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Yesteday I had to reinstall my home computer due to a botched BIOS flash (don't ask, long story...), and decided that it was time I installed Windows 7 on that computer as well.

Remembering the Microsoft's Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool, I went looking for the download only to be met by a 404 (page not found) error when I tried to download it. The whole information/documentation section was still available on the Microsoft Store site, but the downloadable file was missing. No information was given, so I assumed it was a glitch on Microsofts behalf and located an alternative download site (CNet) that still had it available.

The tool did it's job, and I got Windows 7 Enterprise installed from a USB pendrive without any problems at all, just as expected.

Today, however, all information regarding the tool has been removed. All you get now is a "Sorry, the page you are looking for cannot be found." 404 error when you try to access it's previous location and no explanation is given.

Turns out, Microsoft has indeed pulled the tool from the site. According to Rafael Rivera Jr. this is because he discovered that the Microsoft tool was using code from "CodePlex-hosted (yikes) GPLv2-licensed ImageMaster"

Clearly a breach of the GPL as the Microsoft tool wasn't GPL'ed itself.

Read all the details in Rafael's post "Microsoft lifts GPL code, uses in Microsoft Store tool". I guess that means we are back to using Novicorp WinToFlash again. For more details on WinToFlash, check out my post called "Installing Windows from a USB Stick".

How did this ever slip through Microsofts QA?

Update:

On November 13th Microsoft confirmed that their own internal code review of the tool had uncovered that Rafael Riviera Jr. was indeed right. The tool does contain GPL code. The tool was develped for Microsoft by a third party, but still, this could, and should, have been avoided if Microsoft had conducted a proper code review before releasing the tool into the wild.

So, Microsoft now what? Well, it seems like they indend to do the only thing they can do, release the whole tool as GPL licensed:

As a result, we will be making the source code as well as binaries for this tool available next week under the terms of the General Public License v2 as described here, and are also taking measures to apply what we have learned from this experience for future code reviews we perform.

Read the whole statement from Microsoft: Update on the Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool

I must say that even if this shouldn't have happened, Microsoft did the right thing here. Admitting what happened and took the natural consequences. Well played.

Over time the boot partition on a Windows Server 2003 installation might just turn out to be too small. There can be various reasons for this, but the fact remains that over time you will accumulate data on the boot drive that you didn't take account for when you set it up initially.

Luckily I run almost all of my servers in a VMware based virtualized environment, where it's easy to expand the the virtual disks. The problem is that Windows Server 2003 doesn't let you easily expand the boot volume, at least not without downtime. I've previously talked about using tools like GParted to expand the boot volume but there are easier ways to do it and prevent downtime at the same time!

All you need is love. No,wait, that's something else entirely! All you need is ExtPart. ExtPart is a lovely little 36KB tool that Dell has provided to expand partitions on Dell based servers and storage systems. It is a little known fact that ExtPart can do the job in any 32 bit Windows Server 2000 or 2003 based install (no 64 bit support, sadly), and in Server 2008 there are other methods of doing this.

Enough talk, lets get down to the business at hand.

1. Download ExtPart from the Dell download site
2. Expand your boot volume, either via the Virtual Infrastructure Client or via vmkfstools
3. Run ExtPart inside your VM to expand your boot volume to the new size

Thats it. The following screenshots outline the process very well, without having to guide you through each step. Have a look!

It can't get much simpler that this, honestly.

A little while a go I mentioned a great little tool called Novicorp WinToFlash.

Seems like Microsoft figured out that was a great little idea, and in conjunction with todays official Windows 7 release, they've also made the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool available.

Since you can buy Windows 7 and then download the ISO directly from the new online Microsoft Store (Can anyone say Apple?!) it makes sense that they have created their own little tool that enables you to install Windows 7 from an USB stick. The tool makes it easy to copy the ISO to a USB stick, and then use that to boot your computer and install from it. Nothing more, nothing less.

I love utilities like these, you know the ones that do one task and do it well?

Now this is something I don't often do as this is mostly a tech blog, but this is huge. Last night Temple of the Dog reunited when Chris Cornell joined Pearl Jam on stage.

Temple of the Dog was Chris Cornell, Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, Matt Cameron, Mike McCready and Eddie Vedder all of which were present at Los Angeles’ Gibson Amphitheatre performing “Hunger Strike” from the self titled album released in 1991.

Now, can Pearl Jam please come play in Bergen, Norway? And, yes, I wouldn't mind it much if Chris Cornell came along for the ride too...

Nice little error message shown when trying to hot add a new HDD to a VM running on ESXi 4.0.

How much need have have do you need?

Addendum:

Clearly I'm not the first to notice this rather peculiar wording in ESXi 4. Maish Saidel-Keesing posted the same screenshot back in May 2009 in his post called Hot Add and "Need have have".

Read that post instead of mine, it also highlights what ESXi 4 is missing as well as poorly worded error messages.

Funny thing is that I can even remember reading Maish post back when it was published, but I don't remember seeing that weird error message. Oh well. :)

Thanks to Jase McCarty for pointing this out to me.

vmwarewolf.com has posted ESX PSODs

If you happen to search Google for one of the following phrases you might expect Google to return a list of official VMware Knowledgebase articles on the topic.

• crash debug screen
• machine crash screen
• ESX Server PSOD
• Purple screen crash report
• Decode purple screen error

I know this is a direct copy of some of that article, but it's an attempt to help out getting ESX Server PSOD ranked in Google. I'm sure I'll be forgiven for the verbatim copy/paste job.

Cody Bunch over at professionalvmware.com has started a series of posts called "The Best Tools You Didn’t Know You Needed". So far Cody has featured GParted and TeraCopy, both truly great tools to have in your virtual or non-virtual tool-belt.

I have my own series of posts outlined, still in draft mode though, that I plan to publish within the next week or so and thankfully they highlight different tools than the ones already covered by Cody in his series.

Seems like I need to speed up the publishing of my posts now! I'm sure there are other great (free) tools out there that are missing the recognition they deserve.

Can you think of any? Any freebie tools that make your day as a (virtual) sysadmin easier?

Leave a comment, I'd love to hear from you!

I recently did a rather big reorganization of my domain controllers, in relation to an domain wide upgrade to 2008 server, and as a I result of this I had to re-configure the DNS settings for all my member servers. Being somewhat lazy and not particularly fond of repetitive tasks, I figured there had be a way to automatically change the required settings.

I ended up using a couple of great tools and some vbscript "magic" and was able to change the DNS settings on all my member servers within a couple of minutes.It would have been much more time consuming having to do this server by server manually, and this process also guarantees that the settings are the same on all my servers.

Enough with the rationale already, let's get into the solution itself. It's pretty easy, but does require a couple of easily available tools, a bat file and a VBscript.

Tools:

• psexec
psexec @servernames.txt -c -p administrator -u [password] SetDNS.bat
• DumpServernames.vbs
  This dumps all the server names in a given OU into a text file
  Usage: cscript DumpServernames.vbs > servernames.txt
  Set colItems = GetObject _ ("LDAP://ou=Servers, ou=something, dc=something, dc=local") For Each objItem in colItems Wscript.Echo objItem.CN Next
• SetDNS.bat
  netsh interface ip delete dns "Local Area Connection" all netsh interface ip add dns "Local Area Connection" [IP DNS SERVER] netsh interface ip add dns "Local Area Connection" [IP DNS SERVER] index=2 ipconfig /all

Caveat alerts:

• The netsh command outlined requires that the network connection you want to change settings on is called "Local Area Network".
  If you have manually renamed your network connections inside Windows 2003/2008, this will fail, so update the script accordingly


• You will need to update the vbscript with your local OU setup as well as edit SetDNS.bat and insert your own DNS server IP values

Date Published: Sep 11, 2009 - 4:17 am