With the Swine Flu H1N1 virus going around, chances are you may have staff or yourself needing to be able to work remotely. Some might be off for the flu itself, others may be off work to care for loved ones who have fallen ill. Regardless of the reason, as a network administrator one of our tasks is going to be supporting staff and allowing them to connect back into the office. Some of us who are already supporting road warriors might find we need to scale up our solution and some of us will need to design and deploy a whole new solution. [Read more…]
Time Change Tonight – Setting the Time Source in Linux
Just a reminder to everyone (at least in North America) that time changes tonight. We fall back an hour and gain an hour of sleep. Always check your systems tomorrow to ensure they changed correctly.
Last spring I made a post on how to set the time source on Windows Server 2008. Nothing has changed, so no need to rehash it. Just remember, if you need to set a time source for your Windows Domain, run the commands on your Windows Server with the PDC emulator role.
If you are using Linux, some versions have a command named ntupdate to update against a time server. This command also works in FreeBSD and probably other *nix environments. The command line to update against a server (in this case the NRC) is: ntpdate time.nrc.ca. If you want it to update automatically, add the command as a cronjob.
Finally, if you are using ntpd, change the servers by editing the /etc/ntp.conf file. Add the line server time.nrc.ca to add the time server at the NRC.
Using an Answer file in Virtual Machine Manager
I have rebuilt my Hyper-V server at the office and decided to try out Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) to manage my virtual machines on that host.
One of the things I find useful is having a template for Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. Through the licensing arrangement of Enterprise, you can have up to 4 virtual instances per license. Having to deploy each copy manually doesn’t sound like a treat to me. So I decided to create a template and I built a virtual machine that I wanted to use as my base image.
After creating my virtual machine, I then created the virtual machine template from the existing virtual machine. Once this was done, I was almost ready to deploy my virtual machine from the template.
But before I could do that, I needed an answer file. To create an answer file, you will need to install the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK ). I copied the install.wim file to my local machine from the DVD media so that I could generate a catalogue. A quick internet search turned up several sample unattend.xml files which I used as a basis to form my unattend.xml file. Once I was complete, I saved the unattend.xml file and then imported it into my library shared folder. On the properties of the template in the OS configuration tab, under the scripts area, there is a spot to add an answer file. I added my unattend.xml file and away I went.
When the system started to customize the image I hit a snag. When I connected to the VM, I was shown an error message. That message was:
“Windows could not parse or process the unattend answer file for pass [specialize]. The settings specified in the answer file cannot be applied. The error was detected while processing settings for component [Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup].”
After a quick search on the internet, I discovered what the problem was. For the product key, you need to use a KMS key and not a MAK key. At least if you are using Volume Licensing media you need to use KMS. I made that change to the key and I am now off to the races. My templates are deploying as they are supposed to.
Links
Creating Virtual Machine Templates
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