Tue, 27 Mar 2007
VMWare Free Converter - First Thoughts
While we're a Xen shop I've always been a VMWare fan and I
had the chance to take a look at the free (as in beer) VMWare Converter
Starter today. We've got a couple of old Windows machines with no
installation documents or run books so when working towards making them
reproducible grabbing a whole system image is a great first step.
The first machine I tried it on has a very unhappy hard drive (yes, it's my work laptop) and the converter refused to play past 5% of the disk; me thinks it's time to verify my backups. The second machine was a Windows 2000 server (amusingly running VMWare server). The converter required a reboot (which it didn't on the laptop running Windows XP) after installation but made an image afterwards without any complaints and with the machine up and running.
I've not had the time to fully dig in to how well this'll work on the more awkward machines (boxes with more than 2 CPUs, apps that expect hardware access, VMWare tools not installed etc.) but the image of my trial machine (which was written out to a UNC path) came up quite quickly and all the settings I checked were correct.
I like the tool, it provides a nice revertable image for me to dissect so I can work out what's on the machines with out being a resource drain on the live servers. It's simple to use, has a nice GUI, a great price tag and will make a painful task a lot simpler. In a worst case scenario the images can also be pushed in to service as a stop gap in order to reduce the MTTR of the original servers. Oh, you can also use it to help bootstrap server consolidation, but that'll never take off... ;)
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Posted: 2007/03/27 23:48 | /tools/gui | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Simulating Typing in Perl
You'd think it would be easy - have a program type a previously written
program at a human speed (minus the typos). Vim has record and reply
functionality but it's done with typical vim efficiency: yes, instantly.
At EuroOSCON a couple of years ago Damian Conway handed out a
presentation tidbit, he uses the hand_print function from IO::Prompt to make
himself look like a master typist. Well, he could just have been saying
that to make us feel better, maybe he can type that fast... Anyway, I tried
a simple example using the module:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use IO::Prompt qw/hand_print/;
hand_print("I am not really typing this...");
It works but the typing speed is so uniform it makes it obvious over past a handful of lines. So I wrote my own that adds a little randomness to the typing speed, it's not pretty, it does what I want and its output is "Out on the big bad web."
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Time::HiRes qw(usleep);
$|++;
my $input;
{
local $/ = undef;
$input = <ARGV>;
}
$input =~ s/(.)/sleep_and_show($1)/esg;
sub sleep_and_show {
print $_[0];
usleep int rand(200_000);
}
It's a little more jittery, which is more like my typing, and has the
nice side effect of a pretty looking invocation - ./seditor
file_to_type - which could be a valid command.
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Posted: 2007/03/27 20:11 | /perl | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
