Restless C#ding

Oh boy is this one fun... so you like having your VMWare images (virtual machines) on a separate hard drive, so they run faster. You have your PC's OS hard drive on different physical hardware than the VMWare image. Here comes the fun part -- you love the portability of being able to move the hard drive from machine to machine, running the virtual machine on both VMWare Workstation and VMWare player. You suspend your VM when you're done for a while, and resume it later on, sometimes on a different PC. You always safely remove your hardware using the windows OS tools, until one fateful day.

You unplug the harddrive thinking you're done, when you get a windows error message: "Delayed Write Failed". Uh oh.

You've just corrupted your saved state. This is because even though vmware said it was done writing the ram out to disk, it really was still writing... this way you could still work in the background!

OK, you think -- as far as the VM is concerned, the RAM is corrupt (or rather the data stored in virtual RAM is corrupt). How can we get this back?

The easy way is to close your vm software of choice (vmware player or workstation), rename your *.vmem file (a file containing the contents of the virtual ram), and start up the virtual machine again.

It will die. You'll get a message saying the vmem file cannot be found, and there's something corrupt with the saved state... do you want to preserve or discard?

You should select "Discard", and then start up the VM again. This time it'll boot up, just like windows crashed (do you want to enter safe mode? no.). You should still have all of your data (assuming nothing was acting on the data in RAM as you were suspending, in which case you can add data loss to your list of accomplishments for the day.

Working on trying to repair a friend's PC, I've encountered a hard drive so toasted, the file system is unrecognizable. The funny thing is that there's actually no "click of death" coming from the disk, but even a FIXMBR failed to recognize the old school FAT file system ("unrecoverable errors", file names that are all smiley faces (!), and my personal favorite, the reporting of the size as "10,XXX kilobytes" -- ouch!).

So I'm installing a fresh OS on the machine and giving it back as a pristine machine.... sans all saved data, documents, personal information, and settings.

Makes me feel a bit defeated....

It seems the cardspace team has been at work simplifying the user experience for Cardspace prompts. See codename "Geneva". This looks pretty good; they've even included the new Geneva server for creating managed cards, which is something I'd like to explore at some point. I'm very curious what work if any has been done to integrate OpenID in conjunction with cardspace.

I'm not sure just how far Cardspace is penetrating, as I've yet to run across a site (aside from Windows Live, and even that's in beta, and has been since at least August of 2007!), which actually uses cardspace for authentication. I have found many articles from the 2006/2007 timeframe purporting firefox 3.0 support of cardspace, however the plugins online don't show them. Windows live login requires IE to even attempt a cardspace login.

In this month's TechNet magazine the last article, by Raymond Chen told of the reasons why reboots are required after installing updates. It's not so much that windows is unable to swap out dll's that are being used, it's more a product of not needing to support parallel versions of the same dll for apps or services that are already loaded.

I moved servers within our location at work today. While it was a pretty physical workout (servers containing many drives & redundant power supplies make for some heavy lifting), it was much more mentally draining.

It's amazing how long & panicked the wait between powering up a RAID array is, and the time it states it's fully functional is. All went well, and Hyper-V is right where it belongs. I could actually feel my heart beating in my chest as I watched the lights cycle... finally rendering their blue verdict.

My only complaint so far with Hyper-V in Windows 2008 is the weak support of P2V (that is, Physical to Virtual conversion). I've got some pretty dated win 2000 servers that I'd like to retire, but it seems I need to create the VM's the old-fashioned way, through windows install disks, and manually copying the data over. The only other issue so far I've found with windows 2008 is the difficulty in Apple machines getting an IPv4 address through DHCP on a Windows 2008 server. Hopefully I'll find a way around that, since I can force people to use Windows.

I've been slowly attempting to decommission our work server closet without the luxury of downtime. Couple that with the fact that my job does not specialize in server administration, and there's a single user on a Mac, and my lack of formal expertise in network administration, and it becomes a much bigger project.

Today I was quite happy to decommission yet another physical server in favor of a virtual machine. That leaves me with 3 physical machines left to take down (1 is probably going to stick around for quite a while, unfortunately), and that means I've pared down the server closet enough to allow me to move the new hardware in.

The new hardware is quite cutting-edge, with the VM's running in Hyper-V. I've been quite happy these days with our development environment. We've got immediate building going on through TeamCity and NAnt, which allow true Continuous Integration. One of my employees has created the nightly deployment script, and I've just added in another more stable build that's also triggered through TeamCity.