Tripple boot mac, yet another web page on it.....

At work, they have given me a hand-me-down three year old mac with a broken screen to use as my laptop.  Making the best of things, I wanted to tripple boot it with OSX mavericks, Windows 8.1, and Kali Linux.


I won't get into great detail about the steps I took, as you can find a bazillion other sites to explain most of the process.  I could not find a solution to a few spots, so I will elaborate on those.


1)Installed mavericks, install REFIND  (the newer version of reFIT)
2)Use "bootcamp assistant"... BUT INTERRUPT BOOT TO WINDOWS, BOOT TO OSX INSTEAD.
3)Open disk utility, and delete the bootcamp partition, create two MORE partitions.  Format them in exFAT, call them BOOTCAMP and "whatever you want your Linux partition to be called for now."
 4) reboot, booting into windows using a DVD  (I know... but I couldn't get the USB to boot properly)
5) in windows, select the bootcamp partition.  it will say "cannot install here" or some such thing.  FORMAT that partition, then windows will be ok with it and will install.
6) update windows, if you want, or don't.... whatever.
7) after a reboot, make sure OSX still works.  (if REFIND doesnt pop up, you can hold down "option" at the "mac tone" and force it to boot to something other than windows.  Reinstall REFIND to make it work again.)
8) boot the machine again to kali.
9)If you miss the grub menu, it might fail... it did on me.
10) so reboot it again, this time, select "text install"
11) at the point where you want to select the HDD or storage, make sure to do it "manually"
12) find the partition you created for LINUX, and remove it. 
13) then create a partition that is "do not use" at the "beginning of the free space" of 1MB
14) create two more partitions, one that is EXT3 or whatever you like, mount it as "/".  the second one needs to be for SWAP.
15) Finish installing it.
16)  if it boots, you are good, skip to the later point if you windows drive will not boot.
17) when it doesn't boot (mine said "waiting for /dev to populate" forever), catch the grub menu, and do the failsafe option.  If it does still not boot, add "nouveau.modeset=0" at the end of the line that says "ro quiet" .
18) connect it to the Internets, then perform an apt-get update, and upgrade, and dist-upgrade.  This may solve part of your issue.  if not.....
19) install the nvidia drivers:
"apt-get install -y linux-headers-$(uname -r)
apt-get install nvidia-kernel-dkms"
My install took care of uninstalling the "generic" drivers, as listed on other web help pages.
20)  Now that you have a kali install that works, let's boot into windows.
21) if you are staring at an error or a blinking cursor like I was, the boot partion/UFEI is all messed up.
22) Boot to OSX
23) install gdisk (gpt-disk)
24) run sudo gdisk /dev/diskx....   I only had one drive, so it was sudo gdisk /dev/disk0
25) type "b" to back up the partition table
26) now hit "r" and "p".  take note of the partition numbers of the three installs.
27) Enter ‘h’ to recreate your hybrid MBR. Enter each partition number you want (mine were 2 4 6). It will then ask you for a bunch of settings:
Place an EFI partition first: yes/y; For each partition, make bootable: no; For each partition, hex values: AF for OS X, 07 for Windows, 83 for Linux.
28) type "w" to write it.
29) reboot once, just to be sure, go back to OSX
30) if REFIND didn't appear, reinstall that too.
31) enjoy your mac, even though it only runs OSX 30% of the time.

 -AR
"Your mileage may vary, I only wrote this to remind myself how I did it, so if you read it and do something stupid to your own box I take no responsibility.  This is a private note to myself that I have published publicly."

REFERENCES:
http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
http://docs.kali.org/general-use/install-nvidia-drivers-on-kali-linux
http://irvanjit.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/triple-booting-mac-os-x-10-8-mountain-lion-windows-8-and-ubuntu-13/

Well, it could have been much worse.

I thought I would share a hyper-v war stor.

Yesterday someone from central IT called me, as he was going to update SCVMM to 2012.  I said, sounds great!  It wasn’t.

We believed that it shouldn’t bring anything down, as SCVMM mostly just monitors, so it shouldn’t be a big deal at all.  About 3 hours later, I get a call from my DBA.  Production SQL is down, along with a host of other VMs.  The dreaded “missing config file” error.  Now, I should mention that my vms are on a 3 node Win 2k8 R2 DC cluster.  Rebooting physical machines, and moving the drives around to “working” nodes didn’t work.  I could still browse to the VHDs and the config files.  Hyper-v then reported that there was a problem with a corrupted file.

So as we sitting around, thinking about backup tapes and considering how to update our resume, I remembered that once I just had rebuilt the config file for a machine that did this in the past.  Now this current machine that was failing to start had several pass through disks, memory settings, various NIC configurations that I didn’t want to have to recreate.  I decided to look into the XML config file.  Sure enough, it ended with :

“<settings>

    <global>

      <logical_id type="string">78F….D-4FC2-someotherGUIDdigitshereFB</logical_id>

    </global>

    <memory>

      <bank>

        <limit type="integer">12288</limit>

        <reservation type="integer">12288</reservation>

        <size type="integer">12288</size>

      </bank>

    </memory>

    <processors>

      <count type="integer">4</count>

      <features>

        <limit type="bool">True</limit>

      </features>

      <limit type="integer">100000</limit>

      <limit_cpuid type="bool">False</limit_cpuid>

      <reservation type="integer">0</reservation>

      <weight type="integer">200</weight>

    </processors>

    <stopped_at_host_shutdown type="bool">False</stopped_at_host_shutdo

“

Now I am no programming wiz, but I know that you at least have to close XML tags, or computers get angry.  Some quick googlin’ turned up:

http://coolcomputerguy.wordpress.com/2010/08/24/recovering-hyper-v-virtual-machines-that-have-disappeared/

So I made a backup copy of the current broken XML doc, then properly ended the XML tags that were missing.  I then crossed some fingers, right clicked “bring online” and POOF! It worked.

My heart started beating again, and my cell phone quit vibrating.

SCVMM impersonation Schizophrenia

I have had a Library server on Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager for years now.  One day it went missing.  I tried to readd it, but it kept saying:
 "Error (2910)
VMM does not have appropriate permissions to access the resource file://blah/share on the blah server.
(Access is denied (0x80070005))
Recommended ActionEnsure that Virtual Machine Manager has the appropriate rights to perform this action."

After revewing many, many web articles (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969965 , http://www.avianwaves.com/Blog/default.aspx?id=187 , http://www.eggheadcafe.com/microsoft/Virtual-Server/32734159/problem-adding-server-hosts-to-scvmm.aspx , http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/virtualmachinemanager/thread/c3d63ade-b76d-4837-b22d-e1de8ae46341/ , http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969965 ) and many attemps to resolve this issue, I fired up process monitor and decided to start looking for myself. 

I already had the recommended setup, VMM machine name and VMM service acct in local admin group, etc...

Procmon however showed me that there was a network user comming in from the VMM machine, but then it was impersonating "nt authority/system."  What?  When did that change?

So as you can see, the fix was to give at least Read access to the local system user. 
Now back to creating and destroying VMs with just a few clicks of the mouse!

Xserve and Vtrack Visio stencils, free!

I find it strange that after an hour or so searching the internet... no one has free Apple Xserve and Promise Vtrack Visio stencils.  I needed them for a diagram at work, so I commisioned thier creation.... and I would like to release them to the world!  http://www.mediafire.com/?wn61le8um0iqjty is where you can find them.  It has the front and back of both a Promise Vtrack, and an Apple Mac Xserve G5.  (You know, the servers they quick making because they don't give a damn about the enterprise market anymore.)  Please feel free to copy them and distribute, just please let them remain free.  (Dare I say, open source?)  Credits for actual creation go to Tatso, he is far handier in Visio than I am.

--AR

It's always the simple things that cause the most trouble, March 2011 Edition.

I have been trying to hunt down a "random reboot" problem for a few days now, and I hope that I have fixed it.  I searched all over the internets trying to find folks with similar problems, but to no working solution.

(for those interested in the technical details, I have a multi-node Hyper-V "highly available" cluster running 2008 R2.  For my servers, these are Dell Poweredge R815s with four 12-core AMD processors and Broadcomm 5709C Nics.  I have an Equalogic 6000E and 6500XV for central storage, and I am using iSCSI for all of those connections.)

So the Internets took me to many great sites with complicated fixes, and of course fixes that don't apply to my setup (it seems that Intel has a nasty bug with their processors right now, btw).  For some examples:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/956/p/19309520/19608235.aspx
http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2010/02/windows-server-2008-r2-with-hyper-v.html
http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/Microsoft_Operating_Systems/Server/Windows_Server_2008/Q_26651719.html
 http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsserver2008r2general/thread/281d43e9-5f42-45c5-9c90-692de8ba27a4
http://boardreader.com/thread/Random_Reboots_with_a_R710_and_Windows_2_rokvXbhvbk.html

In a nutshell, everyone above suggests driver updates, firmware updates, windows updates... all stuff that is pretty simple. The more I Googled, the more I though it might be related to a NIC issue, or at least I had a hunch that it was.

So I decided to take what I call the "dummy" approach.  I went through every NIC, setting by setting on each node in the cluster.  I had already turned off the "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" option on the iSCSI nics, but I had left it alone on the motherboard NICS.  I decided to change this so every NIC was the same, disabling the setting.

Then a meeting took me away from diagnosing it any further yesterday... I went home, expecting to get a bizzilan e-mails from SCOM the next morning, as one or more nodes reboot at night.  But my inbox was free of SCOM's nagging, and none of the nodes rebooted.  So no matter how many times we forget, we should check the simple things first.

--Bryan

Why Apple will never be an enterprise player.

Apple is kind of like the rich kid in high school who was an asshole, but everyone liked him because he had money.  I try to like Apple and their products, but the more I get to know them, the less I like them.  Besides the censorship and their situation with Adobe on their mobile devices, anytime I have to deal with their "enterprise technology" I am disappointed at the little things that break.  Yesterday was one of those days....

I have had an issue for several months now where when a PC connects to an SMB share on my OSX 10.6 server, it behaves strangely.  I can upload any file I want of any size I want to the Apple server, but when I try to pull the file down it errors out saying, "file is no longer accessible."  Another weird part is it gets extremely close to being done before it fails.  (For example, with a 6G file, it was within 20mb of completing, and with a 28k file, it copied more than 26k of it.)

I spent many, many hours Googling for a solution over the span of 6 months.  (Using USB drives for the rare occasion that files had to be transferred... and used sneaker-net to move them.)  Most of the solutions I found on forums blamed the PC and FAT file systems... you could tell they were written by mac-fanboys who don't have any idea about what they are talking about.  But enough about that rant, let me give you the answer.

It turns out that Samba was the problem.  So after reading about how the version of SMB that is distributed with OSX is way old, I started investigating how to up grade Samba to the latest edition (oh, btw, you use MACPORTS for that).  While I was waiting for the 8.9G of Apple developer tools to install so I could install MACPORTS, I by chance found another article or two:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10532382
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3179


ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME APPLE?!?  You (YET AGAIN) release an update to something for your "enterprise-level" applications and FORGET TO TEST IT WITH SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS SAMBA?  Not only that, but YOU CAN'T WRITE A DAMN SCRIPT TO FIX THE PROBLEM WHEN YOU FIND IT?

So it turns out that Samba shares "all" of the file, including the "Extended Attributes" that are specific to the XSAN file system.  Windows gets the file from the server, then when it receives the EA part it doesn't know what to do with them (as EA is not a Windows kind of thing) and discards the file with an error.  I made the change described in the KB article above and everything works fine now. (the solution is to change "stream support = yes" to "stream support = no" in /etc/smb.conf) .

So... I hope this post finds someone someday who might have the same problem that I did and may come across this post that might perhaps save a bit of their sanity.

Thanks internet for letting me rant.....

--

And now for some terms that I used to try to find this problem that may help this article be found by someone in need:

XSAN
the item can't be found
file disappear after copy
SMB mac
samba mac
OSX
XSERVE
mac windows compatibility
stream support = no
extended attributes
xsan and samba
xsan and smb
file copy to pc almost completes
file copy from xserve almost completes
Apple file sharing problem
apple file sharing issue
file size issue with SMB
file size issue with samba
smb connection issue
samba connection issue
windows osx samba
windows pull file from xsan
Problem connecting to my Windows (SMB) share in 10.6

Macs, Windows 7, and SMB shares

I was recently creating a SMB share on one of my Mac 10.6 servers that acted funny.  It would keep asking me to log in, even though I had the correct credentials.  I accidentally discovered that a Windows 2008 R1 machine could hit it just fine... but my Windows 7 box could not.  This lead to a search of the internets, and I discovered a somewhat-related problem (it was actually crashing Samba on the server side)...  Someone on that blog wrote that it has to do with NTLM.  I figure the security permissions were changed from Windows 2008 R1 to R2, and also between Vista and Windows 7.  The post mentions to change a bunch of stuff in the "local security policy" of the Windows box to make it work.  I don't like changing a whole lot of security stuff, especially loosing it... so here is all I changed to make this work , citing "nikonz" from the site above for the original fix (with my changes):

"Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Local Security Policy

Local Policies --> Security Options

Network security: LAN Manager authentication level
Send LM & NTLM responses - use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated"

There, once again my Macs and PCs are at peace with each other again.