TechGrabage

I am a user of VMWare, a software that speaks for itself. I want to use VMWare to create my base images for various tasks and hardware platforms. Today I will test this:

1) Add a new drive to a virtual machine 2) In the guest OS, format the disk (bigger than current c: drive) 3) Fire up GHOST32.exe within the guest OS. 4) Create an image of drive C: on the newly created/formatted drive D: 5) Move the image to a network location for depployment.

Sounds like it’ll work. I’ll post some results.

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I am using the newest version of the Ghost Corporate Console of late. Works very nicely. In conjunction with Universal Imaging Utility (UIU) I can deploy a single ‘universal’ image to many different machines. Once I have this universal image created I can deploy it to many machines with just a few clicks in the Ghost Console. For each machine the console can see I can create a custom cinfig for that machine that will give it the correct computer name and join it to the domain.

You can’t beat being able to click a machine and send an image to it that will rename it and join it to the domain!

The current version of Ghost Corporate Solution Suite in conjuntion with the UIU is something no network/systems admin should have to live without.

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Beta testing that is. I have been doing quite a bit of beta testing of late. Some pretty high profile stuff to. Tested a new inkjet printer from Dell and some cool stuff right now for Verizon. The best part are the incentives. For one of the most recent tests I received a DVD Recorder. Pretty cool. Hook it right up to the TV and record shows and movies directly to DVD. Only problem so far is my DirecTv receiver. The DVD Recorder can’t change the channel on the DTV receiver. I think I’ll hook up to the DirecTv TiVO receiver. This way I can transfer my hard drives recordings form the TiVO to DVD…

Kinda fun. I’d tell ya who I test for but that would decrease my chances for cool stuff!

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Users are objects in Active Directory. Shares via DFS can be objects in Active Directory. Printers are objects in Active Directory. There are so many objects in AD. Why do I need to create these convoluted scripts to attach printers and shares to users? Why? If they are all objects wouldn’t it make sense to be able assign printer objects to user objects as well as share objects to user objects? How about assigning a printer object to a group of user objects? This would make life a lot easier as far as administration of a Windows Domain goes…

Make sense right? Over simplified? Not possible?

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SUN… Of all companies. Perhaps it is the pinch SUN Microsystems has felt since the popularity of Linux and other open source initiatives picked up the steam they have of late that has made them be on the side of the user, not big business. SUN has created DReaM. An open source DRM methodology. DReaM is based on the user owning the license for purchased media for life. Current practice has DRM based on the DEVICE. Basing DRM on a device makes very little sense, for the user. When the device dies you lose all icenses for the media you have purchased, unless all your DRM license databases are backed up (are yours?).

Is there a good reason for not basing DRM on me instead of my devices?

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Looks like XBOX 360 Pricing has been set… Not bad. $400 bucks in a usable state.

I must obtain one!

Technology News: Gaming : Microsoft Unveils Xbox 360 Packages, Pricing

Attention Sys Admins and Desktop Support Specialists everywhere!

This is the tool you have been waiting for. A lot of use GHOST for our PC imaging needs. Why not use it, it mkaes life a lot easier. For years the big draw back with imaging Windows clients has been the Hardware Abstration Layer (HAL). The HAL is unique to each installation platform. It tells Windows how to communicate with the hardware inside the PC. If this layer is not configured correctly settings OS settings that pertain to hardware (audio, video…) would not work. Windows uses Plug-n-Play (PNP) to determine the contents of the HAL.

What if we could eliminate the HAL from the Ghost image? In conjuntion with SysPrep we could force the machine to create the HAL upon restoration of the image to a client machine. In steps the Universal Imaging Utility from Binary Research International. The UIU takes care of this. It even automates the SysPrep process with a few basic templates for you to use.

In my testing the UIU has been almost flawless. I have created a ‘master’ image of a Windows XP Pro installtion on an HP DX2000 mini tower machine. If you check the link you can see the specs. I have then successfully deployed this image to the following machines:

Gateway M1000 HP D220 HP NC6000 Gateway Profile 3 Gateway Profile 2

All of the above have very different HAL’s. A Ghost image created with the UIU restored to all of the machines without any issues what so ever! Using Ghost Corporate I was even able to set the computer name and join it to the domain! I was done just as easy as that. In the past I would have had to keep Ghost images around for each hardware platform. This reduces the number of images I need to keep around drastically.

The only machine I cant restored a UIU image to is a Gateway E4600. Failes on video hardware. The UIU people are working very hard with me to fix this!

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Universal Imaging Utility

How cool is this? TiVO to offer program download service. You’ll be able to download programming rather than record when it is on. Thanks Engadget!

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Exclusive pics of TiVo Download - Engadget - www.engadget.com

As always, a very interesting perspective from Engadget…

Microsoft’s closing and locking Xbox 360 peripherals - Engadget - www.engadget.com

A must have!

As Quoted from the site: “QEMU is a generic and open source processor emulator which achieves a good emulation speed by using dynamic translation. QEMU has two operating modes:

* Full system emulation. In this mode, QEMU emulates a full system (for example a PC), including a processor and various peripherials. It can be used to launch different Operating Systems without rebooting the PC or to debug system code.
* User mode emulation (Linux host only). In this mode, QEMU can launch Linux processes compiled for one CPU on another CPU.

An optional proprietary QEMU Accelerator Module is available to optimize the case where a PC is emulated on a PC. This module enables QEMU to run most of the target application code directly on the host processor to achieve near native performance.

The supported host and target CPUs are listed in the status page. For full system emulation, the supported Operating Systems are listed here.”

QEMU