I wanted to analyze the traffic on my Linksys WRT54GS and started to search for an application that can do just that. I stumbled upon WallWatcher (http://www.wallwatcher.com).

Because my Linksys router is flashed with the Sveasoft firmware, it has syslogd. You only have to enable logging on the linksys, enable syslogd and send log traffic to the IP address of the computer where you run WallWatcher.

From that moment on it is all very easy. Below you can see a graph that WallWatcher generates based on the captured log traffic.

Damn BitTorrent traffic. :-)

Maxtor has a product called Maxtor Shared Storage that adds storage to your network in minutes. The drive has a network port to plug it into your network and also includes USB ports to add additional drives or even printers.

I wonder if it is as customizable as the Linksys NSLU2 with custom firmware. Probably not. Anyway, if you are looking for an easy way to add storage to your home network, check it out.

Maxtor.com - Maxtor Shared Storage

Interesting tool to retrieve XP keys, lost passwords and save your WPA.DBL file. With that file you can reinstall Windows XP on the same hardware without having to register again.

RockXP

You Had Me At EHLO... : So, I have to guarantee you that I can recover the contacts in this OU...

VMWare has this document describing the support policy for Microsoft software running on VMWare.

Microsoft should just support their software under VMWare (especially ESX) because it is used more and more by customers. They should not ask to try to reproduce the error on physical machines because that is next to impossible.

This one has been available for quite some time but only recently I started to use it. It allows you to change many networking settings depending on the profile you select.

The things you can do:

• set a proxy server
• connect to drives
• configure your IP addressing settings per network card (fixed, DHCP)
• set you browser start page
• use the ISA firewall client or not
• change desktop wallpaper, display resolution, volume
• set the default printer, MAPI profile, time zone, outgoing SMTP server
• add host names to the hosts file
• run custom scripts when you select any profile or a custom profile

Check it out at www.mobilenetswitch.com.

Yesterday, I wrote about building an MSCS cluster in VMWare 5 Workstation using iSCSI. On the cluster nodes, I used the StarPort iSCSI initiator software. Microsoft’s own iSCSI initiator software is a better way of connecting to the iSCSI target and is actually supported on a cluster.

So instead of using the StarPort software, use Microsoft’s initiator software. The installation is easy.

First define a target server:

Then set the targets:

By clicking the Log On button, you can set Automatically restore this connection when the system boots.

As you can see from the screenshots above, I still connect to the StarWind iSCSI target on my host pc (laptop) over the VMWare host-only network (in this case 192.168.116.x).

You should also set service dependencies as described in this article. This avoids the cluster service starting up before the iSCSI service has brought the disks online.

Have fun !

Yesterday, I blogged about issues with VMWare Workstation and clustering. Instead of trying to work around it with the settings I described, I followed another approach: iSCSI.

Because this solution will be entirely based on software inside the host and guest operating systems, you do not need to use settings in the vmx file to enable SCSI reservation on the virtual bus or disks. Instead, you need to have software that implements the iSCSI Initiator and the iSCSI Target. With the iSCSI Target software, you make storage available over an IP network. With the iSCSI Initiator software, you connect to the resources offered by the target.

The first question is: “What software do you use for the iSCSI Target?”. There are a couple of solutions:

• StarWind (check their website)
• WinTarget (check their website)

I used StarWind and installed in on my host pc. The Windows 2003 cluster in VMWare will run on this host pc.

The second question is: “What software do you use for the iSCSI Initiator?”. Again, there are multiple solutions:

• Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator
• StarPort (from the vendor of StarWind)

I used StarPort and installed it in the VMWare Windows 2003 guest operating systems.

So, what is the basic setup here?

• On the host pc (I used my laptop), you install StarWind (the iSCSI Target software).
• On the host pc, you make disks available that can be used for the quorum resource and data in MSCS. I used ImageFiles as disk, not real ones.
• In the guest operating systems (running in VMWare 5 on the host pc), install StarPort (the iSCSI Initiator software).
• In the guest operating system, configure StarPort to use the disks made available by StarWind. You will then see extra SCSI disks in Windows 2003 that you can format and assign a drive letter to.

You need to make sure that the guest os can connect to your host pc over a virtual network. I used the host-only network in VMWare for this purpose.

The procedure to install the Windows 2003 cluster in VMWare 5.0 is as follows:

Step 1: Install StarWind on host pc and configure the target disks

The StarWind installation is simple. Just launch the installer and follow the prompts. After installation, you can add devices and make them available over the network with iSCSI. For a basic cluster setup, I need a quorum disk and a data disk. The data disk will be used for Exchange or SQL data. I decided to use ImageFiles for this purpose.

The StarWind installation directory contains a program called mksparse.exe. In the StarWind directory, you should create a folder called images. In that images folder, create the image files with mksparse.exe:

mksparse -o <StarWind install dir>\images\quorum.img 500M

mksparse -o <StarWind install dir>\images\data.img 1500M

This creates two files that can be added as devices. This means that the iSCSI initiator software (see later) can be configured to use these devices. Add the devices with the StarWind administration console:

VERY IMPORTANT: when you add these devices, use the clustering option to allow multiple initiators to connect to the device.

Step 2: Install the 2 nodes in VMWare and configure StarPort

This is basic stuff. Just think about the network connections a bit. I used three.

• Public: a virtual network card that uses bridged networking. I need this because my domain controllers are running under GSX on another computer in the network.
• Private: a virtual network card that uses a custom virtual network (VMNet9) that will be used for the MSCS heartbeat.
• iSCSI: a virtual network card that uses the host-only network to connect to the iSCSI target on the host pc.

After installing the first guest, install the StarPort software and add the remote iSCSI devices:

In Disk Management, you can then format the disks and assign drive letters:

Shut down the first guest and repeat the steps (install StarPort software, configure the disks and assign the same drive letters).

Step 3: Install MSCS

On the node that is up, install MSCS as you normally would. I always use the minimal configuration. In that case, you specify that you want to use Q: as the quorum resource. Other resources then need to be added manually (in this case R: ). I created a group called Exchange and added a disk resource using drive R:

The result is something like this:

Conclusion

You now have multiple options to build a cluster in VMWare workstation:

• You can enable SCSI reservation on the virtual bus or disks (like in VMWare GSX) but you might get mixed results. You need to modify the vmx files and create virtual disks and share them between the guest operating systems. In essence, this solution is not supported by VMWare so don’t complain if it does not work.
• You can use iSCSI to build your cluster. The steps above show it is fairly simple to do but you need some extra software. Sadly, the iSCSI Target software is not free.

Have fun when you try this yourself and let me know about your results.

For demo and test purposes, I need to be able to setup an Exchange 2003 cluster on my laptop. I run VMWare Workstation 5.0 on my laptop. Something like this:

There seem to be some difficulties on VMWare Workstation with enabling SCSI reservation on the virtual SCSI bus or disks, resulting in disk corruption.

Now, setting up a cluster in VMWare GSX is fully supported. A couple of settings do the trick:

• scsiX.sharedBus=”virtual”
• disk.locking=”false”

This enables SCSI Reservation (SCSI-2 disk reservation protocol) for all disks on the bus. This is fully supported by Microsoft Cluster Server and Veritas Cluster for example.

If you do not want the whole bus to be shared, you could use:

• scsiX:Y.shared=”true”

In the above example, SCSI reservation is enabled on disk Y on SCSI bus X.

In addition, you need to use preallocated virtual disks. You should not use physical disks (ESX supports that of course).

Using the same settings on VMWare Workstation 4.5 and higher seems to yield mixed results. According to some discussion threads and documents published by Oracle Japan, you need to add a few more lines to the .vmx file.

• disk.locking = "false"
• diskLib.dataCacheMaxSize = "0"
• diskLib.dataCacheMaxReadAheadSize = "0"
• diskLib.dataCacheMinReadAheadSize = "0"
• diskLib.dataCachePageSize = "4096"
• diskLib.maxUnsyncedWrites = "0"

In fact, setting disk.locking and diskLib.dataCacheMaxSize should be enough. I did not test it yet but I will do it soon.

Some more info.

There are many sites on the web that tell you how to tune Firefox for performance. This simple application does it automatically. Of course, it’s much more interesting to do this manually but anyway… here’s the link:

http://www.totalidea.com/freestuff4.htm