Sajee's questions

I'm looking for tools that will work on either Linux/Unix or Windows Server that for a given set of servers in an enterprise environent, will:

• Identify the server [via hostname, or some other unique attribute]
• List the the number & type of CPUs + cores
• Enumerate the storage devices used by the server
• Provide CPU and storage utilization data
• Provide load, network & storage I/O metrics

The goal is to gather accurate metrics about the current environment that will drive the design of an equivelent environment virtually or in the IaaS cloud [e.g AWS].

I found a couple of options so far:

• SysTrack Virtual Machine Planner
• Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit

Some of this data can be gathered directly from the OS but I rather use a tool that has that functionality and presents the data in an easy to understand manner. Does VMWare provide any tools for this? Other suggestions?

I followed this article and I have the desktop running on Ubuntu on an EC2 instance and I can connect to it from TightVNC. When I try to use Terminal, when I type certain characters, they seems to get lost. For example, I can type passw but the when I try to type d that character doesn't appear. If I then press Enter, the Terminal window minimizes. I can't type the character d at all. All other letters & numbers are fine. How can I fix this?

BTW, I'm using Bash in Terminal. Everything works when I SSH into the instance using PuTTY. It's only when I use a Terminal instance from TightVNC that this problem occurs.

My domain name is not resolving correctly. It should resolve correctly to an IP address provided by my cable company. That address is dynamic. I run an app that updates the nameserver hosted at everydns.net. I look at my router's admin page and I see that my external address is a.b.c.d Yet my domain name is not resolving to this address.

At my domain name registrar, the DNS point to everydns.net (NS1.EVERYDNS.NET, NS2.EVERYDNS.NET, etc). At my everydns.net console, I see that my DNS A record is a.b.c.d, which is what it should be.

BUT when I do nslookup on my domain, it returns and answer of w.x.y.z. Even when I do a nslookup specifying the nameserver of everydns, it return w.x.y.x! I expected it to return a.b.c.d. How could this be?

I can't access web content (like a simple HTML file) on my Windows 7 Ultimate x64 machine, either locally or remotely. I tried connecting to IIS (running on port 80) and the built-in Visual Studio web server (running on port 23456) but for some reason, the request never makes it to the web server and both IE and Firefox timeout. The firewall and antivirus have been stopped. I tried accessing the web server using http://localhost, http://127.0.0.1 and http://192.168.1.109 and none work. The hosts file looks like this:

    127.0.0.1       localhost
#   ::1 

I tried commenting out both lines and un-commenting both lines. No difference.

So I assume something with the networking stack must be screwed up on this machine. Any advice on diagnosing/fixing this?

This was working fine but after an unexpected reboot.

In Explorer, on the Windows 2008 server itself, I can see the shared folders when I do this: \\localhost (or \\servername or \\192.168.1.7) But when I try to click on any of the folders (like \\localhost\folder1), I get 0x80070035 or 0x80070043 "The network path was not found".

What's wrong here?

If I encrypt a USB drive using Windows 2008 EFS, will I be able to view the the contents of the drive on another PC (is there a way to provide credentials?)? The Windows 2008 system is using Windows account and not domain accounts.

On my Windows 2008 system, I've attached an external USB drive that's encrypted using Truecrypt. Once I mounted the Truecrypt drive, I share some of the directories from that drive using Windows file sharing. I tried sharing a folder called "media" and when I try to access that folder from a Vista client on my LAN via \myserver\media, I get this error:

\myserver\media is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permissions.

An unexpected network error occurred.

If I share the folder media under some name such as fizzbuzz then I can access \myserver\fizzbuzz w/o any errors.

Any clues as to why this is happening?

Related: Windows 2008 and Truecrypt: how to automatically mount shared folders after restart?

On my Windows 2008 system, I've attached an external USB drive that's encrypted using Truecrypt. Once I mounted the Truecrypt drive, I share some of the directories from that drive using Windows file sharing. I find that whenever I restart the server, these shared directories are no longer shared and I to recreate share them. Pain.

Is there any way to avoid having to recreate these shares every time? Perhaps if I can script the sharing of the drives, perhaps I can run the script I mount the drive? If so, can someone tell me what the script commands are? For example, I want to share Z:\dir1 as \myserver\dir1 to everyone (no authentication required).

Thanks.