RedHat Certified Technician

I am officially a RedHat Certified Technician! Although I'm not gaining any experience in RedHat on my current project, I managed to get RedHat training approved by my firm, and took the RH133 course last week. The course was great- I learned a good deal of administration tips and tricks and it really helped fill in some crucial voids in my Linux repertoire.

I'm hoping to continue on the Red Hat path to obtain my RHCE in the next year, hopefully in October if possible. Admittedly, Gentoo still holds a special place in my heart, but in terms of usability and enterprise server-grade Linux, Red Hat has gained a lot of points in my book, particularly with its implementation yum and system configuration tools.

The class also inspired me to take a closer look at Xen and KVM virtualization. I'm hoping to P2V my Windows 7 box at home, and instead use RHEL (or CentOS) as a hypervisor and run Windows 7 as a VM.

RH courses I'm hoping to attend (and gain certification in) in the coming months include:

• RH253 - Red Hat Linux Network and Security Administration
• RH318 - Red Hat Virtualization Administration

Fast Forward 8 Months

So again, I have criminally lapsed in my posts on this blog. Since that September post, I left my previous job at the University of Georgia, had a nice 2-week backpacking trip through Europe away from computers and familiar faces, and returned in mid October to begin work for the man a large technology consulting firm, based out of the Atlanta office.

I'm currently on a 6-month 10-month project for a federal government client, spending 4-5 days of the week in the greater DC area, working as, to my dismay, a "Windows Desktop Engineer." I've been able to grab a few server tasks on the side, and the role has afforded me some valuable experience with Windows Server 2008 and Active Directory, however I find myself a good distance away from where my true interests lie: Linux servers and virtualization technologies.

At work, I've learned a good bit about GPO authoring, Active Directory 2008 configuration and management, Ghost Suite 2.5, Windows Server 2008 implementation of DHCP and DNS, enterprise-level IT, and the nature of consulting.

In what little time I have at home every few weekends (I tend to spend weekends in different cities or staying in DC), I've been playing around with Windows Server 2008 and Active Directory architecture in a virtual environment. Since leaving UGA, I had to forfeit my VMWare Workstation license, and thus have been learning to use Sun's VirtualBox. Aside from the networking, I've found that many of the standard features are comparable to VMWare Workstation.

In the coming weeks, I hope to have the opportunity to play around with Xen virtualization and KVM in Linux. More on that later!

Mounting ISOs in Windows 7

One feature that I was hoping Windows 7 would have (as Linux has had it since I can remember) is the built-in ability to mount ISOs... but alas, again Microsoft disappoints. To add insult to injury, neither Daemon Tools nor PowerISO work reliably in Windows 7. Windows XP SP3 broke Daemon Tools (something with sptd-SCSI Pass Thru Direct), and PowerISO installs on Windows 7 only unreliably, apparently determined by the particular workstation's hardware- here at work my coworkers who use Dell 740s have no problem, but the install always fails on my Dell GX620.

So what's the solution? Pismo File Mount. And it may be better than PowerISO or Daemon Tools anyways. It allows much more granular control of the mounted ISO, such as mounting for the owner only and establishing access (rw,r) for other users. It also allows you to mount ISO where they are, as opposed to a virtual disk, allowing quicker and better Windows explorer integration.

Adobe PDF Printer on Windows 7

Apparently Adobe Professional's Adobe Converter printer does not install cleanly on Windows 7. To manually install the printer, I did the following:

1. Start > Control Panel > View Devices and Printers
2. Add a Printer
3. Add a Local Printer
4. Create a new port
5. Named it AdobePDF
6. If Drivers auto populate, select Adobe PDF Converter, else
   
7. Click "Have Disk"
8. Browse to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobatx.x\Acrobat\Xtras\AdobePDF
9. Click any of the Adobe PDF Converters
10. Click "Use the driver that is currently installed (recommended)"
11. Name the Printer (I used the default "Adobe PDF Converter")
12. Right-click on the printer > Printer Properties
13. Go to Advanced tab
14. Click "Print directly to the printer" so that it doesn't spool printing

And now it works as intended! Just another odd quirk with Windows 7...

VMWare NAT on Windows 7

While I would never dream of switching my home workstation to a new version of Windows within its first few months on the market, particularly when it is still only in RTM, at work is a different story.

I could probably still get by using XP Pro on my workstation, and put Windows 7 in a VM, I find self-immersion to be the best method to fully learn a new OS, as it forces me to get it set up completely, otherwise I can't do work.

While I've run into a few annoyances thus far (no Daemon Tools or PowerISO, urg), nothing yet has been a show stopper... until I tried accessing the internet in my XP Active Directory administration virtual machine in VMWare using NAT.

Apparently Windows 7's new compartmentalized network security breaks VMWare's NATing ability. Note in the below screen shot how the VMWare Network adapter is identified by Windows as being on a public network, thereby disabling its connection.


I was able to still use Bridged networking within VMWare, but this was not practical at work since we have to specific each connected machine's MAC address in our DHCP tables to assign it an IP- a bit overkill for an only occasionally non-critical VM.

So after some digging and a bit of troubleshooting, I found a workable solution thanks, in part to this article, using Win7's Internet Connection Sharing (ICS). One important caveat to note is that Win7's networking has changed in a few minor ways that require a bit of deviation from the article. Below is a summary of steps:

1. Run the Virtual Network Editor as Admin
2. Go to Host Virtual Adapters tab, remove all VMNet instances (default are VMNet1 and VMNet8)
3. Click Apply
4. Click Add, select VMnet1
5. Click Apply
6. Go to the Host Virtual Networking tab
7. Click the > next to VMnet1 and change the address and subnet to use the Win7 ICS network (192.168.137.0 / 255.255.255.0) <- note how this deviates from the article
8. Click Apply
9. Go the NAT tab and select VMNet1
10. Click Edit and change the Gateway to the ICS gateway IP (192.168.137.1)
11. Click Apply and restart the NAT service
12. Go to the DHCP tab
13. Add VMNet1 and remove all others
14. Click Apply
15. Select Properties of VMNet1 in DHCP Tab
16. Enter a Start and End Address for DHCP (I used 192.168.137.50 to 192.168.137.75)
17. Click OK then Apply

19. Go to Network Connections in the Windows 7 Control Panel
20. Right Click on your Local Area Connection > Properties
21. Go to Share Tab and check both boxes (Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection and Allow other network users to control or disable the shared Internet Connection [optional])
22. Click OK

23. On each VM, go to Network settings and select Host Only Networking for every VM that needs to NAT out to the network

Done! Seemed to do the trick on my XP SP3 VMs, and now I can administer our AD tree and group policy!

IT Cheat Sheet

Courtesy of Gizmodo

IT Humor, RAIDing USB Drives, Windows 7 Deployment

No posts for a while, been keeping busy at work, haven't been motivated to come home and spend more time tinkering on my computers after spending 8 hours on my workstation... I guess sometimes even a geek needs a break. In lieu of actually working on my computers, I've been watching a lot of the British sitcom IT Crowd on Netflix, combining British humor with a little esoteric IT humor thrown in.



As I spend more time in my full time position here in our IT Office, not only am I gaining a lot of enterprise-level IT technical experience, I'm also learning a lot of the ins and outs of dealing with our clientele. Its been an eye opening experience to say the least, dealing with all different sorts of characters with different technical competencies. I hope to post more on this subject later, as it has sometimes provided good humor here in the office, as well as some definite frustrations.

I've recently stumbled across a potential need to RAID USB drives for mirroring (RAID 1). My roommate uses an external USB harddrive to store photos taken for her work. Unfortunately, it seems that only after using the drive for a month, it has already bitten the dust (although I still have yet to take a look at it). It occurred to me that a USB RAID array could be very useful, particularly in this situation, but according to Jason Khors of Big Bruin, this can't be done using Windows. Not surprisingly it can be done using Linux, using the LVM (oh what can't you do, Linux?).

But there still may be hope, seeing as my roommate uses OS X (which I've grown to dislike more and more since working with it in an LDAP enterprise environment). Apparently OSX can use external drives for RAID arrays, at least according to this article. Assuming my roommate doesn't mind me hacking away at her MacBook, maybe I can set this up for her, and learn something in the process.

On an unrelated note, here in the office we've gotten our copies of Windows 7 RTM, so we're mired in documents and manuals dealing with Windows 7 deployment tools- WAIK tools, Sysprep, WinPE, imageX, and SCCM just to name a few. While SCCM is a beast in-of-itself, a good resource for general 7 deployment can be found here. We're hoping to start using Windows 7's VHD capabilities for deployment as well.