six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2012-11-17

Importing VMs From external Hyper-V Hosts

I've been working on a project where I needed to migrate (clone actually, in order to maintain a fallback scenario) virtual machines from external (standalone) Hyper-V hosts to a Hyper-V cluster. The external hypervisors were not members of the same domain as the cluster nodes. The networks were separated by a firewall. A trust relationship between the domains was not desired.

System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (SCVMM) supports this scenario, but there are several steps that must be performed to prepare for the migration.

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Posted 20:03 [permalink]

2012-11-16

Loop-mount VirtualBox Disk Images

On Linux you can mount disk images via loopback devices. Partitions inside disk images can be made accessible via kpartx from the multipath-tools. Unfortunately this does not work for VirtualBox disk images (.vdi). It's possible to loop-mount those disk images as network block devices, though.

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Posted 01:53 [permalink]

2012-10-29

A Wrapper Class for Active Directory Queries

Tired of writing the same boilerplate code for querying objects from Active Directory over and over again? So am I. Thus I wrote ADQuery, a class that wraps the initialization of the required objects, sets some default values and also provides properties to allow for adjusting the usual parameters as the situation requires. See API documentation for details.

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Posted 19:49 [permalink]

2012-08-29

Linker Errors When Building Xlock on Debian

When building xlockmore (version 5.39) on one of my Debian boxes I encountered two linker issues, one with libxext, the other with libcrypt. Both issues persisted even after running configure with the --without-ext and --without-crypt options. WTF?! Why would anyone with at least half a brain provide --without-FEATURE options for apparently required features?

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Posted 02:03 [permalink]