Rqomey's questions

A console view of a Windows 2008 R2 VM, on vSphere is showing the following screen:

"Operation 2 of 2" "Wiping disk"

Can someone advise on what this program is?

Some information on this mystery:

A number of VMs are now effected. The symptom is after reboot "OS not found" message is appearing.

• VM's are running on ESXi. VM's are running on a particular datastore
• Netapp NFS Mounting the disk in a working box shows no partition table, have not yet been able to hex dump.
• VM was not hard reset, would have to be an OS initiated soft reset
• There is NO iso mounted There was no "non guest" access to VM, so would need to be RDP or similar
• Backups are performed using netapp backup software over-night
• NFS in question is thin-provisioned on the back end (array level), and ran out of space just after we saw these issues.

We are running a win 2008 core host in a HyperV role. We have expanded the logical drive on a RAID 1+0 array belonging to the server, as we needed more space.

We have two data partitions D: and E: I want to expand them both so they use all space, and are equally sized. There is data on all partitions, although E is not in live use (so files can be moved and copied from it.

Current:

What I want- temporary Partition (F:) at end of drive:

I am going to create a temporary partition F: so I can move the files from E: onto it, then delete E:, expand D: to the desired size, then rename F: to E: To do this I need to create F: from the end of the drive, ie. have unused space between E: and F:

tl;dr How do I create a partition with a large offset in Windows server?

On a brand new install of Windows 2008 core (for use as a hyper V host( There are 4 ports open to the world:

135/tcp   open  msrpc
445/tcp   open  microsoft-ds
2179/tcp  open  unknown
49154/tcp open  unknown

I tried blocking one of them with the rule netsh firewall delete portopening protocol=TCP port=135

But nmap -PN still shows it as open! I am a lot more experienced with Linux, so I am not sure if these ports are a security risk or not, but I would rather close them to the world. How can these ports be blocked using netsh advfirewall firewall ?

To expand on this further, what are the most locked-down firewall rules that can be put in place to allow remote management using server manager, and hyper V manager, from a single trusted IP address. To put it another way, I want to manage these new servers from a single remote machine, and allow no access to anyone who is not using that IP.

There is a recent question regarding multiple sysadmins working as root, and sudo bash -l was referenced.

I searched for this on google and SE, but I don't understand the difference between sudo bash -l and sudo -i.

From the man pages for bash and sudo it seems that the difference may be that sudo bash -l runs ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login, and ~/.profile, and ~/.bash_logout of the root user, but from testing myself it looks like it runs the normal user's .bashrc and not the root one. I may have misunderstood which user the ~ expression is referencing in the man pages. Clarification of the difference and usage scenarios would be appreciated.

when cloning CentOS (minimal install + nginx, tomcat, postgres all not running) in a VMware virtual environment what unique identifiers are present on the cloned machine?

The information I have found so far is that when cloning, the new MAC address causes an a new interface to be added, so it is necessary to follow instructions here: That is, remove the 70-persistent-net.rules and update the MAC address in /etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts/ifcfg-eth*

But, is there any other unique properties which may cause problems, or even indicate that the machine is cloned? Is there some sort of System ID created by centos minimal during install.

The ones I can think of are:

• If ssh server creates server creates keys during install these would be duplicated and that could be a security issue.
• Any static IP set up
• The MAC address set up

Would there be any others, even if they would not effect the usage of the cloned machine.

Thank you in advance!

-----edit-- I just found a page it seems to have a fairly complete list. Would any of these actually cause problems if they were on a shared network, or even on a cluster?