Can’t Access Windows 2000 or Windows XP File and Printer Shares From Windows 7

Published on 10:30 am - Saturday 10 October 2009 in Hints and Tips, Resources and Time of the Time. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Can’t access file shares and shared printers on your Windows 2000 or Windows XP Machines from Windows 7? The solution is below. I had this issue for a few days and finally, after searching through heaps of forum threads and posts, stumbled across the solution. The solution was originally posted on Windows Client Tech Centre forums (by a user known as ‘shooda‘).

On your Windows 7 Machines:

  1. Access the ‘Run’ command (otherwise known as the run box). If you can’t see it in your Start Menu, try enabling it in the ‘Superbar’ (the Task Bar) properties or on your keyboard press the ‘Windows’ (WIN) key and the ‘R’ key at the same time.
  2. Type: gpedit.msc (press enter or click OK)
  3. Make your way down through Computer Configuration
    1. Windows Settings
      1. Security Settings
        1. Local Policies
          1. Security Options
          2. And double click on ‘Network security: LAN Manager authentication level’
            1. Click the drop down box and select the option ‘Send LM & NTLM Responses’
            2. Click OK
  4. Close the Local Group Policy Editor.
  5. Done! Try accessing file and printer shares on your Windows 2000 and Windows XP machines from your Windows 7 machines.

More information (as technical as it is) can be found here.

VMware Server 1.0.9 on CentOS 5.3

Published on 9:00 pm - Thursday 24 September 2009 in Hints and Tips, Resources and Time of the Time. 4 Comments

The contents of this guide should work perfectly fine on a base (yes that’s base, not bare bones) only installation of either CentOS 32/64 bit or RHEL 5.3 32/64 bit. If you have any troubles, please do leave a comment and I’ll do my best to assist you. This guide assumes you are setting up your machine to be a server, although the steps will work just fine on a machine configured to be a desktop.

Install CentOS 5.3 32/64 Bit

If you haven’t installed CentOS 5.3 already, you should do so. Kinda hard to use VMware Server 1.0.9 without an operating system. Most people want the host OS to have as little additional crap as possible. In regards to that, during the installation, make a point of not installing any additional packages, or package groups except the ‘Base’ group (oh and leave the base group in it’s default state, don’t go ticking on any extras, you’ll make the installation install more dependancies thus more crap). So in other words, only the ‘Base’ group should be ticked, untick the rest!

Nope, you won’t have any GUI, and even if you did, you still have to do the rest of the configuration at the command line anyway. VMware Server 1.0.9 host with GUI = bad idea, unless of course your host is also your desktop.

Once installed, configure your host as you like it from the ‘firstboot’ screen and than login as root. Here’s a few tips.

  • Disable any services you aren’t using.
  • Disable SE Linux
  • Unless you’re going to configure and use it with VMware Server 1.0.9 machines, disable ip6tables
  • Don’t go configuring special firewall rules just yet, leave that until later.

Even though it’s the host, its’ software should still be up to date. Issue the following command and download any updates.

yum update

Updates finished? Awesome! Lets reboot the server and start the next step afresh.

shutdown -r now

Install VMware Server 1.0.9 Required Components.

Plenty of you will argue about what you do and don’t need to complete the install. Well, I’ve completed this configuration of server with VMware Server more times than I care to remember now, and sometimes I needed all of these packages and sometimes I didn’t. No, I didn’t bother to find out why. Do you know why? Great! Put it in the comments!

Login in as root and issue the following commands one after the other. Yes, you can issue them all at once if you’re clever, I like to take my time, in case the worlds explodes.

yum install kernel-devel
yum install kernel-headers
yum install libXtst*
yum install xinetd
yum install gcc*

On a couple of occasions, I needed the following package – It could have been when I was using CentOS 5.3 64Bit

yum install libXdmcp-devel
yum install libXrender*

What does the ‘*’ mean? It means grab any packages that start with ‘anytextbeforethe*’

Installed all the packages? Fantastic! Lets reboot the server and start the next step afresh.

shutdown -r now

Install VMware Server 1.0.9

How you get the installation package of VMware Server 1.0.9 onto your server is up to you. Here are a few tips.

  • Download VMware Server 1.0.9 Here or Here
  • Make sure you register for a VMware Server serial number or numbers. It’s free.
  • You can use WinSCP to transfer VMware Server 1.0.9. to your server (it uses SSH). Get it Here or Here.
  • You could use the wget command with the direct link above, directly on your server, like this:
    • wget -c http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmserver/VMware-server-1.0.9-156507.i386.rpm
  • Burn it to a CD
  • Burn it to a DVD
  • Transfer it to a USB Drive

Once you have the VMware Server 1.0.9 installation file on your server, installing is pretty straight forward. If you’ve never installed a RPM file before, pay attention, people go to university for this stuff. Make sure you are logged in as root, and issue the following:

rpm -ivh VMware-server-1.0.9-156507.i386.rpm

Easy, no?

Depending on the power of your server, it may take a few minutes to install. Once installed, we have one last final step. No need to reboot this time!

Configuring VMware Server 1.0.9

Issue the following command. If some or none of the required packages are not installed, this will tell you straight away.

vmware-config.pl

or if you are so inclined:

/usr/bin/vmware-config.pl

Both do the exact same thing. Don’t run both (either by concatenating them both together or one after the other), that would just be silly and make you leave a comment about how you ran both and got an error message.

NB: If you are told that some packages or components are missing, I suggest going back and re-issuing the ‘yum’ commands above in the section ‘Install VMware Server 1.0.9 Required Components‘. Before you issue any commands, press ctrl-c to quit the setup program and return to the command prompt.

If you see something like the following, you are good to go:

Making sure services for VMware Server are stopped.

Stopping VMware services:
   Virtual machine monitor                                 [  OK  ]

You must read and accept the End User License Agreement to continue.
Press enter to display it.

The configuration settings of VMware Server 1.0.9 is now up to you. Here are a few tips:

  • Accept the agreement, type Y or Yes and press the enter key.
  • The defaults are all fine.
  • In most cases, Bridged networking is what you are after, so say ‘No’ to host only and NAT (unless you know what they are and you are going to use them)
  • Sometimes the installation would tell me that port 902 is unavailable. This is not true. Override by typing in 902, otherwise you’ll need to remember 904 (or whatever other number you select) and type it in every time when you use the VMware Server 1.0.9 client. Not cool.
  • At the very least, choose your own location for the storage of VMware Server 1.0.9 servers. I always put mine in /home/vmware (because I have /home on a separate partition)
  • Put your Serial Key in now, rather than later.

Installation and Configuration is now complete! If you need any further help / assistance, please, feel free to leave a comment

Proxmox OpenVZ Server 2 NICs 2 Gateways

Published on 2:00 pm - Tuesday 22 September 2009 in Hints and Tips, Resources and Time of the Time. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

These are two solutions that worked for me. They are by no means the only solutions.

My Predicament.
A server (a Dell SC440), with two physical network interfaces. Our office has two ISP connections (DSL broadband). We have the one internal network range (192.168.1.0/24) with two gateways (1.254 and 1.221).

I have installed Promox on the server. I wanted to be able to choose which gateway the guest containers used, instead of them being locked into using the same gateway as the host server. Some of the guest OS containers will host services via the first ISP, and the others will host services via the second ISP. (obviously with firewall rules etc configured in our gateways). So the container gateway entries need to point to their respective ISP/Gateway.

Note: While the security advantage of venet over veth is certainly worthwhile in a hosting environment (and others as well), in my case, we have two hardware firewalls that haven’t let us down yet, and there is little to no concern for the possibility of an internal hacker (there are only three of us!)

Continue Reading Proxmox OpenVZ Server 2 NICs 2 Gateways

Sacred 2 on Windows 7

Published on 12:00 pm - Tuesday 22 September 2009 in Hints and Tips and Time of the Time. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Kudos go to my girlfriend for sussing this one out.

Recently, we came across a conundrum concerning the computer game Sacred 2 running under Windows 7. Long story short, it just wouldn’t work. It should be noted that the reason for this not working, has nothing to do with Nvidia / ATI Graphics cards, but it is related to Physx/Ageia. Make sure you have the latest version of Physx installed. Sacred 2 does come with the last version of Physx known as Ageia Physx (before nvidia bought it and rebranded it to just Physx). You can also obtain the latest stand alone Physx package from the nvidia website. Even if you have an ATI graphics card, you still need to have this installed to play Sacred 2 and any other games that require Physx. So long as your CPU supports it and it is powerful enough, you’ll get CPU powered physics, instead of physics powered by your graphics card. Some people call this “Software Physics” or “Software” mode. I’ve noticed no performance difference between a computer playing Sacred 2 with an Nvidia graphics card and a computer with an ATI graphics card.

This fix should work for owners of Sacred 2 under Windows 7, regardless of the version  you have (Steam, Impulse, Stand alone or whatever).

  1. Create a shortcut to the Sacred 2 executable. You’ll find it in the game directory, in another directory called ’system’. For me, it is: D:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\Common\Sacred 2\System\Sacred2.exe
  2. Put the shortcut on your desktop, or somewhere handy.
  3. Right click the shortcut and select properties
  4. Click the Shortcut tab
  5. In the Target field, you need to add the following: -skipopenal -nocpubinding. The contents of my Target field look like this: "D:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\common\sacred 2\system\sacred2.exe" -skipopenal -nocpubinding
  6. Click Apply and Click OK.
  7. Double click the shortcut and play Sacred 2!

Still can’t get it to work? Leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do to help you out. Further comments and suggestions are welcome. These are just simply the steps that worked for us. In case you are wondering, we are using the RTM (Release To Manfacture) version of Windows 7 (we are Microsoft Technet Partners). This is the same version that is available to consumers and end users as of mid October 2009.