VirtualBox Headless on Debian Notes

VirtualBox is a viable LAB option for Certification study. Personally I would prefer to run Hyper-V or XENServer but those solutions are a bit resources heavy for a home LAB. VirtualBox is prefect for older aging hardware. ========= Install VirtualBox ============ On Debian Wheezy I learnt the hard way that the packages in the distro repo are dinosaurs, which I could not get to work with PHPVirtualBox. I installed VirtualBox from the Oracle repo....

November 9, 2014 · 2 min · Shane Greaves

Things that make you go Hmm: Dell Optiplex 3011 && WinPe

I’m having some issues with deploying Dell Optiplex 3011 Windows images using Windows deployment services. What should be a quick win has turned into an head banging exercise! From the onset I was very sceptical about these systems so I’m not surprised that it has been such a pain. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mkl8kCwvpm0 I am using WDS (2012 Server) with the Windows 7 Boot image. I have injected the drivers for the realtek network card and for some reason the drivers will not load in WinPe....

August 6, 2014 · 1 min · Shane Greaves

Password Management Guide

I can’t keep up with all the passwords! There are too many passwords for me to manage, I used to find myself unable to access systems. Passwords are especially annoying on mobile devices with the tiny keyboard. I wanted a solution that works on both the Desktop and Mobile devices. Lastpass is a password management option that I have used in the past. They have a free service but you have to pay to use there mobile apps which is not bad however I never liked the user interface on their Android App....

July 30, 2014 · 3 min · Shane Greaves

70-410: Installing and Configuring Windows Server 2012

Course outline for 70-410, Installing and Configuring Windows Server 2012. Install Servers: Plan for a server installation; plan for server roles; plan for a server upgrade; install Server Core; optimize resource utilization by using Features on Demand; migrate roles from previous versions of Windows Server Configure servers Configure Server Core; Delegate administration; 3. Add and remove features in offline images; 4. Deploy roles on remote servers; 5. Convert Server Core to/from full GUI; 6....

January 25, 2014 · 1 min · Shane Greaves

NBC Voice Top6 iTunes Chart Results

This is where the morning ended (Tuesday, 3 December 2013): 15. Tessanne Chin – Redemption Song (The Voice Performance) 17. Cole Vosbury – Rich Girl (The Voice Performance) 20. Jacquie Lee – Cry Baby (The Voice Performance) 23. Cole Vosbury – Better Man (The Voice Performance) 25. Will Champlin – A Change Is Gonna Come (The Voice Performance) 27. Will Champlin – Hey Brother (The Voice Performance) 33. Tessanne Chin – Unconditionally (The Voice Performance)...

December 3, 2013 · 1 min · Shane Greaves

The Voice – Instant Save | Tessanne Chin

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6Wk9X1gTOM] This one seems designed to keep our girl @Tessanne on the show. Let us not wait until the last minute to get up to speed on this! @Tessanne has quite the twitter army so everyone should get ready to save her on Tuesday night if she is in danger in the bottom three. Go out and preach folks! Get your neighbours to #Tweet when if the signal is given!...

November 11, 2013 · 1 min · Shane Greaves

Supersonic (Subsonic) Jukebox Mode Config

I have spent ages on this so I am really happy that I got this to work. I was unable to find much documentation on the interwebs on this so I wanted to document this in case someone runs into the same problem I did. Supersonic is a version of Subsonic with restrictions removed. Subsonic has a 30 day limit on mobile app use. Key feature to me. I wanted to be able to play much in jukebox mode, using my Android device as the remote....

October 18, 2013 · 2 min · Shane Greaves

Network Boot Menu setup with iPXE

My iPXE setup is coming along just lovely, and it is working out just fine. My goal is to avoid scurrying around like a headless chicken looking for USB flash drives and optical media whenever I have to work on someone’s system. This part usually takes the most out of me when I am fixing a system as I can never seem to find install media, usb drives and my tools....

August 24, 2013 · 2 min · Shane Greaves

iPXE: WinPe Boot

Network Booting my WinPe image with pxelinux has been an illusive goal of mine. I got it working :-). Get iPXE I downloaded iPXE into my home folder: git clone git://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git cd ipxe/src make cp bin/undionly.kpxe /tftproot/ PXE Chainloading I have configured my network to chainload iPXE using the “undionly.kpxe” image. I configured my dhcp server (dd-wrt) to point to my tftp server which runs on my NAS. I placed “undionly....

August 23, 2013 · 2 min · Shane Greaves

Hyper-V, Remote Management

I have been demystifying Hyper-V in my Lab environment. I have configured a few VMs in an isolated network and I wanted to play with the remote management features from my main system and avoid RDP where possible. The process to get this working was far from simple and Microsoft really needs to remedy this as my last visit was way more fun that this. Luckily google came to my aid and led me to “hvremote”....

May 31, 2013 · 1 min · Shane Greaves