My dad is looking for ways to automate checking the settings of a Windows server for giving it a standards compliance grade. He needs to know if more than one OS is installed, but wants to avoid taking down the server at all costs. Is there any technique within Windows (XP and newer) for programmatically ascertaining whether a machine has multiple OSs installed?
It depends on what you consider "an installed OS".
At the very least you'd have to scan all partitions (including the ones Windows's limited filesystem support can't recognize) for filesystems and then see if they "look" like another OS. If you need to know if the alternate OS is bootable as well, you'll have to scan for boot loaders and their configuration as well.
By the way, what difference does it make if there's another OS installed on the computer?
Not entirely reliably. You could attempt to access the MBR and the partition table and sniff for evidence of the competition if you can persuade Windows to let you open the other partitions as raw devices. It would be a heap of work.
How about doing a checksum of the bootloader and comparing it against a known-good list of Windows OS bootloaders on the HDs?
Related
A few years ago I switch from PC to Mac. I didn't do this because I preferred to use a Mac, but because I desired experience working with both systems. Now, I see the pros and cons of both sides, and I use them both regularly. In fact, my job requires it.
Now though, I would like to create a central repository of all my PC / Mac data. Unfortunately there is a language barrier between NTFS and HFS+.
Is there any way I can create an efficient and reliable central repository for all my data? I prefer not to use 3rd party drivers as I've found them to be complex and often unreliable.
I think you may be confusing physical, on-disk filesystems with network filesystems.
HFS+ and NTFS are physical, on-disk layouts.
Samba/NFS (Network File System)/AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) are network filesystems.
There is nothing to stop you sharing an HFS+ physical filesystem via Samba (network filesystem) with Windows clients. Likewise, you could theoretically, share an NTFS filesystem with an OSX client via AFP.
You can just share a directory (folder) from your Mac by going to:
Apple menu (top left of screen) -> Preferences -> Sharing
Then set up like in red:
Another, brilliant option which I use for serving all my music to a SONOS system, is to get a little Raspberry Pi, that uses almost zero power, and add a 256MB USB memory stick (or maybe 4 off 64GB memory sticks as that can be cheaper) and RAID them together and make that available via Samba. It is silent and uses no power!
i do not know about your possibilities, but may be you could just use sambaserver. My router has a build in sambaserver all i have to do is plugin an USB disk.
You could also format your external hd to FAT32 filesystem. It should work for mac and windows, but it does not support files over 4GB. But its fine for document, photos and so.
good luck
I am not sure how well FTP would work but I assume you could run a FTP server in one or both systems and FTP client in the corresponding system. Most browsers can be a FTP client but there are also dedicated programs.
Mac OS X can read from NTFS drives. It also supports writing to NTFS, but that feature is disabled by default. I am not sure if it can work when the volume is online to Windows. Quick Tip: How to Write to NTFS Drives in OS X Mavericks explains it.
Enable writing to NTFS hard drives for free in Mac OS X (including El Capitan!) claims to provide read and write access to NTFS for free from Mac OS X.
You can use Apple's Boot Camp. I am not sure of the licensing requirements for the Windows you run in the Apple system but apparently you can use your existing license.
There is also Catacombae - HFSExplorer for accessing Mac-formatted hard disks and disk images from Windows.
There is also commercial software available. A popular one is Paragon HFS+ for Windows 10 and Paragon NTFS for Mac® 14 - Write / read access to NTFS under OS X El Capitan - Introduction.
I did not know what "sambaserver" is but it is a SMB server for UNIX/Linux as described in . SMB is built into Windows; see IT: How to Transfer Files Using Microsoft File Sharing for Windows.
I have one drive (C:\) with Windows 2008. Is that possible to install drivers to this Windows while booting from WinPE (another OS)? I couldn't find any software to do this.
So what I'm trying to do is install drivers to one Windows while booting from another Windows on separate disks.
It's not impossible, but not easy either. Installing a driver is basically a matter of copying the files and editing the registry, both of which can be done remotely.
However, the problem comes from knowing which registry entries to create, with which values. This depends on the driver, the OS, hardware and a bunch of other factors. The best approach would be to install the driver normally, and take a diff of the before/after registry, if you can. If not, you could set up another Win2008 system, do the diff there, and start from that.
If you are just updating an already installed driver, copying the newer version files will likely work.
This seems like an XY problem, though - what exactly are you trying to accomplish? There may be a better approach.
I'm building an IOKit CFPlugin driver for OS X. I'll be working with network data coming in that will be translated to MIDI data. No hardware is involved other than the built-in Airport. I have experience with drivers on Windows machines and firmware but this is my first dip into doing it on the Mac. So far things are going pretty well, but the Apple documentation sez: "For safety reasons, you should not load your driver on your development machine."
I only have one Mac. I really don't want two Macs- sorry, Apple. Should I take this warning seriously? Are there things I need to know?
Thanks, Tom Jeffries
You could also consider running OS X inside a VM as your testbed. It would surely be much more convenient that having a separate boot volume.
The warning is rather poorly worded; what you should consider doing is using a separate boot volume (partition) for trying out your driver, since it's possible to arbitrarily hose your system with your driver.
If you're doing kernel development on any OS that isn't isolated from your main system (via a VM, alternate boot disk, etc.), you're crazy!
What may be a bigger issue is that you can't do any kernel debugging, because the only option for that is to use GDB on a remote OS X system. For this, you may want to consider running OS X in virtualization.
you DEFINITELY want to have some way to recover a fubar kext installation: a bootable external drive or something you can quickly restore from-- this is the main reason for Apple's warning against running in-development-kernel-extensions on your production machine.
Nicholas is right that in order to debug using gdb (the only way in kernel space) you do need two machines. I've never tried using a VM as Coxy suggests: but I guess it's feasible (assuming that you run your kext on the virtual machine and use the real host machine to run gdb).
My preferred method for tracing and debugging in the kernel is kprintf() routed to firewire (aka firewire kprintf (man fwkpfv) ). for this you do need two machines with firewire ports.
finally, being an old computer musician myself, I wonder why you want to program a MIDI synthesizer (or transformer) on the network stack level. my guess is that you would have a much more gratifying experience working in userland (where you can use floating point math...)
if you need some hints or tips, feel free to get in touch...
|K<
from the ADC Kernel Programming Guide
Kernel programming is a black art that
should be avoided if at all possible.
Fortunately, kernel programming is
usually unnecessary. You can write
most software entirely in user space.
Even most device drivers (FireWire and
USB, for example) can be written as
applications, rather than as kernel
code. A few low-level drivers must be
resident in the kernel's address
space, however, and this document
might be marginally useful if you are
writing drivers that fall into this
category.
I already have experience with setting up virtual machines, running them and other minor tasks. Im a gamer, so I wont get rid of windows (for now at least...) but I do want to be a great programmer and to be involved with the Open-Source community.
Id like to know if its a good idea to do my programming in linux through a virtual machine, vs giving it a partitioned section of the HDD. Id like to know about performance pros and cons and functionality.
All responses are appreciated, thanks in advance.
The type of programming I intend to dive into :
Android Dev, Web Dev, Desktop Dev...More Android and Web right now though.
So im looking at C#,C,C++,Java,PHP,HTML,MySQL...Off the top of the dome.
I do web designing as well, so dreamweaver is added as an "essential". But im sure I can do dreamweaver files and upload them to the server after programming in Linux...Right?
And any info on IDE's in Linux for the above mentioned are appreciated, but i would prefer going the coding route and understanding the essence of whats happening "under the covers"
Thanks to all for reading, I appreciate it.
Hope this isnt confusing :S
There is an easier solution..
I still have to use Windows for Symbian programming so I use a Wubi and Ubuntu to provide my double bout into Linux..you deploy Wubi uses a large file and thus no need to worry or mess with creating a partition..
I have used it for 18 months with no data loss and no worries..
There is also another tool called andlinux:
http://www.andlinux.org/
It uses colinux to run Linux as a program inside windows..
A couple things:
If you're using an IDE, there's no point to coding on Linux. Linux is nice for programming because the command line tools are awesome. Netbeans and Eclipse both work fine on Windows. All you'd be missing is makefiles (which IDEs don't use anyway).
Using a virtual machine would be annoying (working with the window and stuff) and slow. Try AndLinux if you want to have Linux running in Windows. It sets up X and Pulseaudio for you, so all of your programs will appear to be native. It's basically a way to run Ubuntu as a Windows service (all Ubuntu packages for your architecture are installable).
If you just want the fun of Linux command line programs without access to all of Ubuntu, cygwin is smaller and might be faster.
If by "Dreamweaver files", you mean HTML/PHP/CSS, then yes, you can just upload them to the server. As far as I know, the only ASP or ASP.net compatible server is Microsoft's, but why use that anyway?
EDIT: SO didn't give me enough space in the comments to answer your question..
AndLinux and Cygwin are basically just better ways to do your "virtual machine" idea.
Cygwin adds a posix layer to Windows (basically everything you need to compile Unix/Linux/BSD programs). This means that you can generally take a Linux program and just compile it on Windows and have it work. They also have repositories, but in my experience, the cygwin installer is slow and hard to use.
AndLinux runs the Linux kernel as a Windows service, giving you a similar experience as running it in VirtualBox/other virtualization programs. However, it also sets up X (the graphics layer for Linux) and PulseAudio (a sound system that lets you run sound over a network), so that when you run Linux programs they act and sound like native programs. I also like AndLinux better because you have access to all of Ubuntu's programs, and apt-get is easier to use than cygwin's installer. Also, if you use AndLinux and later to decide to go 100% Linux, you're basically already using it that way.
What I'm getting at is: If you want to run Linux in a virtual machine, don't. Just install AndLinux. It will be faster and it's much easier to work with (since everything is just a normal window).
Here's an example of the difference:
Screenshot of AndLinux: The program in the bottom right corner is running in AndLinux. Notice how it just looks like a badly themed Windows program? Compare that to something like this, where you have another desktop in a Window.
And still.. there's no reason to virtualize Netbeans. It's a native Windows program and you can gain nothing and lose a lot of speed.
If you're interested in Android development and you want to use Linux, then I would recommend you do your development in Eclipse. Eclipse is available for Linux and if you get Ubuntu then Eclipse is amazingly easy to install. I used VirtualBox + Ubuntu + Eclipse for several projects I worked on. If you decide that Linux is not for you and your project was in Eclipse then you will have no problem switching back to Windows since Eclipse is available for both operating systems.
The ONLY problem I had was the screen size on the virtual machine... if you have a big screen and you use a virtual machine then you might get limited to a fraction of your actual screen resolution. It's very easy to install Linux on a second partition, so I would just recommend you go with a second partition if you want to fully utilize the size of your monitor.
My setup is sort of the opposite: I run Linux as my main OS, both at work an at home, and I have Windows in a virtual machine. On a modern computer with adequate memory the performance of development tools is not a problem. I work with Visual Studio in the virtual machine, and I have seen few performance issues. (But note that this is on a fast computer, and that you may need more memory than otherwise, since you are running two OS:es at the same time. On an old computer with less memory it can become unbearable.)
Dual-boot, where you have to restart the computer to switch OS, doesn't work well for me. It takes way too much time to switch, and really need to switch back and forth. Having Windows in a window works much better for me, and you can maximize that "Windows window", so it looks like you're just running Windows.
One thing you may want to look at is to have Linux running in a VM, then configuring Samba to allow the host to network-mount pieces of the Linux filesystem so that you can operate using Windows tools, and have Linux running the server processes (e.g., httpd). Alternatively, I'm sure that there are shell extensions for using FTP, NFS, or SSH/SFTP servers from within Explorer, but I've not looked at any for a long time.
If you should happen to need to use graphical Linux tools then you can use the X server found in cygwin for that.
The downside of this plan is that Samba can be a bit tricky to configure, but you get to use the Windows tools you're already familiar with.
I had no issues running Ubuntu via VMWare. You can easily switch to full screen mode anytime. Strongly recommended. One shortcoming is that Linux will not be exposed to the full potential of your hardware. Compbiz Fusion failed to work as a result.
Given that you're a gamer, I'm thinking your machine should be fast enough to run Linux in a VM. Best to try out the VM before messing with disk partitions.
I use physically separate machines to run Linux and Windows (and MacOS X). This means that I don't have to reboot to do something different, and each system gets the full power of the hardware.
Disadvantages: more desk space used, more time and money spent maintaining hardware (though if you do a rolling upgrade, this is mitigated - Linux runs most happily on not-quite-new machines). Doesn't work so well if you like carrying laptops around.
Be aware that VMs universally don't give you full graphics acceleration. This can be a non-issue (many programs must cope with Intel GMA anyway), or it can be a showstopper. Your choice.
What do you recommend for quickly creating images for testing a software product (that needs hardware access - full USB port access)? Does virtualization cover this? I need to be able to quickly re-image the system to test from scratch again, and need good options for Windows and Mac OS.
Virtualization may work for you as long as it is only USB access.
VirtualBox is available with USB support either for "private use or evaluation" or commercially and works on Win, Mac and Linux. USB support on Linux and Mac is somewhat sporadical though and does not work with all devices. VBox supports snapshots.
VMWare has one free product called VMWare Server for Win and Linux but I'm not sure how far USB support is included in their server products. For Mac there is VMWare Fusion but that's not available for free. Fusion should work with most USB devices. Workstation products for Windows are more expensive. I think there is a trial version for all of them. All do snapshots.
I don't know how far Parallels (Mac) supports USB devices or snapshots.
You don't need snapshot functionality if you can afford some short downtime between re-imaging. You can shut down the VM and then just copy the disk image (which is nothing else but one or multiple regular files) and start the VM again. Snapshots can be reverted to a lot faster (without rebooting).
If virtual machines will work for you, you can choose between Virtual PC, VMWare and VirtualBox.
Virtual PC supports Win host and Win/linux guests. Although there are some caveats with regards to the X resolution support.
VMWare supports Win, OS X and Linux host. It supports Win and Linux guests.
VirtualBox supports same hosts and guests as VMWare.
None of the three supports OS X as guest officially. The reason is that OS X is licensed only for Apple machines. However, there are some hacks that allow installing OS X under VMWare. It might be also possible to install it under VirtualBox or Virtual PC, although I have not seen specific instructions.
If virtualization is not good enough for you, you can use precreated installation images or a disk imaging program.
For precreated installation images for Windows, you can use the sysprep tool (search for sysprep or system preparation tool). I don't know if there are equivalent tools for OS X from Apple.
For disk imaging programs, I know quite a lot people swear by Symantec Ghost. I personally have not used it, so can't give you much info about it. There's also a list of disk imaging programs on Wikipedia, so you evaluate these as well.
Hope that helps.
If virtualization is right for you depends on how much access direct access you actually need.
But if virtualization works then vmware offers products for Windows and Mac that support a Snapshot feature.
Or there's also VirtualBox which works on Linux, Windows and Mac, also supports snapshots and is free.
I use VMWare Player for this sort of stuff. I've not tested it with the sort of access you discuss (since I mostly do apps rather than driver-level stuff) but the advantages are many, specifically being able to copy the VM when it's shut down for later restore to a specific point (sort of a poor man's snapshot) and being able to have lots of configurations without blowing the hardware budget.
It certainly provides USB virtualization and I would say it's the best bet for providing the full device access. I would suggest testing it since, if it provides the hardware support you need, it's a very good solution for the other reasons given. The only other (non-VM) suggestion I can think of which would match it would be hard disk image backups which can be restored at will.
I've used Virtual PC heavily for this kind of thing in Windows, without ever hitting any issues. It's free, which is always a bonus ;o)
Edit: Just re-read the question - not sure that it has USB support. Should tick all the other boxes though
CloneZilla is a great, free way to reimage machines.
Once I worked for some company where we needed to test our software for various combinations of versions of OS, SPs and some other libraries which our application was dependent on. For each separate identified combination we had a separate partition image created with the help of Norton Ghost (DOS version). All images were put to a server. Whenever a tester got the next version of the system core to test, they would just methodically restore from all applicable images, install the application, test it and report it.
This approach though a straightforward one would allow full access to the hardware and will provide you with 100% native installation.
Nowadays, I still use this approach for my private PC. I'm sure you can try the latest achievements like Hyper-V. We use it nowadays where I work. When we tried to install Team Foundation Server (the process is far from being easy) we also had to drop the process at some point and just restore a virtual machine from an image because we realized we made a few mistakes during installation. Conceptually the same approach that saves a great deal of time. I'm not really sure though how compatible a virtual PC is in the sense of hardware access.
You can try both approaches.
P.S. Today there are two Ghost products, Symantec Ghost (good old one) for corporate use and Norton Ghost for home use (bloatware in my opinion). If you decide to try this option, I would recommend the Symantec Ghost (part of Ghost Solution Suite).
If you can't just use a virtual machine and take snapshots of the fresh install then do a fresh install onto real hardware and use a disk imaging tool (Ghost comes to mind).
If cost is a factor then there's a few Linux live CDs that will do what you want. This comes to mind. Put a second disk in the machine and image from the second disk unless you have fast networks and network storage; it's way to slow to go to and from the network regularly. If you're using a Linux live CD then you can actually set the second disk to EXT3 so Windows won't detect it and assign a drive letter too.
If you have a dedicated workstation for testing then I would highly recommend Symantec Ghost. Simply get the workstation to the clean state, reboot to ghost and 'take a snapshot' of the HD or partition. You can then replace the HD or partition from the image say from CD or multicasted over a network connection from another PC.
I have used it for years now, even to the point of automating the build of 60 test workstations (at the same time).