Multi Boot Thumb Drive with YUMI

There are a couple of Linux distros I use regularly for such activities as creating recovery images of developer machines and communications debugging. To avoid software installation on production systems I simply run these distros from a bootable thumb drive created with the help of a very useful tool called YUMI.

YUMI automates the installation of a number of supported distros onto the one thumb drive using a simple GUI. Once the distros are installed I simply create a folder on the thumb drive called "Data" and keep any docs etc that I need in there the same as I would on any other thumb drive.

Hosts File Fixes PCS7 OS Project Download Errors

I was getting error message whenever attempting to download a PCS7 OS Client project. The Client PC had two network interfaces, one on the terminal network and another on an office network. On further investigation I found the following:

• Pinging by PC name from the PCS7 Engineering Server was resolving to the address on the office network, not that of the terminal network. 
• The Engineering Server LHMOSTS file had the client PC with the terminal network address
• ipconfig /flushdns did not fix the problem

After some googling I stumbled on the solution - the hosts file! It seems that lmhosts and hosts are used by different utilites and ping is one of the utilites that uses hosts. 

After adding the correct name and ip address to hosts ping resolved to the desired address and PCS7 downloaded the OS client project without errors. This would indicate that PCS7 also uses hosts or at least the tcp/ip utilies like ping that reference it.

RDP to Windows Server for Non-Administrator Users

Windows Server 2003 by default does not allow Remote Desktop Connections from users that are not part of the Administrators group.

To get around this open a command prompt and enter the following:

C:\> WMIC RDPermissions where "TerminalName='console'" call AddAccount "Remote Desktop Users", 2


Any user added to the Remote Desktop Users group on the server will now be able to start an RDP session.

Building a Recoverable Developer Computer

I wanted a developers computer that can easily be reimaged to a vanilla XP install at the completion of each project. My main reason for this is due to the fact that control systems software does not always play well with products from other vendors so it is best to start a new project with a fresh install.

The tool I ended up selecting to help with with this task was Parted Magic. This is basically a live cd Linux distribution that includes partitioning and cloning tools.

The computer I performed this setup on originally had one full size system partition with Windows XP installed. What I wanted was three partitions.

• C: “System”
• E: “Recovery”
• F: “Data”

My plan being to store the vanilla XP System image on the Recovery partition where it can be easily restored over the used System partition at the commencement of a new project. The Data partition is the same as is seen everywhere to keep important data separate from OS installations.

The steps I followed.

1. Download the Parted Magic ISO and burn to a CD
2. Boot into the Parted Magic environment from the live CD
3. Use the GParted tool as described on the Parted Magic site to shrink my System partition
4. Boot back into Windows XP and create the Recovery and Data Partitions. I made the Recovery partition identical in size to the System partition to avoid potential problems with imaging later
5. Setup the XP system to a state that I want to be able to restore to later
6. Boot into the Parted Magic environment
7. Select System Tools –> Clonezilla
8. device-image
9. local_dev
10. sda2 (Recovery)
11. Expert
12. saveparts
13. I used the name “Vanilla-XP-img”
14. sda1
15. Agree to default options
16. Increase the size of image file splits to something large to prevent splitting e.g 51200
17. Agree to defaults and start

This leaves an image file on the recovery partition that can then be restored to the System partition to get back to a plain “Vanilla” XP install.

The steps to recover a partition from an image are nearly identical to the above, with the exception of selection restoreparts instead of saveparts.

Technorati Tags: clonezilla,windows,xp,image,recovery,partition,howto,parted magic

P2PU: Drupal Introduction #1

I’ve started two drupal courses through P2PU and want to keep my work on each separated.

To achieve this I need:

• Two separate drupal folders
• Two separate drupal databases
• Two separate virtual sites for apache

I made the first site “drupalintro” in the same manner as outlined in my earlier post P2PU: Drupal Social Web Application #1 with the following changes.

1. The drupal directory was named /var/www/drupalintro
2. $ mysqladmin –u root –p create drupalintro
3. mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES ON drupalintro.* TO ‘<drupaluser>’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘<drupalpass>’;
4. mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
5. mysql> \q
6. $ vim /var/www/drupalintro/sites/default/settings.php
7. edit:  $db_url = ‘mysql://<drupaluser>:<drupalpass>@localhost/drupalintro’;
8. $ cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/drupalintro
9. $ vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/drupalintro
10. edit: DocumentRoot /var/www/drupalintro
11. edit: Directory /var/www/drupalintro

Now to make the second site called “openhippel” I did the same again with the following changes:

1. The drupal directory was named /var/www/openhippel
2. $ mysqladmin –u root –p create openhippel
3. mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES ON openhippel.* TO ‘<drupaluser>’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘<drupalpass>’;
4. mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
5. mysql> \q
6. $ vim /var/www/openhippel/sites/default/settings.php
7. edit:  $db_url = ‘mysql://<drupaluser>:<drupalpass>@localhost/openhippel;
8. $ cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/openhippel
9. $ vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/openhippel
10. edit: DocumentRoot /var/www/openhippel
11. edit: Directory /var/www/openhippel

Now to change between the two virtual sites I simply use the following (shown for selecting drupalintro)

1. $ sudo a2dissite openhippel && sudo a2ensite drupalintro
2. $ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Then I can browse to my localhost address and see the home page for the desired site.

Technorati Tags: drupal,p2pu,apache,ubuntu,howto,virtual sites,mysql

P2PU: Drupal Social Web Application #2

Just finished the first Tokbox session for the Drupal Social Web course. Bit of a bumpy start with the first session starting half an hour late!

I’m starting by forking three repositories from GitHub that will be used for this project. The repositories as I understand them are:

1. hippel_idea the features package
2. hippel_kit which will contain drush makefiles
3. hippelicious a hippel theme

It looks like the idea this week is to make sure we can fork these and edit them locally before commiting, pushing back to our own github forks and sending a pull request to the original repository.

At this stage I will consider it an added bonus if I can make these work in my drupal install…

Technorati Tags: p2pu,drupal,openhippel

P2PU: Drupal Social Web Application #1

I’ve enrolled in a P2PU course called Drupal Social Web Application. Over the next 6 weeks I’ll be learning how to use Drupal and git while working on development of the Open Hippel platform. Most of this stuff is pretty new to me so I’ll be in over my head. I’ll also be moving house at the same time, hopefully without too much of a no interwebs period. When it rains it pours!

I’ve been getting acquainted with Drupal this week and after some trials with the Ubuntu drupal6 package I’ve opted for the manual installation of Drupal as outlined in the Ubuntu Community Documentation. The manual installation allows me some more flexibility in terms of where I keep my files and which version I use when compared to a package install.

Here is a brief outline of the steps I followed on an Ubuntu Server 10.04 virtual machine.

1. $ cd ~
2. $ wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.19.tar.gz
3. $ tar zxvf drupal-6.19.tar.gz
4. $ sudo mkdir /var/www/drupal
5. $ sudo mv drupal-6.19/* drupal-6.19/.htaccess /var/www/drupal
6. $ sudo mkdir /var/www/drupal/sites/default/files
7. $ sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/drupal/sites/default/files
8. $ sudo cp /var/www/drupal/sites/default/default.settings.php /var/www/drupal/sites/default/settings.php
9. $ sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/drupal/sites/default/settings.php
10. $ mysqladmin –u root –p create drupal
11. $ mysql –u root –p
12. mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES ON drupal.* TO ‘<drupaluser>’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘<drupalpass>’;
13. mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
14. mysql> \q
15. $ vim /var/www/drupal/sites/default/settings.php
16. edit:  $db_url = ‘mysql://<drupaluser>:<drupalpass>@localhost/drupal’;
17. $ cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/drupal
18. $ vim /etc/apache2/sites-available/drupal
19. edit: DocumentRoot /var/www/drupal
20. $ sudo a2dissite default && a2ensite drupal
21. $ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
22. From the host (or any machine on the same network) browse to “<server ip>/install.php” and follow the web based setup for Drupal

Technorati Tags: p2pu,drupal,ubuntu,howto