Erik Jacobs A Real American Hero

I purchased a new motherboard and CPU in an effort to upgrade both my system processing capability and my hard disk space. My original plan was just to clone an existing 1TB drive onto part of a 2x2TB RAID array, but I was struck with many issues, even with disk cloning. I went through a lot of trouble trying to find a method that worked. So after much pain, here’s what I found:

1) The current stable Redobackup is too old to detect the effective RAID device that my new mobo bios was creating. It refused to select a target device.

2) The current stable Clonezilla also has issues. It detects an md device, but then has issues determining its size and refuses to actually write data to it.

3) The GParted livecd seemed to work best. I used gparted to copy partitions from the original drive to the new drive. I then used dd to copy the boot sector, just in case.

What I found is that Windows 7 gets *REALLY ANGRY* when you just pop an existing installation into a new mobo/cpu. It basically is unstartable. I found an article that suggests running Sysprep with “generalize” and “out-of-box” as a part of transferring to a new machine:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/135077-windows-7-installation-transfer-new-computer.html

Following these instructions and running Sysprep I then found an issue with the Windows Media Player Network Sharing service – it needed to be stopped in order for Sysprep to work right.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/8f5002e1-95b4-47bf-b031-4b72b3eb388a/sysprep-fails?forum=w7itproinstall
(that link may not work without a login).

So, what I ended up doing thus far:

1. Clone existing 1TB drive onto new, temporary 1TB drive.
2. Boot old mobo system with cloned 1TB drive, run sysprep per instructions.
3. Put sysprepped temporary 1TB drive into new mobo system, boot, let Windows do its first startup, finally install (most) drivers.

I found some issues with some of Asus‘ drivers, so I had to do these steps *AGAIN* in order to get to a working system.

My next step is to clone this now updated 1TB drive onto a 2TB bios-based RAID array and hope for the best. I hope someone finds this information useful!

So I recently have been setting up a new Fedora 14 Linux machine at home, which used to run Windows as my primary desktop. I figured that I would keep the printer connected physically to this machine, even though it would no longer be the primary desktop. That meant I had to figure out how to get printing working first with Linux, and then printer sharing.

Getting printing working in Linux was fairly easy. In fact, the printer had already appeared in the list of printers without really doing any work. I recalled from a previous attempt a while back that there are some neat specific tools for HP printing in Linux, and I found them again at the HPLIP project. A quick install of that software in Fedora and I, at least, had that up and running.

Sharing the printer via Samba and CUPS is where it got a little tricky. I had ended up fighting a bunch with the specific configuration of Samba, finding lots of conflicting tutorials with different information that didn’t make sense. I tried a few things, and kept getting permissions errors.

I finally realized that, at least for printing, smb is running/executing as the user “nobody”.  I also noticed that there happened to be a samba-specific folder in /var/spool. I put two and two together and figured that SELinux would be happiest with Samba talking to that folder. So, here’s, ultimately, the set-up I ended up with for smb.conf:

[global]
  workgroup = YOURWORKGROUP
  server string = Samba Server Version %v
  security = share
[printers]
  printing = cups
  printcap name = cups
  browseable = yes
  printable = yes
  public = yes
  create mode = 0700
  use client driver = yes
  path = /var/spool/samba

Adding the printer from Windows proved to be a snap:

1. Browse to the computer name (//yourlinuxmachinename)
2. Double click the printer to connect to it
3. Find the driver it needs
4. Done!

Hopefully this will help some of you if you find yourselves fumbling around trying to make this sort of thing work.

This really should not have been as hard as it was. I tried in vain to take the Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit ISO, that I had downloaded from MSDN, and put it on a USB HDD that I had laying around. I have just built a new computer and did not bother to buy an optical drive. Unfortunately, my existing Windows machine was 32-bit Windows XP. This meant running any files from the Windows 7 CD (like the boot sector program) was not a possibility.

I tried various tools like UNetbootin, WinToFlash, MultiBootISOs and others. I also tried some tricks with xcopy that did not seem to work. Since I work for Red Hat and am a Linux person, I happened to have a Linux machine at my disposal. Here’s what I found that worked:

• I created a bootable (IMPORTANT!) 4GB primary NTFS partition on my 40GB external USB HDD
• I formatted this partition with NTFS
• I mounted the Windows 7 ISO and the NTFS partition, and copied the files from the ISO to the USB HDD
• I used ms-sys to write a Windows 7 MBR to the USB HDD

There was at least one caveat here. I saw, in a place or two, suggestions to use ms-sys against the partition itself. When running ms-sys against a partition, it complained, so I ran it against the base device (in my case, /dev/sdb).

Hopefully this will help someone out there!

This is basically a copy of a comment I made on Fred Wilson’s blog, but I wanted to put it here so that other people (who might possibly pay attention to me) might see it, too.  So here are some random thoughts:

– Wireless technologies (WiFi) have evolved extremely quickly because they are largely “unregulated”. No one really owns the spectrum and every company can make a device that can access that spectrum, so they all compete to offer better performance/features/etc. in that space.

– The only organization that can create a monopoly is a government. Even if one company were to buy up everything and become the sole provider of a service, it still is not a monopoly. Either people will substitute something else in place of that service (walking instead of taking the train, even though it takes a long time), or someone will determine that the barrier to entry, no matter how significant, will ultimately provide a competitive alternative to the existing monopoly.

– Cable and telephone companies have “near” monopoly over internet access, but it is only because they have already eaten the tremendous costs of infrastructure over time, and happened to be able to retrofit this infrastructure for use as a data transport infrastructure.

– Verizon seems to think that, despite the start-up cost, there is competitive benefit to them setting up a new higher-speed data transport infrastructure, as one example. Companies like Clear have decided that, despite the lack of comparable performance to other options today, there is a competitve to their investing in the infrastructure for their wireless data service infrastructure.

– “Net Neutrality” and spectrum auctions will likely serve to neuter the inevitable explosion in over-the-air as an alternative to existing wired data service infrastructures. Instead of net neutrality making the internet and data services better, it will ultimately serve to further reinforce the near monopoly that the cable companies and phone companies already have by eliminating the competitive benefit that the wireless providers can exert over the cable companies by being net neutral. If Comcast were allowed to really really manipulate its network traffic, customers who did not like this would move to services like Clear in favor of a neutral experience as a trade-off to performance. Forcing the net neutrality hand means that this inevitable movement is going to be stifled.