ESXi 4.0 Error attempting to install Windows 2008 R2 on Dell PowerEdge Server
Recently I was attempting to install a new copy of Windows 2008 R2 Standard Edition on a customer’s ESXi machine. Although I was currently running many different operating systems on the server, I was surprised to see that I could not install 2008. I received the error “0xc000035a Attempting to load a 64-bit application, however this cpu is not compatible with 64-bit mode”. After about 10 minutes of troubleshooting I realised that the problem was not in Windows 2008 or ESXi but rather in the Dell System BIOS. For some reason dell ships their servers with Intel VT Virtualisation Technology turned off! ESXi is unable to run 64bit operating systems without first turning on VT technology. I’m surprised I missed this, out of some coincidence all of the operating systems on the machine are 32-bit. That seems a bit perplexing to me that by default Dell disables this on their servers, it seems like it’d be a no brainer to turn it on. Perhaps for security purposes? If you have an answer, let me know in your comments!
Thunderbird keeps asking for Gmail IMAP password.
Mozilla Thunderbird
I installed Thunderbird for a client today after his copy of Outlook Express kept giving him grief with his Gmail IMAP. I’ve always been very happy with Thunderbird, as far as a light mail client goes, it covers most of the bases.
I noticed a peculiar error today whereas it would prompt for a password everyonce and a while. Even though I had saved it to the Password Manager. Apparently this is a common issue.
From what I’ve distilled the best thing you can do are the following.
Go to your IMAP account settings and bring increase the time between checks on the Gmail server. A change from five minutes to ten has helped some users from getting the constant request to reauthenticate. Others have up and switched to POP, not a long term solution, but you can always set your gmail to archive. The other solution that I came up with was to go to your Gmail web page, and go to the bottom where it shows the clients checking your mail. Verify you don’t have another device, like an iPhone or smartphone checking your imap mail as well. This can cause Gmail to detect too many users and refuse your password.
There is no definitive answer from google yet on this one, so your best bet is to play with your settings and see if you can make it bearable.
Update: Found some info on the Google Apps Site: the unlock captcha part seems to ask for an email address which means you can use your normal Gmail address as well.
Status This is a known issue. We’re currently working on a solution to address it.
In most cases, it will help to follow the recommendations in the Gmail Help Center including clearing the captcha.
To clear the captcha, visit https://www.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/UnlockCaptcha. Be sure to replace ‘yourdomain.com’ with your actual domain name.
This issue might also be resolved by changing the strength of your Google Apps account password. In this case, we would recommend using a strong password that contains more than eight characters.
If you are continue to be prompted for your password and need to clear your captcha often, please contact us and provide screenshots, the time that you received this error for several examples, and the exact error message that you are receiving.
How to Bridge your Wireless Network Across the Street
WRT54G Router
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been in this predictament. A client a few months ago called me with a problem. He said that his office was across the street from his home, but that because of a decrease in work, he had to cut back on his budget. The first thing that went was his DSL connexion for his house. He figured, since he had DSL at work, he might as well just use that. After a few months of his kids shuttling back and forth between the office and the house, he realised that he was going to need a better solution.
The answer? A wireless bridge. Sure you might say that there are plenty of Repeaters on the market, and high gain antennaes, and all sorts of exciting things. But that’s not nearly as fun as reflashing routers 
. For this project I used three routers.
1. The Broadcaster – Linksys WRT300N
Only device I actually bought, I figured if we were going to be blasting this across the street, I might as well get something with lots of antennaes. And I bought into the Wireless-N hype.
2. The Bridge – Linksys WRT54G
This one was sitting around the house from the old house network. Version 3 or 4 me thinks.
3. The Rebroadcaster - Netgear Blah blah Wireless-G
This was the router originally at the office for their local wireless network.
If you aren’t familiar with DD-WRT, it’s a community driven after-market firmware for a whole slough of routers. See if you’re deviced on on the Supported Hardware List. If it is, use the link next to the device for specific flashing instructions. Although most are similar, each device’s specific hardware limitations mean they are all slightly different. Although I flashed both of the Linksys routers, you really only need one device with DD-WRT on it. I installed it on mine to give me access to additional features, for example the ability to increase the transmit power on the WRT300N.
What we are effectively doing is making a “Wireless Client Bridge”. This means that we are setting up a wireless network, and making another Router connect to it as a “Client”. Then, we’re using another Router to turn this Client into another local wireless network. Now plenty of people are going to say “Why not just configure the Bridge to Repeat as well”. Using a seperate router means you’ll get more range and speed. When using two seperate routers, you have the advantage two radios. Meaning that a weak signal will never become unusable because your radio is working to both receive and transmit packets simultaniously.
In the past I have used Wireless Bridging to extend my network, connecting extra rooms, sending a signal across the street to a neighbour. Once you have a Router running DD-WRT, here are three great guides to help you get your router set up in Wireless Bridge Mode. Here, here and here.
Once you have your Router connected to the main wifi network, find a comfortable spot for your routers. Somewhere out of the way, with a reliable source of power, and most importantly a good wifi signal. Up high and near windows usually will result in the best results. Once you’ve found your Repeater’s new home. Go ahead and reconfigure the third Router.
Configure the “Rebroadcaster” to disable DHCP, and broadcast a new local wifi network, on a different channel and with a different SSID than your other network. This will make sure they will not conflict. If you try to set the network SSID (name) to be the same as your other network, your Bridge Router will attempt to connect to the Rebroadcaster rather than the correct network. This makes a little WiFi black hole.
Once you have all of these set up, I always cable tie the pair together, clean up the wires, and run as many packets through as possible. The crazy part about the Bridge Mode with DD-WRT is it’s actually reliable. As long as it has a signal and power, DD-WRT has the great ability to take a beating and come right back. Although you’re never going to get the same speed an reliability of a cabled solution, for web browsing and small file transfer this solution can be the perfect answer for being just a little too far away from your target wifi network.
Corrupt/Missing hal.dll
Fixed this problem today. Kellyn did a little research and found the solution. It turns out Hal.dll has nothing to do with Hal.dll but rather a corrupt or missing boot.ini file. The soution is:
1. Boot from your Windows XP CD.
2. Enter Recovery Console
3. Run “bootcfg /rebuild”.
4. Reboot and Voilà all is well.
There of course is the odd chance that your hal.dll file is actually corrupt. But as it was explained to me, the majority of the time. Hal.dll is just the first file that Windows looks for. Because of that it can mistake a missing boot.ini for a missing hal.dll.
Antivirus 2008/2009 Removal
Recently it seems like this virus has gotten almost out of control. From what I understand and I have seen it’s not so much a virus in it’s own, but a downloader for other much more nefarious programmes. It seems as if everytime I see this virus it has different attributes, different executables, and libraries. At first before most spyware programmes could detect it, I would spent a very long time removing the individual files and startup entries using tools like Unlocker and Spybot’s TeaTimer. Between these two programmes there are very few viruses/malware that can survive.
Once the startup entries and processes are removed, TeaTimer will prevent new changes. Alas, here was the catch this last time. The virus had hijacked the TCP/IP stack. Meaning that all of my web traffic was being routed to fictious pages. Furthermore attempts to download Spybot and download updates for various anti-virus programmes were blocked.
I was having a hell of a time until I tried Malwarebytes Anti-malware. I had seen this software on customers’ computers before. But this was the first time I used it myself. I have to say, it’s a miracle worker. It removed the files, and the startup entries. And to top things off, it killed the processes. I still had to do some cleaning up with HijackThis. But all in all, I’m very impressed. For the first time a Freeware Antimalware programme did the job. I’ll definitely be using it in the future, and recommending it to clients.
TheOS 4.x Virtualisation
A couple months ago I did a job for a local company here named Avis Plumbing and A/C. They are using an old Multi-User Serial system based on TheOS 4.1. The system works great for them except for the fact they were completely dependent on serial based hardware. They had these huge serial terminals, an old “mainframe” and a dozen odd CAT3 cables going every which way. After hours of research, lots of dead ends on-line and a few calls to the original company that made the software; I made some interesting discoveries.
My first idea was to virtualise TheOS. Since it’s simple, light-weight in effect: tiny. I figured making it portable would limit their dependence on proprietary hardware and free them from 10 year old Digiboards. After trying VirtualBox, VMWare and Bochs. I was about to give up. Until, I found a note on their support forums.
Under Network Interface Cards it reads:
The virtual NIC in the Virtual PC product emulates a Digital DS 21140 (Tulip) chip set. As such, you have full network connectivity using Corona in the Virtual PC box running under Windows XP. Simply set it up to use DHCP, and everything works fine.
Sure enough, I went ahead and plugged the Proprietary Parallel Security Key into my PC, enabled Parallel pass-through and BAM. I was prompted to enter my key. The installation went fine except for one big snag up. After a while I realised that the version of TheOS they had did not support TCP/IP. Bummer. Even worse the Theos-Software Company will no longer provide a license or the disks to update to the magic version with Telnet support. And probably just as tragically to move up to the next version TheOS Corona. The cost would be prohibitively high relative to the gains.
I ended up using USB-Serial Adapters and a copy of Tiny-Term to simply replace the Dummy Terminals, rather than changing the server. At least now they have laptops on their desk. But I still dream of the day when I can reduce their mess of serial cables into one sleek little server in their wiring closet.
I’d really love to play with it more, if I could get my hands on a copy of Corona, it’d be a great project to see if I could migrate the data. I imagine there has to be other people out there who love their TheOS systems that would love them even more if they were able to backup all of their data to a flash drive. I suppose if that’s you, call us at 877-419-9634
