Saturday 19 September 2009, 4:22 PM
VMPs - Virtual Machine Practices
Most of the following relates to using XP Pro as host. As soon as you feel comfortable using Ubuntu or some other Linux as host do it since you will see a performance increase in the VM.
On VirtualBox, its like all other VMs from other manufacturers, if you can afford to throw more RAM at it, go ahead and do it since VMs are like JAVA, real RAM hogs. RAM is incredibly cheap right now.
The other area they like to gobble, is hard drive space. Usually 8 to 10 GBs at a time. A large hard drive is an advantage here. Intuitively putting the VM "virtual hard drives" on a drive other than the boot/system drive for the XP host should help performance.
Unfortunately by default VirtualBox will place the VM hard drive files in the Document and Settings User profile folder. Ugh. Be sure to put them some place else to prevent massive profile folder bloat.
When it comes to operating systems, especially Linux distros, trying as many as you like, yes you can. Create a new VM for each distro. Just remember that a running VM will grab RAM space. The more RAM you can give it totally uncontested, the faster the VM will run. So to speed up VMs, limit the number running at a time and give them as much room as is practical. That means if you aren't using it, suspend it or shutdown that specific VM.
Beware that the hard drive you have all of this running on is in good shape. What can't run or isn't running in RAM, is being swapped out to the hard drive. So drive swapping tends to increase rather remarkably. A high speed drive helps but its still way freaking slower than more RAM.
Each of the VMs will have a setting for the amount of RAM to allow the VM to use. That comes out of the total amount of RAM of the host. The host requires RAM space since its actually fairly busy responding to the services demands from the VM so don't totally choke off the host. Setting RAM below 512 MB on XP Pro SP3 system without shutting down a lot of the unneeded XP services is likely to generate a big performance hit to the VM.
When you get comfortable with Ubuntu (or another Linux distro) I find that running VirtualBox on Ubuntu as host, things runs faster than with VirtualBox running on a XP Pro host. Mostly because there isn't so much crap running like in XP Pro. But also because the OS can use the RAM above 3.7 GBytes like XP Pro can't in a 4 GB motherboard. This is an OS limitation based on a hardware issue. Might be different in differing OS or hardware. All my testing has been on Intel chipsets. Not a problem on 64 bit systems. The biggest argument I see for a 64 bit board is a VM.
Also another trick is to shut down as many services as you can in the XP host so that you can to give the VM more room. However do NOT shutdown networking, firewall, SMB, RPC, DNS, DHCP, workstation, secondary logon, error reporting, event viewer, or printer services. If you just stop the services instead of disabling them, when the system is rebooted they come back. There are others as well.
One special service ABSOLUTELY that needs to be turned off temporarily is Windows Update, especially if you have set it to auto-install. You don't want it trying to update while the VM is up and running! Especially since it seems practically ALL XP updates require a reboot.
You can shutdown dotNet related services, indexing service, help & support services, DCOM, Terminal Server like remote desktop and assistance, and anything related to dialup server (its not likely to want to stop) and you're not likely to need Hyperterminal!
In the case of Dialup Server and Telephone related services, if you aren't using a dialup connection, you can disable them but it requires a reboot to make it "stick". Just set them on disabled and then reboot. Its almost impossible to get the telephone services to shutdown from the MMC or Services applet. When the XP system comes up the services won't be running.
In the process window in Task Manager, you can also stop any of the software update processes, like Google, java (juschedule), realplayer etc. If you have a variation of SQL server or its agents or writers running in the XP host, shut them down. If the OS comes back and tells you that the process is vital, believe it and try shutting something else down. Anything with svchost attached to the process name is likely networking related so just leave it running.
If something stops working that you need to have running, just reboot the XP Pro host. As long as you haven't gone into the Services applet and DISABLED the service, it all comes back on the next reboot.
Please note that all of this "advice" is related to Windows XP Pro. I haven't much experience with Windows XP Home. In the areas of running VMs on XP Home, I've had no experience. I've considered XP Home the "runt of the litter" and haven't paid it much heed. My kids run it on their systems but that's about it.
BTW all of this advice works for everyday XP Pro operation or game playing even without a VM running!
Tuesday 15 September 2009, 6:29 AM
Windows 7 Needs Liposuction
I've tested Win7 in Beta and what turned out to be the RTM. On a dual core with 4 GB of RAM its a fine OS. Faster and much more reliable than Visaster. It did a number of things I was impressed with but there is no compelling reason to run it. That's at work or at home.
I try to install as little software as possible on a computer's OS to keep the running speed to a maximum. In Windows there are limited things that can be done like killing the taskbar tray, shutting off unneeded processes, etc. Even killing the Explorer shell can give you a little speed boost of about 1% and about 15 to 20 Megabytes of more RAM space in XP Pro. Most applications using Win32 API calls will still draw windows and do the Windows Form library functions without having to run a full Explorer desktop.
I find that Ubuntu 9.04 runs the exact same applications as XP I need at work and at home for 85% of my work. Word Processor/office suite, a web browser and email client application. For those situations where I HAVE to run Windows, I'll run XP Pro in a VM hosted on Ubuntu. Its about as fast as Win7 without a VM on the same hardware.
The complaint I have with Windows OS that Linux addresses to a certain extent, is that I can strip out or NOT install big chunks of software that is more rightly defined as application layer software instead of the bloat the has driven Windows into the ground performance-wise.
Considering the speed increases in the hardware, the operating systems ought to be running 5 to 10 times faster than they do. Mr Kingsley-Hughes timings on the install/upgrades confirms to me that the Win7 operating system is too damn fat. (check out his column over at ZDNET.COM yesterday)
Years ago I did tests comparing an application suite software our company wrote running on Windows 2000 Workstation/Pro SP4 and XP Pro SP1 on the the exact same hardware, same RAM, hard drive etc. Win XP Pro ran the software 20% faster than Win2K.
A similar test I've done running our current application on Windows XP Pro and Win7 Beta on the exact same hardware revealed that XP Pro was faster by 5%! What happened?
I went through looking at what processes were running on the 2 systems. I tried to optimize the running processes in Win 7 to approximate what was running in XP Pro. I did speed up Win7 a bit but not enough to be statistically significant. Win7 was still slower than XP Pro. Both tests were done again on the exact same machine with 4GB of RAM, both Windows OS versions were 32 bit and the video and network drivers were Microsoft's device drivers. XP Pro was running SP3 and Win7 was running the Beta.
If you open the Services windows in both XP Pro and Win7 and compare, there are approximately 3 times as many services running in Win7. A lot of them do arcane tasks that have little service for data display or word processor-like applications. The trick is to figure out what can be shut-off.
Its obvious that I will have to repeat the test again once Win7 comes out. I was very surprised by the results. I expected Win7 to blow past XP Pro.
Sunday 13 September 2009, 4:11 PM
Grubbing XP Pro to 2nd Boot
I had a hard drive failure on my home Windows XP Pro DELL system last week. I decided this morning at about 4AM to rebuild the system as a dual boot with Ubuntu 9.04 on the second partition. The goal is to minimize my "Windows dependency" status as much as possible. Another goal was to come up with functional partitions that could be imaged and cloned. I couldn't sleep anyway.
I installed a replacement hard drive and started the task with DELL's XP Pro re-install disk. I have images of the system but they are loaded with a lot of stuff I didn't really need for future work. So I decided to re-install everything from scratch. The DELL disk was slip-streamed with SP2 and I have a network install for SP3. So maybe its not really totally from scratch, close enough.
This time I'm running a clock on the whole process. I won't fault Microsoft for the bad drive so the clock starts at 4:23AM after the drive is installed and the system has started booting from the CD.
I've partitioned the 200 GB drive I installed into 2 sections. The first partition is NTFS for Windows XP Pro at 90GB. The second will be for Ubuntu 9.04. At this point, the second section is just unpartitioned space. There is a second drive, 320GB in size, that is formatted in a single partition as NTFS. Both drives are Western Digitals. The final drive complement is a CDROM\DVD RW and a CDRW drive. The computer is a P4, 2.8GHZ with 1GB of DDR RAM, a DELL Dimension 2400. It has the stock Intel video 845 family chip turned on as primary video adapter and a Nvidia TNT2 Riva PCI pcb with 64 MB of RAM as the second video adapter. Drivers for all of this are from the DELL web site. The Nvidia drivers are in SP3.
Base XP Pro system install at SP2 level is done by 5:08AM.
In the end what's installed on the system is SP3 from the network install package already resident on the second hard drive and approximately 60 updates downloaded “live” from Windows Update. Not all of the ones offered, but most. Total size of the first of 3 Windows Updates runs was 149 MB, including IE8. There were updates that loaded specifically for IE but I have no clue what size the files were. I refuse to install MediaPlayer 11 or dotNet framework 1.1. MediaPlayer 11 gets dumped because of the DRM issues. As to dotNet 1.1, nobody should still be writing to that piece of drivel. Other ignored patches related mostly to security patches appropriate for NT domain membership or for multiple language options I'll never need.
I also installed Mozilla FireFox 3.5, OpenOffice 3.1, Google Chrome, InfraRecorder, mspgcc (a gcc toolset for the TI MSP430) and Adobe Reader 9.1. All of these were package installs from the same second drive. With the exception of mspgcc, these are what I consider essential function tools for a typical desktop.
I used the open source tools simply because the Ubuntu install will get the same applications installed to match the XP.
Clock stops at 6:30AM. Total install time for Windows XP Pro SP3+ selected applications is 2 hours and 7 minutes. Actually quite fast for Windows simply because I “cheated” and already had all of the packages downloaded minus the SP3 updates.
Clock started again at 7:15AM. Now Ubuntu 9.04 is getting the same installment routine into the open partition on the IDE primary master drive (sda). The base system has finished installing by 7:30AM. I go into System/Administration/Update Manager and start it to download all the updates released for Ubuntu 9.04. It downloads 145 MB of updates and starts installing them.
Clock stops at 7:55AM. Total time for install is 40 minutes. Google Chrome for Linux isn't out of early Beta although I really don't need it on Ubuntu. Infrarecorder isn't necessary on Ubuntu since Brasero installs as part of the base install. The base install also includes FireFox 3.x, an Adobe Reader substitute, and OpenOffice 3.0. I haven't looked yet but mspgcc might be available in Linux.
I did get one giggle out of all the keyboard banging and mouse clicking this morning. There was an option to import my User settings from the Windows XP Pro partition. Not ever having done that before I clicked it mostly to see what it would do. It grabbed my desktop picture from the XP Pro Settings & Documents folder for my XP admin account and dropped it on the Ubuntu desktop. Ba-da-bing.
So for the price of:
1 hour and 27 minutes more of my time installing Windows XP Pro versus Ubuntu;
20GB of hard drive space used by Windows XP Pro versus 8GB of hard drive space in Ubuntu;
no differences in functionality;
potentially becoming XP-ground-zero for every malware-writing jackass in the world;
I get the “equivalent” in Windows XP Pro?
No contest.
Ubuntu wins.
Monday 7 September 2009, 5:29 PM
XP Nerd Trick 2
DANGEROUS TECHNIQUE DESCRIBED BELOW. THIS WILL MODIFY YOUR DESKTOP OR LAPTOP COMPUTER TO THE EXTENT THAT IT WILL BE EXTREMELY DIFFICULT IF NOT IMPOSSIBLE TO RECOVER CONTROL OF THE SYSTEM. MAKE an image and put it on a bootable CD or DVD if you insist on playing with this on a computer you need to keep running.
My previous comments about Control-Alt-Delete not working still apply. Control C and Control-Break don't do much either.
In HKLM\Software\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\WinLogon\Shell
replace Explorer.exe with the BATCH file as described in Not-so-Stupid Nerd Trick, a previous blog. The second step is to NOT modify the setting in IniFileMapping. Third step is to have the system Auto-Logon as described previously. On the next reboot, the fun begins. Done.
With the system set this way, it becomes a single-purpose computer, an appliance as it were. It will not run any User programs other than what you've programmed into the batch file.
With this registry entry you've basically shackled the computer to a single task and that is exactly perfect for kiosks, public information displays, embedded systems tasks etc. It doesn't matter what the User settings are, the system never bothers to execute the the User programmed shell.
An interesting experiment would be to set the System Shell to be FireFox or Chrome. Consider it a taste of things to come, if you believe the Cloud enthusiasts.
You could set the "XP appliance" system up to be a printer server for other computers in the office. Just set the printer management software to be the application started by the batch file. Make sure the Auto-Logon user has printer management permissions.
The old XP computer becomes your dedicated printer management tool. Make sure to share the printer(s) out to all other users. This could be a way to use an old XP Pro license on a slow system that can't run Visaster or Win7. Dumping the printer tasks to an XP Printer will speed up the rest of the desktops when printing. This should be possible with any sort of printer. Or multiple printers connected to the XP Pro box.
BTW if you set up another account as admin that has remote logon capabilities, you can use one of the VNC tools to "manage" the system remotely or to break into the registry and hack the shell back to Explorer.exe. Remember to spell out the file extension, Explorer.EXE.
Thursday 3 September 2009, 4:42 AM
Bare-Metal VM Farms Part2
Talked to a rep today at Virtual Computing.
There are some "soft gotchas" with the bare metal VM concept. ( A soft gotcha is one that if you gave it a second thought or two, you would've known about it before asking the question.)
The obvious one is "How do you deal with all the freaking hardware drivers?" You limit the hardware selections supported.
1) The product is tailored for specific sets of hardware from one of the big three OEMs- DELL, HP and Lenovo or full Intel chipset boards. No AMD or other second source x86 need apply. A Pentium 4 isn't going to hack it either. Systems supported are high performance desktops and laptops.
2) It requires an Intel VT equipped CPU. That limits it to the Core 2 Duo or Quad CPUs. (I knew that was going to be a possibility.) AMD multi-core compatibility is still being worked on.
3) Video adapters are limited to Nvidia and Intel chip sets. No ATI video boards supported at this time. Well I didn't think that was going to happen with AMD owning ATI.
4) The software works with a client and server model. The client connects to the server that delivers the VMs to the hypervisor client. The client is on the Intel VT
5) The Server application has to be running on Windows Server 2008 running on just about anything, no dual or quad CPU necessary. No plans at present for a Linux server capability.
6) Management module resides on the server. Features in the VM and hypervisor can be tailored like levels of security or access to the hardware based on user groups or logon. Active Directory was very faintly hinted at. Each VM can be limited in access to the peripheral hardware on the client machine.
7) VMs are pre-designed or can be client designed as "generics" or as custom as wanted. All VMs can have the same or differing levels of access on each client.
8) "Restore points" or backups of the VM as modified by the client-user can be scheduled or initiated by the user.
9) VM images can be set as permanent safety images with incremental updates to operate as a fallback to wipe out malware in the VM.
10) New software release is planned this coming Monday or Tuesday.
Still got some growth to do but it looks really interesting for a lot of reasons.
The biggest is that if its done right, it eliminates the double-API conversions that have to happen between the OS in the VM and the OS on the host hardware. That tighter binding to the hardware should offer a really nice speed improvement.
It might spur some activity by others in the VM game to bring out their products. My experience with VMware on XP Pro was not a bad event but it was still slow on certain software applications.
In many ways, a stripped down Linux works fairly closely to the hardware level of this no-OS hypervisor. Maybe a group of Linux driver and kernel programmers are working on something like this?
Monday 31 August 2009, 8:31 AM
Bare Metal VM Farms
There has been a recent flurry of PR for a firm that is somewhat related to Citrix called Virtual Computing. I do not all the particulars but there is a financial relationship between the two. Citrix is well known for slim-client/remote client hosting solutions.
What caught my eye was the concept that a "hypervisor" would run on the hardware of choice sans a hosting OS. In turn it would host as many sessions as the client wanted (within the physical & electronic limitations) with multiple VMs running the applications desired in each one, That would allow the simultaneous use of Windows and the Linux of the month in separate windows without any possible "leakage" from one to the other.
Hallelujah, somebody has seen the light! That is the way to do virtual machines. Give each major application or group of applications its own solitary-confinement cell with nothing the OS can use to get to the other cells. A virus or Trojan should not be able to hop the gap from one cell to the other because they won't know they're there.
Truthfully I do not know exactly how that can be done in total but it is the absolute best possible sort of solution with the recently released and soon to be digital débutantes with multiple cores. If done right it puts the operator/admin in control. I would hope that there is some management capability even if its nothing more that a configuration boot file of some sort.
Each VM/cell gets at least one processor, a chunk of ram, some controlled access to the peripherals like printers, monitors etc and the hard drives (or soon to be sold state drives) are over somewhere else in their own network box. Yes everything is going to go through TCP/IP or some other network protocol.
A big advantage is that ONE installation of some sort of anti-malware is used to clean up the ENTIRE data-store for the entire digital facility.
Tighter security would also be a by-product. Accounting records are on one data-store totally inaccessible to those that should not be reading the payroll records. They could be stored in an entirely separate network with separate encryption and would not be stored on the accountant's desktop. When he shuts down for the day, the VM running his accounting program disappears from the desktop.
VMs are used to run everything and master copies of them will sit in a box somewhere else. You have a program you like that runs under Ubuntu but isn't available under Windows? Open a new VM and put in a copy of Ubuntu running in a VM you copied from a server.
The disk drives will have their own OS optimized to allow the drives to respond to ANY connecting OS or "hypervisor". Users will no longer need worry about hard drive formats. Folders will be virtual constructs instead of "real" objects.
One application that could run in one VM on each users desktop would be a search engine of some sort that could add storage silos in-house, out-of-house and Internet access. That could be the Gnome file directory or the Windows Explorer window. It's obvious that it would be some sort of database/search application that could tailor the output product's appearance or display to the OS making the request. The User could also tailor the application to do searches with criteria not currently available like historical lookup of corporate data from previous employees work on similar projects.
You want "cloud" computing? This brings cloud computing into a realm of manageable proportions. Imagine being able to run some sort of distributed program, video frame rendering or massive math calculations, that "borrow" computer cores from the office assistant's computer since she's only busy browsing her BFF's Facebook entries, or maybe the desktops that are otherwise sitting idle since their user's are out of the office?
I see this as a way to split up the server-farm and distribute it all over the building. Or have virtual servers come on-line and go away as demand pops up or ceases.
I have always been someone that believes to do multi-tasking right, you use multiple computers, not one computer with a bunch of cycle stealing windows. Using a "bare-metal" hypervisor or NO-OS VM mechanism with multiple cores and a honking big chunk of RAM is digital Nerdvana.
The only thing better would be that it comes as Open Source. Sadly it doesn't at least from this vendor.
Monday 24 August 2009, 6:01 PM
Creating a Multi-Boot Mini-Server
Because of an upcoming job interview (yes, I am still looking, unsuccessfully), I wanted to set up a system with openSolaris and perhaps CentOS. As long as I was doing that, I decided to set up a few other server-oriented Linux distributions, and see if I could get the whole thing multi-booting. Of course, I needed a good candidate system on which to do all of this, and my various laptops and netbooks are not particularly well suited for it. I considered buying a new low cost system, but throwing money at a problem when you are unemployed is not the optimal solution. Then I realized that my nettop system, a Dual Atom motherboard in a Mini-ITX case, might be a good candidate. Obviously, I wouldn't choose an Atom (or even Dual Atom) for a server CPU, but my objective is just to get things loaded and learn about the administration and configuration of such a system.
I started by researching multi-boot openSolaris/Linux systems. As I have mentioned previously, openSolaris uses a modified GRUB bootloader, and I've had trouble setting it up to multi-boot before. I found one good, simple piece of advice in the openSolaris documention - it is possible to boot a Linux partition from the openSolaris GRUB, but it is not possible to boot openSolaris from a standard Linux GRUB. Ok, that makes sense and corresponds with my experience, so I will have to make sure to set my system up to use the openSolaris GRUB, and add whatever Linux systems I install.
The second problem is that when I have tried openSolaris before, it didn't seem to like Extended Partitions on the disk at all - it refused to even see what was inside of them. Now, I don't know if that also applies to the GRUB in openSolaris, but just to be safe I decided to set up one Linux distribution in a Primary Parition, and then the others in an Extended Partition. That way I can make some more tests, and see what works and what doesn't.
So, I wiped the disk and reparitioned it, creating two 32 GB Primary Partitions (for openSolaris and CentOS), a 4 GB Primary Partition for Linux Swap, and the rest of the disk in an Extended Partition, within which I created 8 GB Logical Partitions for Debian, openSuSE and Fedora. There's a lot more space in the Extended Partition, of course, so I will add more Linux distributions once I get this much set up and working.
I'll go into more detail over the next couple of days, but the first results are very promising. After just a couple of minor stumbles, I have all five operating systems installed and multi-booting. One thing that I learned the hard way, but which doesn't surprise me in retrospect, is that openSolaris and its version of GRUB don't know about ext4 filesystems, so I have used ext3 for all of the Linux installations. One pleasant surprise was that the openSolaris GRUB still understands the configfile directive, so I didn't have to copy and add the kernel and initrd directives for each of the Linux installations. Whew.
Now, the next task is to settle in, figure out how to configure them, and get them co-existing as well as possible. More on that over the next few days.
jw 24/8/2009
Friday 14 August 2009, 3:48 AM
A Not-so-Stupid Nerd Trick in Windows XP Pro
or “How to Drive Someone Batty with Windows”
Basically setting up a custom User Shell has been fairly well documented. It takes changes to 2 registry keys, one in HK_Current_User and the other in HK_Local_Machine. The Local_Machine key opens up Pandora's box and the Current_User key puts something in the box. I would suggest that the User account be a Limited Account, not an Administrator.
First log-on as the intended victim, uhh make that User and open Regedit.exe and change HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon “Shell” value to an executable BATCH file. This entry must be a RZ or a single string and must contain the full path if its not on the User's path variable. So something like this: “c:\folder name\surprise.bat”. The use of double quotes is suggested for paths that include folder names with spaces.
Surprise.bat can be any executable you would like to drive the User crazy with.
A one line batch file is all you need like:
cmd /c “c:\folder name\surprise.exe”
Make sure to put whatever command line options you need inside the right-hand quotes. The batch file can be as long and complicated as necessary. Just make sure that all of the executables and other files necessary are where the batch file says they are. Once the batch file starts, the usual Control-Alt-Delete doesn't work. Control C will sometimes stop the program BUT it goes right back to the beginning and begins again.
Now log off and log-on again as an Administrator.
Now what makes it nuts is to set the System to allow custom shells. Start Regedit again, go to:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\System.ini\boot\shell
Change the Value to be:
USR:Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
Note that the string value starts with USR:Software.
Reboot and let the fun begin.
Every time the vic---User logs on, the program in the batch file starts. Every time the user manages to stop the program, it restarts. The magic cookie is the Batch file. Since the system considers a batch file to be part of the cmd shell it executes it. When the program is stopped it returns to the registry to restart the shell. Which is the batch file that just got terminated. This same behavior is what restarts Explorer when you've stopped the Explorer process in the Task Manager window or more likely it blows up all by itself.
This has some really nice properties for programming “endless loops” for slide-shows, media presentations in kiosks or powerpoint-like presentations. The advantage is that outside of pulling the power plug, there's no way to shut it off.
Add an AutoAdminLogon registry entry to the same WinLogon key in HKLM with a RZ value of “1”, put the DefaultUserName and DefaultPassword entries in the same key with the Victim's user name and password and you're all set. So the next time the power is plugged in, there it goes.
This is an excellent technique to use when scripting some sort of automated process that absolutely, positively has to be done exactly right. If the user manages to shut it down it starts right back at the beginning and runs all the way to the end. When the process has reached conclusion, put a shutdown.exe command in the batch file to shutoff the computer.
It might also be a way to torture terrorists. Put Windows Mediaplayer on it and force the terrorist to watch a SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon over and over again. Just don't give him earplugs or a keyboard and he'll tell you what you want to know in hours.
Wednesday 29 July 2009, 5:29 AM
Thunderbird 2.0, Exchange Server and Email Dreamland
In the further adventures of the Ubuntu 9.04 desktop in the workplace, the crabby engineer has installed Thunderbird 2.0 and has it connecting to the corpulent (corporate, whatever!) Exchange server. I tried Evolution in the Ubuntu 9.04 distro and was deeply disappointed. I could not get it to work at all. I was looking forward to a "lookOut!" connection with the calender, company address book etc, without actually having to use "lookOut!".
Since Thunderbird is a IMAP/POP client, its going out to the intranet and then back to the Internet connection on our Exchange Server, so I run a secure connection. We have a number of employees that are located all around the world so web access is necessary. I also get to take advantage of the spam filter since the IT guys have it set to NOT distribute spam to outside remotely logged on connections. Nice. My inbox is so nice and tidy now. Even though Thunderbird is using a POP connection, Exchange lets me keep folders on the server and local folders on Ubuntu without any complaints at all.
I was a little worried about compatibility but it seems to work without any complaint except one. I get a message on every refresh or connection that the server security license is not licensed to the Exchange Server. Yes that is true but even when I set Thunderbird to accept the license as a permanent exception, it pops the warning up every time. What really is the problem is that the license does not mention or cover the web connection I am using to get to the server, just the inside connections. So this message is popping up for all of our Internet connected employees as well. When I have some time I'll figure out how to deep-six the security pop-up on this one single connection.
Oh well. Its just another click. Working with Visaster has really inured me to the potential security threats represented by the pop-ups. (Not!) So far I haven't yet gotten nailed by a spoof pop-up (knock on my head!). I try to check my email when I can stay focused on it and not be distracted so I'll not just blindly click-through. However, I'm only sure about myself, not the other company employees. A number of them are situated where they have to use public Wifi or 3G connections to get to the Internet. Hopefully we won't get trashed by something dropped onto the Exchange Server by a remotely connected employee or a wireless man-in-the-middle.
One of the future IT fantasies would be a completely secure email system such that you could trust the connection, the message and the ID of the guy sending you the email. And likewise for him as well. For employees, using a variation of VPN or some secure tunneling technique takes care of the connection security issues but doesn't necessarily lend itself to expansion beyond the corporate structure. Vendors, sales reps, FAE's etc are a lot of the people I communicate with daily and for them there is no easy answer to increase security on email.
If I had a wish, it would be for the Internet gurus out there to invent a really secure email service and protocol that could be used for managed connections. Something besides set email filters to prevent unwanted email from getting dropped on your desktop. I could handle it if there was a way to automatically negotiate with the remote server and give them a secure keycode or token to allow an encrypted transmission to come through. PGP is good but its not automatic.
The email clients could have maybe four levels of security. SPAM or JUNK, the lowest could be just dumped daily if convenient. Unmanaged, would be the advertising that is of some use and maybe job related. Managed would be the email you wanted to get from vendors and the like and it would have the security features enabled. Corporate would be the company originated email and the most secure.
Another nice feature would be a way to dump forwarded email with spiritual, religious, and/or schmaltzy sentiments back to the originator AND all the people that forwarded it to the hundreds or thousands that got it before you did. (I did say it was a crabby engineer, right?)
Just some ideas.
Saturday 18 July 2009, 10:31 PM
Ubuntu 9.04 Snaps Desktop Visaster
I finally had my fill of Visaster on my office desktop. The final kick in the teeth delivered by Visaster was a document that flat out disappeared while I was attempting to move it to a remote shared drive. Explorer did its typical "white-out" and then locked up the desktop and the system had to be power cycled to get responses from the keyboard or mouse.
I got permission from the IT department to go back to doing my own IT admin work. I went into Visaster's Disk Manager and shrunk the third partition (D:) on the 640 GB drive. That gave me about 300 GB of open drive space. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 and set all 3 of the Linux partitions manually. 80GB for /, an 8GB swap space (overkill) and the rest for /Home. I set them up for ext3. So now I have a dual boot system. Visaster and Ubuntu, with Ubuntu as default. As I manage to copy project and doc files from the NTFS D drive to /Home, I'll shrink it further.
A definite upgrade for Visaster is Ubuntu 9.04 on the same hardware. Eventually I'll be Visaster-free at work like I am at home.
Open Office 3.0 works fine for what I have to do. FireFox of any version is far superior to Internet Exploder 6, 7 and especially version 8 for access to the crappy commercial wiki I've described before.
While working on the Visaster I discovered something interesting and unexpected. This being a DELL system, there are 3 partitions setup for Visaster, a hidden DELL repair partition of 60 odd megabytes, the C and D NTFS drives. All three of them are primary partitions. The three Linux partitions are primary partitions as well. MS DOS, 16 & 32 bit Windows all have a limit of 4 primary partitions on a drive. But this one has a total of 6 primary partitions and Grub seems to run all of it just fine. Nice.
This particular system has an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2.8 GHz with 4GB of DDR2 RAM so its no slouch. Ubuntu 9.04 on it has done some pretty things I hadn't seen before. Application windows open and close with fades in and out with the panel moving towards and away from the user. Transparency of the task bar and application bars are independently controllable.
Another desktop feature I have not seen before is related to the mouse. If you push the mouse hard over to the right, it shoves the desktop to the left so suddenly it appears as if your desktop is twice as wide as the display (1600 x 1200 turns into 3200 x 1200). The desktop space actually is twice as wide, the setting for the video controller becomes a sliding "window" on the desktop. I suppose its just a variation of the virtual desktop feature but it was totally unexpected and a cool effect! You could park an application window off the right hand side of the screen totally out of sight. It also allows for a mid-range setting so that the "display" window is centered on the desktop range.
Ubuntu 9.04 definitely picks up some significant “snap” with a high power processor. I was impressed, as far as I'm concerned it beats Visaster SP2.
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