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From one of the venture blogs I watch, here’re the pix.

I guess I should’ve been a bit more verbose in my last entry. Microsoft has a whole range of Express products: Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C#, Visual J#, and Visual Web Dev in addition to SQL. The Express page is here and it’s a jumping-off point to the rest of the products, including links for downloads.

Microsoft’s making SQL Server 2005 Express available here. The web page says it’s a free implementation based on SQL Server 2005 and will run on Windows XP as well as Server 2003.

The Knoppix CD boots on my trusty old Dell C600 laptop. Now, I guess I’ve gotta find a wireless card it recognizes.

Needed a good, low-cost backup program. Good if it backs up to disk and can keep versions. Found the following, with my favorite on top:

SyncBackup
DFIncBackup
SimplySafe Backup

Tried all 3 and eventually settled on the first. They’re all good.

Had a conversation with a friend this week about my disk installation issues. He recommended I take a look at the Linux distributions known as Knoppix. Now, I’m familiar with security tools version called Knoppix-STD and have used it on a couple of occasions but, somehow, I missed the original. Wonderful distro! Detected my USB keyboard and all of my devices including the drive on the IDE RAID *and* mounted all of my partitions including the NTFS ones.

It’s about a 700M ISO image. Boot it and run it from CD.

Spent all day yesterday trying to move my primary Win XP boot drive to a larger disk. I tried every partition management and copy tool I have and, while the copy seemed to work flawlessly, I still got an error message that ntoskrnl.exe was corrupt. Nothing I did worked and I couldn’t even boot the Recovery Console I’d installed way back when on my primary disk. I booted my XP Pro installation disk and ran the Recovery Console from there but I couldn’t see anything wrong.

Having converted my system partition to NTFS many months ago, my recovery options are somewhat limited. I explored the world of alternative boot disks, Ultimate Boot CD and Bart’s Preinstalled Environment being the two leaders. The Linux distros on the Ultimate Boot CD appear to support NTFS but I couldn’t tell since my keyboard is a USB model and it looks like their Linux version don’t support that (yet).

Bart’s is a stripped-down XP installation you boot from CD. It’s really quite a remarkable effort — there is no Explorer GUI but you can run the command processor and REGEDIT and edit your services definitions and, since it’s really XP, you can get to all of your NTFS disks.

I also discovered some good resources on the syntasx and options available in BOOT.INI. This one from SysInternals defines all of the options for Windows 2000. And, of course, Microsoft has an excellent description of all parameters in this article from the Windows XP Resource Kit. It includes not only the explanation for the multi() lines but also scsi(), signature() and a section on editing and repairing BOOT.INI. Sure wish I’d known all this ahead of time!

Anyway, after nearly an entire day I decided I’d try BOOTCFG /REBUILD from the Recovery Console and, y’know what? — it worked! I still haven’t figured out why, with an identical partition structure, the old disk’s OS was on partition(1) and the new disk’s OS is on partition(2) but I’m sure I’ll find it.

Just wanted to pass this along.

Their PsTools page is here. The changes are listed in the news section of their main page.

Continuing with my May 3 entry, I managed to establish remote control via both VNC and Remote Desktop through my SSH tunnel. It’s pretty simple once you get through the conceptual hurdles and set a new registry key value for VNC.

The process is only a little different depending on whether you’ve got 2 machines in the equation (your controlling machine and your controlled machine) or 3 machines (your controlling machine, a intermediary machine to which you SSH, and the controlled machine).

For the TWO machine case, ssh from your controlling machine to the controlled machine like so:

  ssh -L <localport>:localhost:<remoteport> controlled-machine

For the THREE machine case, ssh from the controlling machine to the intermediary machine like so:

  ssh -g -L <localport>:localhost:<remoteport> intermediary-machine

&ltremoteport&gt for Remote Desktop should be 3389 and for VNC it’s 5900 (or 5901 or 5902, etc., depending on your Display Number setting in VNC’s options).

&ltlocalport&gt is the port number on the controlling machine (the local machine) that you’ll connect to with either Remote Desktop or vncviewer.

OK, so, now you need to connect. Connecting is a little different depending on whether you’ve got the two machine or the three machine case.

In the TWO machine case, for VNC use the following. And if you get an error message about local loopback being disabled, read WinVNC – Advanced Settings and set the registry key appropriately.

  vncviewer localhost:<displaynumber>

Remote Desktop won’t let you connect to localhost so enter 127.0.0.2 in the Computer Name field.

In the THREE machine case, for both vncviewer and Remote Desktop you use the hostname of the machine to be controlled.

Simple, eh? OK, maybe not really simple but it’s not as hard as it looks. Work through it once or twice and everything should become clear. And here’s a link to the RealVNC web page that explains how to use SSH.

BTW, an alternative if the only machines in the picture are running Windows, is UltraVNC.

Seems that the CDs and DVDs that you and I write have a lifespan that’s considerably shorter than first thought. This article from eWeek says that some CDs recorded int he 80s are beginning to show signs of decay. The answer? — re-record them (what’d you expect?).