Home Server Projects

I've been messing with Windows 7 for more than 2 weeks now in-between sessions spent pounding on Visaster/Office2007 and the comparison, at least at the OS desktop level, favors Windows 7 tremendously. Windows open much faster. Built-in system management panels like Control Panel, and MMC related tools take much less time to perform various simple tasks with Windows 7.

I don't like the Explorer window any better in Win 7 but its not as cluttered as the Visaster's version.

The 4 color flag Start button now has a color shimmer. ennnh, Who cares? When you click it, at least the button at the bottom says Shut Down instead of some sort of icon gibberish as in Visaster. The buttons are relatively bigger as well.

The biggest improvement to the Start button might be the All Programs menu that pops up. Anything that has been installed using Windows Installer or a Java installation (OpenOffice & Firefox 3) comes up on the menu that opens. I would like to swap it for current “sticky-note-snipper-menu”.

Sticky Notes? Just what I need. Virtual flags of paper sticking inside(?) the very frame I need to be as big as possible. The reason REAL sticky notes work is that they get tagged to the OUTSIDE of the computer visual frame. Where else do you put that damn 12 character random string password you can't remember? Some “pointy-haired-boss” (see Dilbert.com) must have thought they were cool.

Snipping tool. Hmmmm? Good idea? Don't know. Its just useful enough to make me wish it did more.

Gadgets—make me wish it was a Mac. Mac's work better and have better display characteristics. (resizing, fade-away, stay quiet etc) I also checked out the Gadgets online at MS website. 50% of them seem to be different styled clocks. The rest were variations of what was already on the Gadget menu in the OS. Whoop-dee-doo. Time for the gadget-programmers to get creative.

Task Manager is somewhat better than in XP Pro. (I can't compare it to Visaster.) Adding the services tab is a slight improvement. It would help to be able to shut-off services from the Task Manager instead of having to load MMC first.

I haven't figured out what "Libraries" is good for besides confusing the programmer.

Why rename workgroups to homegroups? Are we supposed to think of it as something new? Hopefully it uses a new protocol with more secure authentication compared to Lan Manager.

Now for the reason I think Windows 7 will actually be worth something.

A few days ago something got broken. I really don't know or care what it was. OpenOffice was open at the time but I wasn't using it. I was web browsing using IE8 Beta. A message box opened up telling me that the operating system was reporting that some system files were damaged and that it was going to save the data in the open programs and then shut them down. It then reported that it would repair the damage and restart the system.

It did exactly that. I was absolutely amazed. I have never had a almost totally hands off repair like that before, ever, with a Microsoft product. The “almost” is in there because at one point a screen that looked somewhat like the Safe boot choice screen in XP Pro came up and indicated it wanted to finish the repair boot. I suppose I could have let it timeout and execute the repair option but I had to get my fingers into it somewhat! It took only about 20 minutes to do it all. Its running right now, I'm writing this review on it in OpenOffice 3.0

Now the kicker. It did all of this running in 512 MB of RAM, with a 10GB virtual hard drive inside Sun's VirtualBox on my Windows XP Pro system. Freaking amazing.

Been thinking about Virtual Machines in generic and specific implementations.

I think DebbieToo (a Debian 4.0 Home Server) is going to get a “make-over”. She's been outstandingly reliable. Always boots up when I have to turn her off for some reason. Malware free without any special anti-virus programs.

Why screw with success?

Because there are some applications I'd like to add to her and I don't trust them completely. One is Windows XP Pro SP3. Another is Win 7 beta. I'm convinced that the best way to run Windows is in a VM. Put all of your data files or downloads on an external drive or a served drive somewhere else, like on a Linux server. Something craters or you get torched by a viral attack, delete the VM and copy the backup clone you have and start it in a new VM. Hard drive space is incredibly cheap now. Sort of the ultimate software firewall. Nothing still beats disconnecting the Cat5 though this comes close.

Like misters Watson and Meyer, I have been looking at VMs lately both at work and here at home. At home I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to use it but it looked enticing. It generated an itch that I couldn't locate. At work I found it extremely useful though I was disappointed with the VMWare Workstation performance in Vista, in Windows XP Pro it definitely shines. What clinched it was my personal discovery that “shared folders” both in VMWare and VirtualBox from Sun offered the potential way to share files without dealing with logons through Samba 3. This allows a server the capability to look like a Windows box or a Linux box without too much fuss and NO direct User access to the underlying host whatever it is.

For work I eventually came up with a compromise. I put the VMWare back on the XP Pro system with 2 monitors where it worked very well. Then I left the (expletive deleted) MS Office 2007 on the Visaster box now only sporting one monitor. Plug mouses in both systems. Run the VMWare window on the second monitor, a mouse click or two handles grabbing and saving screen captures. Make a shared folder on the Visaster box I can write to from the XP Pro system and that takes care of the documentation screen capture issue.

Another option at home is to go fully into Linux server mentality. Load a instance of Ubuntu server onto a drive, put Sun's VirtualBox on it and add VMs as needed. Because running Win XP Pro and Win7 simultaneously eats up too much RAM, its unlikely I'll be running more than one of them at a time on the server system any way. Linux seems to be a lot more useful with smaller RAM requirements.

Check List

First step is to clone all the system drives involved (multiple computers).
Verify that the clones all are bit for bit good clones.
Remove the floppy drive in the target system for the host. Haven't used it in 5 years at least.
Prep a new drive for Ubuntu server and install it.
Install the Ubuntu (Debian) Virtual Box applications.
Create and verify the VM “envelopes”.
Drop into the VM's OS images from the cloned images.
Allow stored ISOs to be accessible and mounted from the VMs.
Set NLS file shares and permissions.
Setup shared folders with the VMs and verify permissions.
Setup the DVD-/+RW drive and the DVD ROM drive on the target system as drives in the VMs.
Make changes in the Apache server and Samba 3 setups in the VM that will be operating as Debbietoo.
Turn on NAT services in Virtual Box and the host server.
Set logon permissions in all the VMs and what needs to be done in the host.
Setup folder redirection for Windows clients, Links for Linux clients.
Modify the scripts for Debbietoo's Windows clients and attach them to shortcut icons.*
Test everything and fix the things I screwed up.
Clone the VMs. Save copies somewhere else but on the system drive.
Clone the target system drive.

I don't know what I may have left out of that list but I'm sure there's something missing.
End result is I get another computer that previously was running Debbietoo that is as fast as the new Debbietoo system. Also the VM host becomes a system that can serve as a backup system for the entire household network.

* (Since I'm presently the only Linux client: “I don't need no stinking logon script.” via “Blazing Saddles” from “The Wild Bunch” !)

I downloaded Sun's Virtual Box version 2.1.0 here at home after having my adventures at work with Visaster running VMWare Workstation 6.5.

I installed it on my home computer running Windows XP Pro. What a surprise! It works very nicely. I loaded Fedora core 10 and openSuse11 both worked well, and not particularly slow. I could tell I was in a VM but it was very reasonable performance.

Yeah I know that I swore I'd never look at another Windows product again....I downloaded the Win7 Beta iso. I'm now one of the "exclusive 2.5 million" that are going to be allowed to run the software until August 09 when it suicides. Burned a couple of DVD-Rs for work.

After the good performance with the Linux distros, I thought; "Well what the heck!" I installed the Win7 iso straight from its file on the Win XP Pro system into a new VM running under Sun's Virtual Box.

One point here that bears noting: I've gotten so used to Linux that I didn't bother to think about system performance issues when I installed the iso into the Virtual Box. The ISO and the virtual drive happened to be on the same physical drive and even worse in the same partition. Installation took over 2 hours. When I realized what I had done, I realized one user issue that isn't easily addressed by Linux, if you have more than one drive and you like to jack the performance up, having two drives actually improves performance. The caveat being that if you're reading from one and writing onto another volume, they need to be on separate physical drives.

After doing a lot of other things while Visaster SP2 (Windows 7) installed, I'd look in on it and watch what was going on. Somewhere along the way I wondered why the sunlight was streaming down from the sky on the desktop. Yeah I have to admit a really nasty semi-biblical thought passed. Then somewhere along the way the Siamese fighting fish pops up. Oh OK, I think, "We're under water". I wasn't sure if that was a counter-play to Aero or not but I laughed anyway.

It goes through a number of reboots but it tells you in the beginning it will be doing it. (Somebody actually thought through the "user install experience" a little bit.) It reboots after getting it all done and asks for a password. I type it in and it starts up in the VM. Way Cool! It actually works!

In fact I'm writing this blog entry using FIREFOX 3 running on Windows 7 inside the Sun Virtual Box. Its apparently running at near full speed. All the little pop-ups in the zdnet.co.uk website are popping up and changing at about the same speed as on my Linux boxes.

I installed OpenOffice 3.0 on Windows 7 Beta it and that seems to work as well without any hiccups.

Definitely, if you want to run a VM on your computer use Sun's Virtual Box. Its definitely worth looking at especially considering the price, its free. I'm going to look at their Linux versions next. There are versions for practically all of the major Linux distros both 32 and 64 bit.

In fact Windows 7 works so freaking well in the Sun VM I'm going to ask the kool-aid drinker at the office if I can put it on another hard drive and run it instead of Visaster as my nominal desktop system. He'll probably fall over in a faint.

---------added notes

It seems as if Win7 is beginning to look more and more like a lot of the Linux distros. A lot more of the user interface has either become more abstracted or is more hidden behind panels. If you are using many different operating systems during the day, it gets hard to remember where the NIC or the video adjustments are when jumping from one Linux or Windows OS to another.

Over at VirtualBox.org there are an number of blogs and articles on installing Windows 7 Beta on Sun's Virtual Box and surprisingly a number of them deal directly with running Sun Virtual Box instances of Win 7 on a Win XP Pro host.

VirtualBox does not have all the bells and whistles of VMWare Workstation but it is definitely worth looking at for evaluating Win7 at minimal cost.

BTW-- set your virtual drive for Win7 at least 10 GB, the OS install alone took 6+ GB of space in the drive file.

Due to the insistence of the IT department and corporate policy, I moved my VMWare Workstation installation formerly on Windows XP Pro SP3 to the VIsaster SP1 computer to continue an ongoing project. Turns out I was justified in my fears of a VMWare Visaster.

I've spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out why a virtual mouse in a VMWare Workstation guest installation of Windows XP Pro SP3 on a Vista SP1 host just didn't work well. You could get one good click out of the mouse then it would go psycho and jump all over the place inside the guest frame. On occasion, the mouse would jump out of the guest frame and onto the host's frame.

On the VMWare web site there were a lot of suggestions to help “de-bounce the mouse”. One that I didn't really understand at all was to disable the VMWare floppy drive and CDROM drives in the guest OS window. It quieted down the mouse somewhat but did not really improve the “grab” function to get the mouse to operate inside the VM.

Complicating the entire mess was the XVGA setup I was attempting to run it on, a dual monitor extended desktop running on a 22” wide-screen Dell monitor with a second 19” standard aspect ratio monitor. The dual port video adapter was an ATI X600 with my choice of 4 Vista drivers, 2 each from DELL or ATI's website. They were all consistent. They all failed exactly the same way.

This exact same video adapter and monitors were used in the XP Pro SP3 system I was previously running VMWare Workstation on. The XP drivers were from DELL and I didn't have any trouble running the VMWare on the XP Pro system with the 2 dissimilar monitors.

I tested a Nvidia 7600 on the Windows XP Pro system and it worked as well as the X600. The problem was that it was too tall to fit into the Visaster system.

The reason for dual monitors was to allow running the application software in its own VM and test all of the new versions as I document their function. If necessary write up the bugs (or “features” Ha!) on the internal bug wiki. A wide desktop area is extremely handy to have for that combo of functionality. Screen captures from the VM are used for both documenting the software functions and as attachments for the bug reports.

The end result of all the testing is that I have a dual port video board that although an excellent board for use under Windows XP, has issues under Vista. I ended up having to remove the board and drop back to a single screen running off the internal video interface adapter, an Intel 945 AGP chip. Removing the dual port adapter and removing the driver eliminated the psycho mouse.

I would whole-heartily agree that if you need good stable VM technology for Windows XP Pro use, VMWare Workstation 6.5 is the best choice, much better than using the free Microsoft VPC-2007. Failures with VPC were numerous and overall the software worked agonizingly slow even on XP Pro.

VMWare Workstation on Vista is noticeably slower than on XP Pro but with a single monitor it works fast enough to not be annoying. If you need to run any VMWare software on a Vista system I would suggest that you download the 30 day trial version and try it out with the video board you will be using with the VM. That should eliminate any guesswork on your part as to whether or not the psycho mouse will come to visit you!

Well we now know why Microsoft released their patent attempt (or Scroogian vision) on Christmas. We can now see where they want to do their market testing for their “pay-per-use” computer.

Actually I have to give them credit this time. China is an absolutely perfect place to test a product that nobody with brains in the free world would touch. You have a fairly tightly controlled market (compared to the EU and the Americas) where the production costs are de-facto controlled by the government. There is an untapped potential for “sales” or subscriptions driven by consumer and business need for computing power. You have a fairly tightly controlled network access. Subscriptions can be granted or removed by the government owned “vendor”. You don't toe the line defined by your local political boss, he gets your subscription yanked. Don't pay your taxes, the bosses will know it before you can say “1040 EZ”.

Yes a lovely system. The chains are clanking a lot louder now.