Virtual visions visualises with Vista

My first dust with Vista was short. Had it for a day. a lot of bling bling and then bac k to xp and ubuntu. Well since I bought a stronger computer I thought it was time to actually get to know the "new os of tomorrow". I suppose we all have to, at some point. Well, at least they implemented a nice event manager in Vista now. Really nice with filtered searches, possibility to save them och so on.
Anyway, that's not really why I posted this.

Well, im running Vista. Got 2GB memory. What can do with this? The answer is, run my own private virtual network. That's right, perfect conditions to set a couple of virtual clients and servers, maybe try out Server 2008, see how that's working. But here is the big "but", finding a virtualization software that runs on X64 Vista isn't a walk in the park. MS own Virtual Server R2 kept shutting me down, wouldn't even run installer. Xen Virtualization complained about my x64 bits processor, that was obviously, not, ok. Vmware was my first choice, knowing I would wanna run the machines from my linux systems, but that also had a... mysterious... teasing ability. I would run the installer, make my installation choices and entered installpath, the installation would run, almost finishing then ROLL BACK in last seconds. Without any warning or explaination!
Well I thought MS own virtualization software would run, so I left vmware alone and tried the other softwares. And they failed also. So I searched the net for solutions to Vmwares, and I found it. Enjoy.
1. Download VmWare Server 1.0.3
2. Open a cmd windows with admin rights
3. />Bcdedit.exe /set nointegritychecks ON
4. />bcdedit -set loadoptions \”DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
5. Run VmWare installation program with admin rights
6. Ok unsigned drivers.
This will remove driver signing, supposedly forever, I had to "ok" a few unsigned drivers to complete the Vmware installation. So the startup-configuration program ( bcdedit), denied access to installer before. Strangely enough it claimed that the drivers was useless and incomplete after the installation. But the program still worked to my satisfaction.

Vista just worries too much, kinda like my mother... computers just got a little less cool...


Reference:
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=79979&tstart=0

Firefox going up in flames

Everyone who is in into computers and internet today have seen how the browser is getting more and more power. Rich applications are being developed by the dozen and standard programs are getting less and less spotlight. Well, unless you're a gamer then. Many professionals are saying the browser is becoming more and more like an OS. This is nice and all, but now I'm gonna get to the point. For the last 6 months or so, firefox has been acting kind weird when it's running under XP. It's behaving more and more like explorer.exe, that is hogging all the memory doing... what does an OS do on a saturday night? I dunno, but it shouldn't do stuff when I'm not.
To the point, I've been using Ubuntu the last year so I haven't been so disturbed by the fact that I've fixed it. Now however I've looked into it.
It seems that a LOT of people are having the same problem on the net. One would think it would be easier for me just to point towards the right direction. One would think...

Here's how it supposed to be solved. Doesn't do much, but it does something.
1. In firefox addressbar: about:config
2. Add new integer, name it "browser.cache.memory.capacity"
3. As value type -1
4. Depending on how much RAM give above new value:
RAM 128-512 : 5000
RAM 512-1024: 15000

The case of the mysterious dns

My internet connection has been acting strange lately. Internet is working fine when I start the computer, but I can't access my internal network. So I do an />dhclient and I can access the internal network, but not the WAN. Truly annoying. First I explored the option of this being a problem with the ipv6 protocol, so I disabled as far as my abilities could handle. But this only made it work temporarily. Then I noticed that my standard gateway was pointing to an, to me unknown, dns address, 192.168.200.2 when my real dns is 192.168.0.1. I change this, and everything is working again. But it just keeps coming back. I try to make /etc/resolve.conf read-only, and again, it's only working for a short while then it's right back at that mysterious dns.
After surfing around www.ubuntuforums.org for a while I finally find something that so far seems to be working. Here's what needs to be done:
in file "/etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf" look for this segment :
request subnet-mask, broadcast-address, time-offset, routers,
domain-name, domain-name-servers, host-name,
netbios-name-servers, netbios-scope;
Remove "domain-name-servers,"
and at the line "#prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;
I changed 127.0.0.1 to my DNS 192.168.0.1 and removed the commenting sign #.
This procedure tells the system not to ask the router for it's dns information and what dns it SHOULD use. Apparently this is a problem that's not uncommon with routers from certain companies that begin "D" and end with "Link". See I can keep a secret!

Anyways this has been a truly annoying problem I can't for the life of me see WHY the company would construct such a designflaw. Well, I suppose it could be Ubuntu, but hey, why blame them, they're free!
I'm sooo loking forward to getting my new Linksys router! Cheap stuff always mean more work, unless it's Cisco that is, thats a lot of work anyways.

Now but most current problem is avoiding those godforsaken DOS attacks and little scriptkiddies who keep scanning me. Couldn't they at least try to hide it? Now I have to after them. Well my first move in this defence stance is going to be finding a way to handle all my firewall logs. As of now I'm sending them to my email, and there no great way of screening them there... If only there were some sort of online syslog server I could deliver them to, and filter there too then obviously. I'm starting to consider building a phpscript that can filter them for me. Only problem is that I have to find some way to handle emaildeliveries. I could leave a computer on round the clock to handle these things, but since I'm living in a very small apartment I'm not too happy about the idea of having a server humming all night long just to keep track of the firewall logs.

Sigh. I will have to look into this further...

References:
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-140225.html
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-231965.html