I stuck a blank DVD-Rom in my MacBook, and it didn't mount.  Nor would it eject by holding down the eject key on the keyboard.  After some brief googling, I found a suggestion to restart the computer while holding down the mouse/trackpad key, so I thought I would try it.  As I started shutting down apps, I suspended an XP image running in VMWare Fusion.  As soon as I did this, the disk mounted.  I was able to eject it, and reinsert it, and it mounted fine.  It looks like Fusion grabbed onto the disk mount.

Along with my MacBook, I bought a copy of VMWare Fusion, knowing that someday I'd have a reason to run a Windows app, and today is the day.  Once again, its the lousy Entourage which is failing to meet my needs.  What Ineed to do is forward a complicated HTML message.  Entourage fails miserably.  OWA on either of the browsers on my Mac also fail (although not quite as badly as Entourage.)  Even IE7 on Windows fails to forward it correctly (the images don't come through.)  Now obviously I have access to Windows boxes, and can use them, but I'm using this excuse to set up an XP VM with Office 2003.

MCPMag.com's excellent newsletter pointed me to an excellent site with the configuration settings for VMWare server.  Sanbarrow.com

Somehow I missed that VMWare had posted a free conversion app.  This thing is able to convert physical hosts to a VM, as well as converting VMs from Virtual PC and Virtual Server to VMWare format.  I've got a machine I want to migrate to a VM, this may be just the thing I need to finally sit down and do it.

This morning I've been having trouble connecting to a wireless hotspot.  I'm able to connect, and I get an IP address (192.168.1.189.)  I get DNS servers (outside the NAT space), but I don't get a default gateway.  I check with another guy who is clearly online, and he had no troubles.  I 'repair' the connection several times.  I reboot.  I ipconfig /release /renew.  I finally noticed that VMWare had created one of its virtual adapters in the 192.168.1.0/24 also.  I start disabling VMWare services.  Still doesn't help.  I finally figured out that you can disable the actual VMWare adapters, and voila, it starts working.

Something to watch out for.

In an apparent move to combat lost sales due to VMWare Player being free, Microsoft has decided to give away Virtual PC 2004 SP1 for free.  It also says that versio 2007 will be free come next year.  I think I'll stick with VMWare, but this is cool anyway.

One of the trickiest bits of the Windows on Apple story is that Apple decided not to use a BIOS, instead opting for a new Intel technology called EFI.  Its basically a much smarter BIOS, and while it is possible to build an EFI machine with BIOS backward comparibility, Apple chose to leave those bits out.  According to BetaNews, Microsoft has said that Vista will only support EFI on x64 chips, leaving Apple hardware out in the cold, they are 32-bit CoreDuo and CoreSingle chips.

Which really leaves us back in the hurry up VMWare camp. 

One of the functions that I intend to run on a virtual machine is an "email firewall", basically an email gateway that does spam and virus filtering.  On my previous Linux box, I used sendmail, spamassassin, and MailScanner.  I started to build something similar on my new SUSE VM, but soon found out that postfix is different enough from sendmail that I was really lost. I figured that this sounds like the kind of thing that might already be out there, so I headed over to the VMWare Technology Network Community Virtual Appliances page.  Low and behold, the second entry is for Eagle Eye Email Gateway.  s3 smart security solutions created the Eagle Eye VM, but unfortunately they are a German company, and their entire site, and the PDF documentation included with the VM are all in German.  I finally got logged in when I realized that the z character is typed when I hit y on the keyboard.  The reverse is also true.  I'm assuming the keyboard layout is in German.  I haven't yet been able to find the / key, which is making switchign directories a bit tough.  I may just have to scrap this whole idea and build from scratch.  I wonder what distro I can build small but that would support this kind of idea?

It seems that you don't get all the hardware options when running the New Virtual Machine Wizard.  After the machine has been created (but not when its running) you have the option of adding further hardware.  In the console, click "Edit virtual machine settings".  In the resultant dialog, click the Add button, and you will get the Add Hardare Wizard.  Among the items you can add are a USB Controller (this is required to connect USB devices from the Host to the Guest) and Disks.  Cool.  Hopefully, this will solve my Activesync problems.  It also allowed me to create my new virtual file server with 5 different virtual disk files (SCSI.)

Updated:
I needed to modprobe -r -v ipaq before I was able to connect my Pocket PC to the guest VM.  ActiveSync seemed to work just fine after doing that.

I'd have to say this is pretty cool.  I finally got the new server up and running, and installed VMWare Server on it.  I created two virtual machines, one an XP Pro Guest, and one a Linux guest.  I installed XP, and then starting doing the Windows Update dance.  At the same time I was installing Linux in the other guest.  They both felt like I was sitting at local machines.  The Vitrual Server Console is pretty cool, although I don't seem to have all the wholes punched in my firewall to make it work from outside.  Maybe I don't want to anyway, I'll think about that.

I am having an issue with USB devices.  My host seems to be trapping them, so I can't connect them to my guests.  There are a couple of posts in the VMWare forums about this problem, so I'll probably be able to work through it.

I did run into one little gotcha.  Part of VMWare is kernel modules, so if you update your kernel, you break VMWare.  There's a script that pretty much automatically rebuilds everything for you, but it is kind of a pain.

One thing I need to do before building my remaining VMs is to figure out how to create and attach multiple virtual disks to a VM.  I'm pretty sure that VMWare will support it, tis more a matter of figuring out how to do it.  I want multiple disks on my file server and mail server for backup purposes.  I intend to backup the virtual disks (snapshots maybe) in addition to doing regular file backups. 

I use MS Money to track all our financial information.  I recently upgraded to the 2006 version, but it didn't go well.  The Activesync component wouldn't install correctly, so I've been unable to sync with my Jam (I use MS Money on my phone as basically an electronic check register - i.e. just for data capture.)  Last night I decided to try to get it all to work.  I uninstalled MS Money, the PPC component and ActiveSync.  Unfortunately, uninstalling MS Money didn't actually do a very good job of uninstalling.  If left a whole swack of stuff in Program Files, and in the registry.  I cleaned all that out manually, and attempted a reinstall.  Unfortunately, now MS Money won't install at all.  Crap.

My machine has needed a rebuild for a while anyway.  It won't recognize our video camera anymore, making archiving our videos a little tough.

Now I'm wondering if I shouldn't split my environments, and run all my general productivity stuff (Office, Money, etc.) in a virtual machine.  Two issues, can I move a virtual machine from an AMD machine to an Intel machine (I think the answer is no.)  This may not be a big deal since XP Pro has Remote Desktop.  The bigger question is whether I can get ActiveSync to work through VMWare with a Linux host.  VMWare's site seems to indicate that PDA syncing should work, but it may take a bit of tweaking.