Update:

So, I am a moron.  That’s the idiot error you get when you don’t type the password right in your script.  Yep, got it now.

Original:

Well, crap.

insufficient rights to host operating system

The dreaded UAC controls and security model in Server 2008/Vista have reared their head and I think its going to be complicated to work within their rules.

My plan hinged on the automated shutdown, copy and then restart of my Ubuntu server VM.  There are two obvious hurdles to this plan.  The first is acquiring/writing a script to do this.   Secondly, I don’t believe that VMware tools has been successfully installed on the Ubuntu server – I spent a lot of time on that, custom compiling, adding packages, etc.  This seems to have been ineffective so far, but I think that  should be somewhat easy to over come.

Back to the first issue, the automation.  It seems that unlike the big boy version of VMware, VMware Server 2.x doesn’t have a built in task scheduler which would have just been too darn easy.  It does come with an executable that should be an enabler, however.  This script I found would work really well.  The issue is that the script blows out when it hits the “vmrun.exe” because even running the command prompt as administrator doesn’t pass on the necessary rights elevation.  Looks like I could do some fanciness in VB that would make this work…

I am going to try and run the commands singly in task manager to see if the “run as” there is effective.  Probably not, but I can hope.  Time to dig into that, which is just fantastic and will require some local group policy work.  Once I have a fix, it might actually be useful to others.  We’ll see.  Ideally I’ll find a fix that works within the default Server 2008 security model which would make it much more portable.

–Nat

I finally got windows DNS up and running on my Windows Home Server after putting it off for a year or so.   It seems trivial, but I view it as one more configuration item to recreate after a rebuild.   I hope that my current WHS lasts about forever (I built it with 3 to 5 years in mind) but the system drive could always fail – not to mention that WHS2 should be out before too long.  Once WHS is 64 bit, I’ll consolidate my main VMware Server instance onto it and it will be nice to be down to basically one server in the house.

Anyway, I had a couple challenges, but mostly those were due to configurations across my two networks (one behind the G router, the other behind the N router.)  The long term solution is to flip both of those into AP mode and do all my configuration on the SMC gateway but that is an undertaking for another day.  The other was related to flushing the dns cache on the DNS server itself.  Seems obvious, right?  Well, I wasted about twenty minutes before I caught on to it.

I switched over to OpenDNS for my external DNS servers and that seems to have sped up internet browsing a touch.

The last thing to do is to have DHCP append a domain (so atlas will be atlas.jhome) to PC’s and then setup a zone for that on my DNS server.  That way name resolution will be tidier and I can setup reverse zones and such.

And the next last thing to do is to setup another windows host for dns so I don’t have to worry about maitnenance activities upsetting our LAN and internet access.

It just never ends!

–Nat