Format External SATA Drive

I just bought a Seagate SATA 250GB HD and an external SATA enclosure on eBay. Windows 2003 recognized the enclosure in Device Manager but the HD did not show up in My Computer. Reason being the drive was uninitialized and unformatted (since its new).

So how do you format a drive that does not show up on My Computer. Normally, a new HD connected directly to IDE shows up as unallocated drive in My Computer which you can then partition and format. However, what do you do when its connected to USB?

After half hour of playing around, the answer was simple enough:

1. Start -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management.
2. The HD will show up as Disk1 (unallocated)
3. Right click on Disk1 and select Initialize.
4. A Wizard will walk you through initializing, partitioning and formatting.

I partitioned it into 4 primary partition (maximum allowed by NTFS).

Debian Etch

Just installed the latest Debian Etch (Debian 4.0) on my server using netinst cd. The netinst cd contains the base install and is about 150MB in size (better than downloading the full CD). Wow, is it me or is Etch much faster than Sarge.

Since netinst only has the base packages, I need to manually install everything I need, which is better because I get to keep the server lean. I need ssh, svn, apache, mysql, and perl (basically the whole LAMP thingy). Java, Tomcat, JUnit, ANT and Continuous Integration server will come later on. But I ran into a bit of a trouble. Since I installed from CD, I don't have the web mirrors set up. The fix is simple:

1.Add to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://mirror.optus.net/debian/ etch main
2. apt-get update

Which threw up the following error:

# apt-get update
......
Fetched 5562B in 13s (421B/s)
Reading package lists... Done
W: There are no public key available for the following key IDs: A70DAF536070D3A1
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

Bit of googling showed the fix is simple

3. apt-get install debian-archive-keyring
4. apt-get update

NOTE: You need to be root when you do all these.

MMC cannot open the file "blah blah"

My laptop running Windows 2003 R2 server developed a problem where I can't use any of the admin tools snap-ins lije Services or Event Viewer or IIS or SQL Server Console. The error I get is:

MMC cannot open the file C:\WINNT\system32\eventvwr.msc. This may be because the files do not exist, is not an MMC console, or was created by a later version of MMC. This may also be because you do not have sufficient access rights to the file.

After a bit of Googling, the solution was simple:
RUN: regsvr32 C:\Windows\system32\msxml3.dll (as admin)

Crappy Free Apple Quicktime Movie Player

I just reformatted my laptop and reinstalled all my software. This is a ritual I perform after every semester (meaning twice a year). It lets me purge all the crap I installed during the semester in order to work on assignments. And also have the latest updates to all software. However, todays ones didn't go smoothly. Apple's to blame.

Apple just released a new version of Quicktime 7.1 for iTunes. The new update doesn't work with Windows 2003 R2. The error message during installation is
Error in Installation (QT error -3). It breaks iTunes and all other software dependant upon it such as Adobe AfterEffect.

Yeah, nothing like having something $2000 worth of software/hardware crippled by a free movie player...

After surfing the internet, I found the following solution which fixed the problem:

* Install iTunes 6 bundled w/ QT 7.1
* Watch it fail w/ the -3 install code
* Try the unistall, it'll fail
* Remove the QuickTime folder
* Delete the "QuickTime.qts and QuicktimeVR.qtx" from \system32
* For good measure, delete all QuickTime registry entries
* Use the QT 7.04 standalone installer, it'll work now
* Use iTunes and sigh deeply that this didn't work two hours ago.

QT 7.04 can ve found at Apple Quicktime 7.04

Open Word Document Without Word

A friend of mine wanted to open a word document but couldn't. Apparently he doesn't have Microsoft Word. The horror. The horror...

I figured out a work around. You can email the word document to your gmail account. Then when you open the email, gmail will give you the option to either download it or view as HTML. Good ol' gmail. :)

Configure Network On Virtual PC 2004

Virtual PC 2004 with SP1 has replaced virtual switch. What it means is your VPC Guest will no longer have network connectivity in the virtual sense. What Microsoft wants you to do is have a physical NIC for each VPC Guest and VPC 2004 binds the VPC Guest to the physical NIC. The physical network card can then get an IP address from the DHCP server or Domain Controller or whatever.

This way, as far as the rest of your network is concerned, your VPC Guest is just another server on the network.

But the question is, what if you don't have multiple network card and all you have is one NIC used by your VPC host machine? The answer it seems is quite simple but took me a while to figure it out.

You install a virtual NIC on your host called Microsoft Loopback Adapter and assign your VPC Guest to use that as its NIC. Then you enable ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) on you host physical NIC. This way, the Microsoft Loopback Adapter will use the physical NIC as a gateway.

Below are the steps I took:

The directions on how to install the Microsoft Loopback Adapter under Windows XP are as follows:

1) On the host operating system go to 'Control Panel'
2) Go to 'Add Hardware'
3) In the 'Add Hardware' wizard, click 'Next'
4) When the 'Is the hardware connected?' page appears, select 'Yes, I have already connected the hardware', and then click 'Next'
5) In the 'Installed hardware' list, select 'Add a new hardware device' and then click 'Next'
6) In the 'What do you want the wizard to do?' list, select 'Install the hardware that I manually select from a list (Advanced)', and then click 'Next'
7) In the 'Common hardware types' list, click 'Network adapters', and then click 'Next'
8) In 'Manufacturer' list, select 'Microsoft'
9) In the 'Network Adapter' list, select 'Microsoft Loopback Adapter', and then click 'Next' twice
10) In the 'Completing the Add Hardware Wizard' page, click 'Finish'

11) Once you have done this you will then need to enable Internet Connection Sharing (ICS). The catch here is that you need to enable ICS on the network interface that you want to use to access the Internet - not the Microsoft Loopback Adapter:

12) On the host operating system go to 'Control Panel'
13) Go to 'Network Connections'
14) Right click on the network connection that you use for Internet connectivity and select 'Properties'
15) Click on the 'Advanced' tab
16) Check the option to 'Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection'
17) If you have multiple network adapters you will need to also specify that you are sharing the Internet connection with the Microsoft Loopback Adapter.
18) Click 'OK'

A couple of things to know at this stage:

Under Windows XP this will cause your Microsoft Loopback Adapter to be hard configured to use '192.168.0.1'. This is problematic if your external network is configured to use the 192.168.0.xxx subnet - but unfortunately there is nothing that you can do about this except to change your physical network settings (I have moved my physical home network to 192.168.1.xxx for exactly this reason).

Under Windows Server 2003 it is possible to change the IP address and subnet used on the Microsoft Loopback Adapter when ICS is enabled.

ICS provides DHCP services as well - so virtual machines connected to the Microsoft Loopback Adapter do not need to have static IP addresses configured.

A more effective defense against DoS

This is an interesting read about DoS attack - http://www.csoonline.com/read/050105/extortion.html

The ideas behind how to foil DoS attack is pretty interesting. I doubt that its 100% effective. A more effective defense would be instead of dropping zombie's TCP packets, redirect it to the IP address of the zombie's ISP.

This way, when the ISP gets hit, the ISP will take a more active interest and disconnect the zombie PC's internet connection. Maybe then, the ISP will call up the customer owning the zombie PC and tell them to clean up their act.

This way, you cut off the head instead of waiting for the hackers to give up(and hoping your defense will hold up).