Converting from physical to virtual machines

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A few days back, I received an e-mail from someone who was trying to convert a Windows 2000 physical server to a virtual machine (VM) and had read some of the posts on this blog. He commented that today’s virtualisation software seemed to be much more complicated than the virtualisation he remembered from his mainframe days but, whilst my mainframe experience is pretty limited (one week’s work experience at the local hospital and a year compiling support statistics/coding a call stack analysis tool at ICL‘s VME System Support Centre in Manchester), I’d have to say that my understanding of the mainframe approach is probably more comparable to the concept of containers and zones in Sun Solaris rather than the virtualisation products from VMware and Microsoft.

For anyone who is trying to get a physical machine across into a VM, I’ve previously written posts about three ways to do this (an overview of Microsoft’s Virtual Server migration toolkit, my experience of using PlateSpin PowerConvert and an article I found about using disk imaging software to convert a machine); however Michael Pietroforte’s post about six ways to convert physical to virtual is probably worth a read.

Avoiding compulsory website registration

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’m sick of giving out my personal details (even false ones) to websites that require me to register. A few months back I wrote about using a temporary e-mail address to avoid spammers but now (thanks to a comment on a post at 4sysops), I’ve discovered BugMeNot a site that allows ‘net users to bypass compulsory registration. Simply enter the URL for the website that requires registration and the site will tell you if it has a set of credentials on file that you can use.

Of course, there are sites that I do register with because they provide a service that I consume, but as Michael Pietroforte notes in his never sign up for ZDNet white papers post, sometimes it’s just a way to get your details (in this case from a company which has been accused of being a Spamhaus) and then refer you to a vendor’s own freely-available information.

Installing the Macromedia Flash plug-in on a Linux client

Posted on By Mark Wilson

If, like me, you’ve been struggling to install the Macromedia Flash plug-in for Firefox on a Linux machine (in my case it was Fedora Core 5), then you may find item 12 on the Macromedia Flash Player 7 for x86 Linux frequently asked questions useful.

For weeks now, every time I’ve accessed a page containing Flash content (like this blog, for example) Firefox has seemingly downloaded and installed the missing plug-ins but the changes haven’t been accepted. After starting a terminal session and elevating my permissions to root (su -), creating a file called /etc/yum.repos.d/macromedia-i386.repo with the following contents:

[macromedia]
name=Macromedia for i386 Linux
baseurl=http://macromedia.rediris.es/rpm/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://macromedia.mplug.org/FEDORA-GPG-KEY

and executing the command:

yum install flash-plugin

the Flash plug-in was installed, although it also needed a browser reset before the changes took effect.

(Now all I need to do is get the Java runtime environment to load…)