Mike's Realm

So you P2V’d a Linux box (CentOS, RedHat, Oracle, etc.) that is using LVM and now when it boots you get:

Reading all physical volumes. This may take awhile…
Volume group “VolGroup00” not found
Unable to access resume device (/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01)
mount: could not find filesystem ‘/dev/root’
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory
Kernel panic – not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Well that sucks–basically initrd didn’t have the right drivers to access the file system.

Reboot the VM with the Linux distro ISO attached

Then it boots from the CD follow the instructions to enter Linux Rescue (usually you type “linux rescue” at the boot prompt)

Now we can rebuild initrd with the missing drivers.

Enter:

Type:

Now hit tab and it will auto complete then add the text that was autocompleted when you hit tab except for the .img

So your command should look like:

Hit enter and it will do it’s thing with a lot of output coming out, when it’s done type exit annd exit again and the VM will reboot automatically.  Should boot up just fine this time.

My zoom lens barrel was stuck and wouldn’t zoom out–it would stick at 100mm and wouldn’t move further in.

Start by removing the 4 screws at the back of the lens on the EF mount.

Then remove the 3 tiny screws inside of the EF mount, 2 hold the electric contacts inplace.

Now lift the EF mount plate up, you may have to rock it side to side gently, you won’t be able to lift it very far due to a ribbon cable so be careful.

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Dust behind your front lens element?  Not to worry–disassembly is easy:

Remove the 3 black phillips screws around the front edge:

You can now lift that front ring off the rest of the lens.

Don’t bother trying to unscrew these next 3 phillips head “screws” they are pins that you’ll need to remove with some small needle nose pliers.  Pull them straight out, they come out very easy.

Now carefully tip the lens over being careful not to let the front lens element fall out, if it doesn’t fall out easily gentle tap and shake the lens a bit and it should fall right out.

This is what the inside of the lens looks like

Now you can clean the dust off the back of the front lens element, reassemble by reversing the disassembly process.

If you are building server images/templates and want to document how you’ve built them why not list the updates that are installed?  Cool, but we can’t copy-pasta the updates in bulk…These tools will handle this for you:

Windows Server 2003

If you are running Windows Server 2003 take a look at WUL (Windows Update List) a freeware app from Nirsoft.  You can download it as a .zip which has the standalone version that doesn’t require an install.  Check it out @ http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/wul.html.  Unfortunately this doesn’t work for Windows Server 2008…

Windows Server 2008

So if your running Windows Server 2008 and want to export a list of updates, there is a built in tool to do this.  Using WMIs Command-line interface (WMIC) you can export this list.

Launch a command prompt and type:

Also note that instead of a csv you can use these other format options:

HFORM/HTABLE are HTML
LIST is Tab Delimited
RAWXML is XML

The official VMware KB 1006996 on virtualizing existing domain controllers recommends 4 options (simplified below):

1. Demote the DC via dcpromo, do the conversion, then promote the DC back again using dcpromo–With all that trouble why not just build a new one?
2. Cold Clone–Cool, except if I’m working remote I need a working out of band management solution to boot the DC with the ISO…or setup a PXE server to provide a bootable cold clone image to do this, regardless too much extra leg work.
3. Use Directory Services Restore Mode (DSRM) and do a hot conversion, cool, but now I need to reboot these guys and hope someone remembers the DSRM password, or reset it before hand…
4. Get rid of the old DC via dcpromo and build a new VM and promote it–no conversion at all, wait what?

Having to P2V over a hundred DCs we didn’t particually like any of these options, the KB focuses on the possibility of a corrupt NTDS.DIT if you don’t follow any of those recommendations.  For our first few we did the DSRM route:

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