Brent Ozar has been writing excellent articles for a long, long time, so I’m not sure how I managed to take so long to find these two little beauties:
These puppies are firmly in the indispensable section of my bookmarks.
Thanks Brent
Just a quickie to let you know that the incredibly useful SysInternals Suite has been updated recently and can be downloaded here.
The following packages are included:
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I had a need for a floppy drive for a server that didn’t have a physical device. I know I could use a USB floppy, but the customer didn’t want a USB floppy hanging off the brand spanking new IBM x3650 servers.
The need arose from a feature in DataCore’s SANMelody software that allows any modifications of the configuration to be written to a backup floppy for config recovery purposes. This is a great feature that I really wanted the customer to use so I hunted for a Virtual Floppy drive that would allow it to be presented to Windows as though it was a physical device.
I ended up with a fantastic piece of software called Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1. This software acts as a proper read/write floppy drive that can mount existing floppy images and add, remove, edit files. It can also create a blank floppy image and have applications write to it directly.
Best of all it is freeware. Perfect!
Sanbarrow has released a masterpiece for all administrators out there. The MOA LiveCD is a fine example of what true dedication can bring you.
3 years in the making the LiveCD allows you to boot into BartPE style environment with VMware related applications installed. The idea being that you can attach a physical disk for forensic/repair purposes etc.
Other useful applications include RoboCopy to get your important files off before the hard drive fails for good. Registry backup tools, VMware Converter and a multitude of others.
It comes in at 500mb, but you can run it from a USB key (if you have a degree of dedication) or CD.
Alongside a few other cool tools MightyCare Solutions have released StorageView.
This handy little app will give you visibility of your Virtual Machines’ disk status in a very friendly GUI.
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Ever found that FastSCP (the best file copying tool around for ESX!!) times out when trying to copy files to your ESX box? Do you get the following error:
Transfer timeout. No data transferred in the last 20 seconds
Operation canceled
I did and I worked out what the problem was!
It’s all to do with the ESX firewall. FastSCP uses a range of ports from 2000 – 2500 by default. These ports are not open by default in ESX so you either open them, fairly easy to do using the command line, or you do what I did and used the GUI to do it for me.
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