.

Overview

The way I implemented the backup solution is through a multiple step process. The process begins by kicking off a bash script via cron job. The script will remote in to the client machine using SSH without a password. It will then run rsync to copy any changes from the client machine to the backup directory on the server. Once the rsync process is finished it will then archive the files. Finally the script will then mount a network share, copy the archive over and then disconnect that share.
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Introduction

I decided to setup a small Linux box that would login to my Linux boxes to backup with rsync (will post how I did that later). In order to do this with a script I had to setup SSH to log me in without a password otherwise my script would prompt me for the password every time.

Remote Machine (Server)

First I had to login on the remote server and check to make sure in the file that /etc/ssh/sshd_config had the following uncommented:

RSAAuthentication yes
PubkeyAuthentication yes

Be sure to restart sshd after you make changes.

service sshd restart #redhat/CentOS
/etc/init.d/sshd restart #ubuntu/other

We will need to create a folder for SSH keys in your home directory so run this command:

[ -d ~/.ssh ] || mkdir ~/.ssh

This command will test to see if the .ssh directory is there, if not it will create it.
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You may be wondering why you are getting HTML Error 403 ‘Forbidden, you do not have permission to access / on this server’ even though you have a file in your directory or document root setup correctly.

The issue is the install by default restricts access to everything as you can see in the following directive:

<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order deny,allow
Deny from all
</Directory>

What you need to do is just comment out the line ‘Deny from all’ from your httpd.conf file then restart your apache service.  You should be good to go once the services come back up.

Introduction

I wanted to setup Time Machine on my Macbook to backup to my network drive. However after some tinkering I come to realize that by default the Time Machine program can not do this unless it was formatted using the apple file system. After some research and some testing I have come up with the solution and just jotting them down here for anyone having the same issue as me.

Setup

There will be multiple steps for this tutorial. I recommend that you read through this tutorial before you begin. Terminal commands will be supplied at the end for the CLI users.

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Introduction

This guide will show you how to setup Cisco IOS authentication via Active Directory. This guide is based on Cisco 2600 Router and Windows Server 2008 R2 using NPS.

Active Directory NPS Setup

This section assumes that active directory is already setup and running in your environment. Now for the fun part.

1. We will need to Add the NPS Role via Control Panel > Admin Tools > Server Manager. Click Add Roles then select Network Policy and Access Services then Network Policy Server use defaults and install.
2. We will need to add a RADIUS Client by expanding Roles > Network Policy and Access Services > NPS (Local) > RADIUS Clients and Servers.
   

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This tutorial will show you how to enable SSH terminal access on your Cisco IOS device.

The first few commands may already be set on your router, if this is the case you may skip them.

• Set a hostname on your router using the hostname command: ‘hostname Edge’
• Set a domain name on your router using the following command: ‘ip domain-name Example.com’
• Set a username on your router using the following command: ‘username administrator privilege level 15 password 0 1234’

Once you have finished the previous commands you will then need to do the following:

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This quick guide will show you the steps needed to create a bootable OSX Lion CD and then will describe how to do a clean install of the OSX Operating System.

Make a bootable CD of Lion

1. First you will need to obtain a copy of the Lion installer application.
2. Locate the Lion installer application with Finder.
3. Right (Secondar) click on the application and goto Show Package Contents.
4. Look for a  folder called SharedSupport.  Inside the folder you will see InstallESD.dmg, copy this file to a different location.
5. Launch the Disk Utility application.
6. Click the Burn icon then select the InstallESD.dmg you copied earlier and then insert a blank DVD.
7. Once finished you will have a bootable OS X Lion CD!

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I have been using a windows host file to block ads on websites for a while now.  The host file (http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt) redirects most ad links to 127.0.0.1 instead of their IP address.  By doing this, it shows either a blank page or “page can not be displayed” instead of the normal advertisements.

I wanted to take this one step further and apply this to my router (Linksys E2000) using DD-WRT.  After searching the dd-wrt forums (http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=20346), I came across the script to do this.  Some routers like WRT54G v5 and v6 will not be able to do this as there is not enough memeory to store the host file.

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I had an interesting thing happen to me when I tried installing CentOS 5 on VirualPC 2007.

Currently RedHat and SuSe linux guests are supported by VirtualPC. Installing other linux guests is possible. To install CentOS 5 as a guest in VirtualPC you will need to install it via text mode. If you try to run the setup normally, you get wierd graphic issues like the one posted below. This is due to the fact that it does not understand the graphics chipset that VirtualPC uses.

To get into text mode in CentOS 5 at the boot: prompt type in linux text

To install Ubuntu 8 and later on VirtualPC you will need to run the installer in SafeMode.

After that, its pretty much straight forward.