Windows NFS: Don’t Forget .maphosts
I recently mentioned that I was trying out NFS Services on Windows 2003. It actually has been working quite well for me – faster and less CPU than NFS to my OpenFiler server, in fact. OK, to be fair, the OpenFiler server is a bit older and running a pair of hyper-threaded Xeons while the Windows server sports a much newer 2.66 Quad core. Perhaps the processor makes a difference?
Anywho, on the Windows server I’m using the User Name Mapping service to map *nix user accounts to Windows user accounts. There are other ways to do this, but it seemed the simplest and easiest for my purposes. I just mapped the root user from the ESXi server to my domain account and then use NFS shares from Windows for backup purposes (using ghettoVCB).
Last week I thought it would be prudent to ensure that I could actually do something with these backups I’m stacking up. Since they’re already on an NFS share I figured I’d just connect to that share with my Windows 7 machine running VMware Workstation.
I Want Some Tab Candy
I was starting to fear that only Google was innovating in the browser space, but this Tab Candy intro video shows that Mozilla is definitely still in the game. Check it out: An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
A Quick Look at Soluto
It has been a long time since I last looked at software to improve boot speeds (“Windows Startup Tuning” from December ‘08). A new option recently crossed my radar though and it has some interesting wrinkles. For starters, Soluto is probably the prettiest little startup manager you’ve ever used for Windows. Definitely a non-traditional GUI » Read the Rest…
Read Errors
The final (?) note on the ESXi / HP saga (part 1 / part 2). This is too much of a downer to continue documenting! I’ll start with a quick tip: If moving data to NFS shares seems slow or gives you frequent timeouts look to your network gear. I was having issues getting ghettoVCB » Read the Rest…
Wrestling with ESXi Client Backups
Continued from Fun with ESXi and HP issues. Learning Lessons. To recap, I had two new drives and a backplane en route and really wanted to get complete image backups of the VM clients running on this VMware ESXi server before I started swapping drives. I’d tried the vSphere built-in file copy utility, FTP and » Read the Rest…
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Flair and Sparklies
