Tech-Blog

links for 2009-06-11

Posted by Mike Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:32:39 GMT

• YouTube - Xbox 360 "Project Natal" Demonstrated on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
  nerdgasm!
  (tags: xbox video gaming)
• Tilted Twister
  rubik's robot
  (tags: lego programming robotics video cool)

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links for 2009-05-29

Posted by Mike Sat, 30 May 2009 00:32:58 GMT

• Sveinbjorn Thordarson's Website - 'watch' for Mac OS X
  Compiles cleanly on 10.4
  (tags: mac unix tools)

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links for 2009-05-26

Posted by Mike Wed, 27 May 2009 00:32:43 GMT

• Installing uzbl on an Ubuntu box
  far out new browser for vim-sters
  (tags: vim web html ubuntu how-to)

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links for 2009-05-22

Posted by Mike Sat, 23 May 2009 00:33:13 GMT

• Doors Open Toronto: Canada's National Ballet School
  Visitors will be taken on a tour in the historical buildings (now administrative offices + boardroom and the academic classrooms), the Betty Oliphant Theatre and have an opportunity to see the studios (with classes underway)and the school's wardrobe facility at the school.
  (tags: toronto events)

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links for 2009-05-05

Posted by Mike Wed, 06 May 2009 00:33:25 GMT

• 46 RPM Spindle T Shirt from Zazzle.com
  Like Billy Bragg wore in concert
  (tags: clothing retro zazzle)

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links for 2009-05-01

Posted by Mike Sat, 02 May 2009 00:32:07 GMT

• GoCycle: The Electric Assist Bike We Have Been Waiting For? : TreeHugger
  A new electric-assist bike from the UK
  (tags: transportation science design)

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On Bootstrapping Active Directory for EC2's Windows Images

Posted by Mike Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:09:00 GMT

Amazon's EC2 service now includes a number of Windows Server 2003 images, starting at $0.125 per hour. These Microsoft sanctioned images are a great alternative to the QEMU shenanigans from the past.

One of the advantages of Amazon's EC2 service is the ability to provision virtual machines via scripts, and without human interaction. Here's a description of my approach to bringing an instance of Active Directory online via script.

Prerequisites:

• Amazon EC2 account
• command line RDP client (e.g. rdesktop)
• dcpromo answer file (I found Daniel Petri's article helpful)

Your RDP client will need to support two features: file sharing, and remote script execution. I've found the Mac RDP clients tough to use via script, but Ubuntu's rdesktop works just fine in a VirtualBox VM.

Starting the Windows Server VM

Choose the Basic Microsoft Windows Server 2003 image or the Basic Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with Authentication Services image; a small standard instance type should be sufficient.

(The Firefox elasticfox EC2 plugin makes it easy to manage windows instances.)

Once your instance is online, you'll need the public DNS name and administrator password for the instance.

Installing Active Directory

Normally, AD is installed and configured by running dcpromo and working through the relevant dialog boxes. Unattended installs are supported via the /answer argument:

   C:> dcpromo /answer:%path_to_answer_file%
 

Running this command on an EC2 instance poses two challenges: how to run a windows command remotely from a script, and how to copy our dcpromo answer file from our local host to EC2. Fortunately RDP solves both problems. Using rdesktop one can define a script to run on session startup, and a local folder to share with the remote host.

Install Active Directory remotely using rdesktop as follows:

   mpierson:$ rdesktop -r disk:share=/home/mpierson/winshare/ \
     -u Administrator -p <admin_password> \
     -s "dcpromo /answer:\\\\tsclient\\share\\dcpromo.install" \
     <windows_hostname>
 

where /home/mpierson/winshare/dcpromo.install is the local path of the dcpromo answer file for your AD configuration. (The RDP file share defined by the -r argument will appear in the Windows host network share list with a host name of tsclient.)

FWIW, here is an example answer file for dcpromo.

Access Your AD Domain

Use rdesktop to access your new AD domain as follows:

   mpierson:$ rdesktop 
     -u Administrator -p <admin_password> \
     -d <win_domain_name> \
     <windows_hostname>
 

where win_domain_name is the DomainNetBiosName defined in your dcpromo answer file.

Posted in technology | Tags activedirectory, ec2, windows | no comments | no trackbacks

On Bootstrapping Oracle's 10g XE EC2 Image

Posted by Mike Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:37:00 GMT

Oracle has made a number of their products available for use on Amazon's EC2 service. Unfortunately, each instance of their 10g XE RDBMS image must be configured manually via ssh before use.

Turns out that the 10g XE image hijacks the bash profile script to force manual configuration. If one was motivated to enable unattended configuration of the image, the bash profile script could be un-hijacked with scp:

  mpierson:$ scp -i EC2_KEY my-bash-profile.sh root@<EC2-HOST-NAME>:/root/.bash_profile
 

BTW, the hijack script overwritten by scp above is also a good starting point for an script that would bring the database online in an unattended scenario. Here's what it does:

1. force acceptance of Oracle EC2 license
2. force change to oracle system user
3. set Oracle environment, including host name
4. force change to SYSTEM and SYS oracle db accounts

Posted in technology | Tags ec2, oracle | no comments | no trackbacks