Posts Tagged ‘windows 7’

Run A Command Every N Seconds

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Short story long…

This week, Apple officially release support for Windows 7 in BootCamp 3.1.  I thought to myself “Self, you have a wonderfully powerful Mac Pro with 8 cores and 10GB RAM that is being completely unused by your XP install, you really should upgrade to to Win7 x64 now that Apple officially supports it”.

So, that’s what I did, with no thought as to how much MORE disk space I would need on my BootCamp partition.

So after installing Windows 7 and a bunch of games, I received my you only have < 500MB of disk space left alert.

This brought me to a point where I needed to resize my OSX HFS partition and grow my Windows NTFS partition.  During this madness, I realized that with BootCamp 3.1, I could view my HFS partitions from Windows!  But much to my chagrin, I couldn’t see my slice that had all of my useful data because it was a part of a concatenated RAID.

After resizing my OS partitions, I decided to move data off my RAID slice so I could break it then just create a normal HFS partition that can be viewed from Windows.  The problem is, moving almost a TB of data can take a long time and turning from my laptop to my left 45 degrees to my desktop on my right every time I wanted to see how my disk space looked left me with a pain in my neck!

I was at that very moment reminded about using while & sleep. Below is a handy little command that will run any command every number of seconds until you break (ctrl-c) it.

while true
do
command
sleep 30 (seconds)
done

I personally ran:

while true
do
df -h | grep disk1s2
sleep 30
done

Which allowed me to monitor the growth of the destination disk I was copying to.

-boogybren

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Posted in :: *nix :: | 2 Comments »

HOWTO: Run VMWare vSphere Client 4.0 on Windows 7

Monday, October 19th, 2009

1. Obtain a copy of %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\System.dll from a non Windows 7 machine that has .NET 3.5 SP1 installed.

2. Create a folder in the Windows 7 machine where the vSphere client is installed and copy the file from step 1 into this folder. For example, create the folder under the vSphere client launcher installation directory (+%ProgramFiles%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib+).

3. In the vSphere client launcher directory, open the VpxClient.exe.config file in a text editor and add a <runtime> element and a <developmentMode> element as shown below. Save the file.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<configuration>
…
<runtime>
<developmentMode developerInstallation=”true”/>
</runtime>
</configuration>

3. Create a batch file (e.g. *VpxClient.cmd*) in a suitable location. In this file add a command to set the DEVPATH environment variable to the folder where you copied the System.dll assembly in step 2 and a second command to launch the vSphere client. Save the file. For example,

SET DEVPATH=%ProgramFiles%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib+
“%ProgramFiles%\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\VpxClient.exe”

4. (Optional) Replace the shortcut on the start menu to point to the batch file created in the previous step. Change the shortcut properties to run minimized so that the command window is not shown.

You can now use the VpxClient.cmd (or the shortcut) to launch the vSphere client in Windows 7.

courtesy of Fernando

-boogybren

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Posted in :: windows :: | No Comments »

Initial Thoughts on Windows 7

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

I know I am probably a bit behind the curve from the hard core geeks on taking a gander at Windows 7, but I really haven’t had much motivation to move on it.  I finally installed Windows 7 today with the public release of its RC.  I know that along with possibly thousands of IT guys around the world, my hope is that it can erase all the missteps made by Microsoft with Vista and actually be a solid operating system.  It’s no secret that Windows Vista has had a rocky existence to put it mildly.  My experience with Vista has been bland at best.  I don’t have any horror stories, but I don’t have any great experiences either.  I use both PC and Macintosh computers with regularity.  I use Linux from time to time, but am by no means an expert.  I mention this because I feel that I am quite familiar with each of the popular operating systems out there now.  What I have seen from Windows 7 so far is… well, to put it bluntly, unexciting.  For an RC the install went night and day better than Vista ever did, but is that really noteworthy?  Shouldn’t an OS install run pretty much flawlessly anyway?  And even as I type up this posting I am reaching for things to say as there just really isnt anything that jumps out at me.  It just feels like Vista.  Maybe my expectations were too high, but with the advent of big changes from the other major players in the operating system space, I guess I just expected more.  More of what I can’t put my finger on… just more.

What are your thoughts?  Have any of you had any experiences with Windows 7?

~dub

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Posted in :: windows :: | 1 Comment »