Virtual Windows 8 ... Sort of.

OK, I know there are people there that love Windows 8, and those that don't really like it.  I am not going to debate that here, but lets say, I need to advance with the times because of my job and will use Windows 8, and try to get the most out of it

Having said that, I work with servers, so my main system is Windows 2012.  Now on first look Windows 2012 looks a lot like Windows 8, so why cannot my Windows 2012 system also be my Windows 8 system.  Now I don't want a completely transformed OS, but try to get the best of both worlds.  So here are the things that I did to my system and hopefully guide you on your transformation.  And for why I did this, I can say only 1 thing: I want to play Halo: Spartan Strike on my computer along with my phone.

Add the Desktop Experience

This is a straight forward process, just adding a feature called 'Desktop Experience'  If you need directions on how to add this web site has it.

Please remember in order you use the Windows App store, you need a Microsoft account, and your logon account cannot be administrator.

Install Halo: Spartan Strike

Go to the Windows store and install it.  Now this application is not free, and for some reason I could not purchase it within the application store, but I used my phone to purchase because it is a single purchase for phone and desktop, so once that was done, it installed fine on Windows 2012

Issue with running app and Xinput1_4.dll

Halo: Spartan Strike installed, but when it ran I was getting an Xinput1_4.dll error, and it bombed out.  I found better description of the error here, and then another page that comes with files and an install script

The script is straight forward and comes with 6 files.  Now I normally don't trust these files especially since they are not signed, and I didn't want to expose my system to any unscrupulous files, so I built a Virtual Windows 8, and extracted the same files to install into my 2012 system.  I did compare my files to the downloaded files, and they were same on the binary level, but better safe than sorry.

Once those files were added the program worked fine, and I am hoping that all other DirectX games will also behave as well.

Issue with keyboard - Halo: Spartan Strike

Now the program is running but for some reason, the mouse works, but the keyboard does not.  For me fixing that is a simple solution.  My system has PS/2 keyboard and mouse, so I just add my  USB wireless Logitech K400 keyboard, now the game works!!!

Better Gaming experience - Xbox 360 Game controller

I have a working game, but using the keyboard is a little kludgey because the key choices are chosen and you cannot change them, also with the AWSD to move, it is a little choppy.

So I picked up a used Rock Candy controller.  It plugged in fine, but didn't work.  Went to the vendor's web site, pdp.com and they state the controller is for Xbox 360, so there are no drivers for windows.

Well not being discourage, went looking for a driver for a Microsoft Xbox 360 drivers from Microsoft and found them here.

Installed the driver, rebooted, and the controller worked fine. It plays like a dream and now I can spend all of my time killing the Covenant!!

I hope my work will enable you to play this game with Windows 2012, and your system primed to play other games from Windows Store.

Getting Windows 8 or 2012 to work as a guest under vSphere 4.1

There have been other blogs and kbase articles that define how to get Windows 8/8.1 or Windows 2012 / 2012 R2 running under vSphere 4.1.  I plan to to offer you a complete document with references

For the guest configuration, I would choose the following:

Windows 2012 / 2012 R2
Guest OS: Windows 2008 R2
vCPU: 2
vMemory: 2GB
Network Card:  E1000

Windows 8 / 8.1
Guest OS: Windows 7 (32 or 64 to match your media)
vCPU: 2, but 1 should work
vMemory:     1GB, but 2 would be better
Network Card:    E1000

After you build the OS, but before the OS is installed the VMX file needs to be modified, so use the vSphere client to do these steps

1. Browse to the datastore where the VMX files is located
2. Download the VMX file to your windows system
3. Edit the file with a Linux compatible editor like Notepad++ and add the following lines:
1. bios440.filename = bios.440.rom
   mce.enable = "TRUE"
   cpuid.hypervisor.v0 = "FALSE"
   vmGenCounter.enable = "FALSE

Then upload the updated VMX file and the bios ROM file from this location.  If you feel a little unsure about using a random file acquired from the internet there are directions on how to extract the file from VMware Player.  I have not done this yet, but trust the ROM file that is the VMware community

Next just install the OS as normal, it should work fine, no BSOD.

Now what I have not seen is anything on VMware tools, and from what it looks like any version of the VMware tools that come with 4.1 will corrupt the video and make  it unusable, so when installing VMware tools, use the OSP version.

Here is the root location of all the tools:  http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/index.html
Here is the version that I have used successfully:  http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/5.5p01/windows/index.html
But guessing the latest which is for vSphere 6 would also work:

• 64-bit http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/latest/windows/x64/VMware-tools-windows-9.4.11-2400950.iso
• 32-bit: http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/latest/windows/x86/VMware-tools-windows-9.4.11-2400950.iso

If you want read more about OSP tools, this page is useful.

Good luck with your Window 8 / 2012 builds!!

Updataing blacklist in pfSense from urlblacklist.com

This is a modified procedure to use a local file instead of the blacklist from urlblacklist.com.  This is a modified procedure for Squidguard.  It should be able to go to the website directly and download then update.

From my experience lately either the download doesn't finish, or if it does finish. it doesn't use the full size.  So this modified procedure will use Firefox to download, transfer to a Linux Web server, then let it pull from a local source

1. Download the file bigblacklist.tar.gz from http://urlblacklist.com/cgi-bin/commercialdownload.pl?type=download&file=bigblacklist 
2. Use WinSCP to copy to Linux box with web server
3. Log into Linux box and copy bigblacklist.tar.gz to /var/www
4. Go to pfSense box and login
5. Services -> Proxy Filter, find the field blacklist URL, enter http://ipaddress/bigblacklist.tar.gz
6. Go to the Tab 'Blacklist' click [download]
7. Wait until complete

Syncing this Blog with other media sources

In order to get more exposure of this blog, I decided to publish this blog automatically onto other sources like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.  So far I just started with Facebook and hopefully this set of directions will work:

http://www.earning66.blogspot.com/2012/06/publish-your-posts-on-facebook-using.html

Update 2014.01.13:  added the ability to publish to twitter using twitterfeed.

Windows 8 / 2012 on ESXi 4.0 / 4.1 hosts

OK, so others have documented on how to enable using Windows 8 and Server 2012 with an ESXi 4.0 / 4.1 host.  I am not going to recreate the procedure, but here are links to some:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/394669
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/312358-how-to-install-windows-2012-server-on-esxi-4-1
http://en.blog.skydriver.org/2013/02/03/windows-server-2012-and-windows-8-on-vmware-esxi-4-1/

What I was curious about was where this bios.440.rom file came from and is it safe.  From the first reference from the VMware communities it came from a vmware employee.  Did some more searching and found these two sites that detailed building / modifying BIOS-es

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/19329-HOWTO-Modify-VMWare-BIOS-with-SLIC-2-1

While it was detailed, and looked like it used some files that were coming from questionable sources, the original toolkit was sound

http://www.bios.net.cn/Files/soft/biosfile/qt/SLIC_ToolKit_V3.2.rar

So I concluded to accept the file and not research further.

First impressions about Microsoft Intune

OK, so last month, I cane across Microsoft Intune last month and wanted to see what it could do.  Hey they were giving me a month and I figured why not.  I can say that after a month, it is not bad, and does have it's place in the world out there.

In the past I have used other products to manage systems.  Tools like WSUS, Qualys, and Tivoli Endpoint Manager or TEM.

So what does Intune do.  From what I see it does three big things:

• Install Microsoft Patches
• Manage Windows Defender
• Have the ability to publish software that can be installed by your clients.

Whey you sign up you need to create a company account and at least one administrator account.  I didn't really work much with the company account, but can see where there is a need for separation between the two.  Also there are different permissions for administrators like read only so there can be multiple persons that can get access to the account and the systems managed.

OK so what I like.  I like that you as an administrator have the ability to approve patches like in WSUS.  When a patch comes out, you have to approve it and then it will be available for installation on your infrastructure.

Another think that I like is that you can take an MSI and add it to your list of company apps.  So if you want to deploy something like Adobe Acrobat, just add it and publish.

Also like the ability to create groups.  I didn't use them, but it was nice they were there.

So now my favorite feature: Due dates on patches.  One thing you can do is assign due date and Install now.  This means that if a client is on, the Intune app will get pushed the patches, so you don't have to visit the clients, they will update themselves.

Now it is not all great with Intune, and here are some of my issues with it.  First all of the connectivity is to the internet, so all of your machines that you manage need to have access to the internet.  Also with this connectivity, there are  slew of them to configure.  So it might be challenging for a company that has an IDS or proxy installed.

There was one last feature that I did not test and it was the easy assist.  This looks like the Lync client so you can have your computer remote controlled by the administrator.  Maybe I will look to it in the future.

So down to pricing.  From what I can see, in the US it is a low, low $6 a month for a year.  It looks like you sign up for a year at a time, but can be billed monthly.  And if I am reading it right, that is the cost for the administrator, not for the clients.  So if you have 2 machines or 25, the price would be the same. 

I stopped at 25 because that is the limit of my license that I was given.  I am guessing that as you increase the number of endpoints, that the cost would also increase, but I cannot find that information.

Pros

• Easy to set up
• Pricing good
• Handles Microsoft patches very well

Cons

• Only supports Vista, Windows 7 and 8
• client need internet connection to work

NAS4Free in ESXi

For the last couple of years I have been using FreeNAS 7.x for my go to simple fileshare tool within my ESX infrastructure.

Well as we all know that platform has reached the end of life, and at first the natural progression was to use FreeNAS 8.  Well I liked it, but it has a completely different GUI, and I just could not get the hang of it.

So last month I found out there is a new branch of FreeNAS7, NAS4Free.  I have just started to install it and get it configured, but I recommend using this web site to get a jump on things:

NAS4Free under ESXi at liquidobject.com