Cloning Windows Server 2003R2 System Disk

I have a situation that requires to clone a system disk on a Windows SBS 2003 system since the C: drive is running out of space. The issue is that the SBS server is down to about 1.5MB of free disk space (don’t ask how that happened…it’s not pretty) and, while the physical disk is 80GB in overall size, the system partition is only 10GB overall. The only real solution is to clone the system partition to a new disk, then boot the machine with the new disk as a slave and use diskpart to extend the partition. Then, after that’s done, change the jumpers on the two drives so that the new clone is the master drive and the original becomes the slave and boot the machine off the new clone drive. Simple.

I ended up choosing to use Clonezilla since it appeared to be more mature than g4u (whether this is true or not I cannot say for sure…nevertheless, they both appear to do the job). I found it by searching for “open source disk clone” and stumbled across the OSALT site. After downloading the ISO I went into my VM lab (a HP DL380 G3 running VMWare ESXi 3.5) and created a new VM consisting of the same hardware as the source except for a 25GB disk versus a 10GB disk.

I then attached the new 25GB disk to the source system (my Windows Server 2003R2 domain controller for the lab), started the VM, attached the ISO via the VMWare Infrastructure client and booted off the ISO/CD. After about 5 minutes Clonezilla came up and I setup the cloning process — all in all about 10 minutes worth of work at most. I then fired up the cloning process and after an additional 45 minutes the clone was done. The clone was still 10GB large as I didn’t explore whether Clonezilla could resize the partition on the fly while it was cloning it. No big deal…it’s easy to extend the partition under Windows if you have the space on your drive. I rebooted into the Windows OS (with the clone disk still attached) and I resized the partition using diskpart. Once that was completed I shutdown the VM, detached the cloned disk from the source and booted the new VM. After a complaint from Windows Product Activation that the system hardware had substantially changed and having to go through the reactivation process again I had a domain controller with more than double the disk space of the original system.

The next step is to do this to the SBS system.

SSH Server on Windows Server 2008 Core

I’ve been playing around (in my copious free time ) with other methods of connecting to and managing Server 2008 Core. One of the things I’ve wanted to do was to be able to SSH directly to Server 2008 Core and have the same command line capability as I do on the console. To that end I did a quick search for similar work and found the following article at TechRepublic about installing an SSH server in Windows 2008. The difference that I wanted to do was to install it in Server Core rather than the full-blown version of 2008.

Like David Davis over at TechRepublic I decided to start with FreeSSHd as my SSH server. The first thing I needed to do was to get it onto the Server Core VM. Rather than downloading it to my desktop and then transferring it to the Server Core VM I decided that would rather download it directly to the Server Core machine. In order to do that I needed wget that would run on Windows. I used the wget binary I downloaded (to my desktop) from Bart Puype in Belgium. Once I copied wget to C:\Windows\System32 I used it download the FreeSSHd.exe binary from FreeSSHd.com.

To install freesshd, just run the freesshd.exe program and it will start up the install wizard. A couple of items to note — on Server Core do not bother with creating a Start Menu item for FreeSSHd and don’t bother with creating a desktop icon either. One of the problems that I encountered when I installed FreeSSHd on Server Core was that I could not configure the SSH server since the task bar icon did not appear on the right (as should be the case since there is no task bar in Server 2008 Core). To configure FreeSSHd I had to edit the freesshdservice.ini file in the C:\Program Files\freesshd directory (the default location for the installation).

A small point to note. Server 2008 Core’s firewall is on by default (even if it’s a domain joined machine) and the policy is to block all inbound connection attempts but to allow outbound connections. After installing FreeSSHd I needed to modify the firewall and decided to use netsh to do so. The command I used was

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="SSHd" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=22

Very simple…I love netsh

Another problem I ran into was getting the NT authentication to work. I did manage to get the password authentication working but I wanted to tie the FreeSSHd server into the Windows authentication. I’m still not 100% sure as to where the problem lies with the NT authentication integration and will investigate it further.

One of the biggest drawbacks to FreeSSHd is that there is very little (re: almost none) documentation that covers the freesshdservice.ini file. You need to read the forums over at freesshd.com in order to get a sense of what the settings are for the file and what specific changes to the file cause in the overall operation of the server. I hope to get that put together and posted here this summer as I think others will find it useful.

To get the password authentication working I installed FreeSSHd on a Windows Server 2003 system and then created the users I wanted there and copied over the relevant portions of the freesshdservice.ini file to the one on the Server 2008 Core VM. Then, to restart the service I would just issue the commands: net stop freesshdservice and net start freesshdservice and I was good to go. As you can see from the last capture in the gallery below I was able to connect to the server and log in using the account I had created on the Server 2003 system and copied over to the freesshdservice.ini file on the Server 2008 Core VM.

Downloading freesshd.exe from www.freesshd.com

Install Wizard for FreeSSHd

Install Wizard for FreeSSHd – No Start Menu/Desktop Icon

Installing FreeSSHd as a Windows service

Creating Private Keys

Running FreeSSHd

Connecting to FreeSSHd on Windows Server Core

In the future I’m going to try some of the other freely available SSH servers and see if they provide an easier integration into Server 2008 Core.

Exchange server at home

I finally sat down and installed Exchange 2003 at home on a server. I haven’t played with Exchange 2007 yet as the only software I have of that one that’s 32-bit is the 6-month time limited version. I’ll have to wait until I’ve got a 64-bit VM system in place before I can migrate to Exchange 2007 on a permanent basis although I would love to do it now simply for the Managed Folders capabilities (to get away from — and stay away from — .pst files). Oh well, perhaps in a few more months.

I’ve been playing around with Exchange 2003, as well as ISA 2006 for a while now, but I figured the only way to get real experience with Exchange is to swallow the bullet and install it in my production environment at home. I chose a pretty good machine for it too – a Dell Precision workstation with dual Pentium III 700MHz processors and 768MB RAM. Yeah, that’s not that great in terms of today’s technologies but hey, you use what you have that’s available. Considering that it’s only doing e-mail duty for at most 5 people I think I should have enough horsepower.

Installation of the server software itself was easy and didn’t require a reboot. I also downloaded and installed SP1 and SP2 for Exchange Server 2003 which went smoothly as well. The catch is that I’m still not comfortable using Exchange 2003 as the front end system. For now, I’m leaving my current mail server in front and just redirecting my account to the Exchange Server. Eventually I’ll move everyone else’s over. Overall, my first impressions are that it’s nice. I’ve been having problems with Thunderbird on Vista lately where Thunderbird will see a message but won’t download the entire content of the message. So large attachments like a WMV file or an MP3 file or, in some cases, e-mail with large HTML content, will only be partially downloaded. The only solution to this is to restart Thunderbird and to try again. I figure that since I’ve got Office 2007 Professional installed on the system I’d give Outlook a try.

First off I can tell you that Outlook with IMAP is slow. Yes, I’m fairly certain this is because Microsoft wants you to use Outlook with an Exchange Server and MAPI but I didn’t have that until this weekend. I had setup my internal IMAP server using Dovecot with a self-signed SSL certificate (for IMAP over SSL). Ok…you might think I’m a bit over paranoid but I’ve worked for far too long in the network security to stomach the idea of unencrypted protocols even inside my own network. 95% of all communications internal to my home network are all encrypted — SSH, IMAP over SSL, RDP, WPA2 — the only thing I don’t encrypt is the POP communication for my wife to download her e-mail from the POP server (I’m still trying to figure out if Apple Mail even supports POP over SSL on Tiger). Anyway, the bottom line is that Outlook IMAP is too slow for my liking. So, in comes the Exchange server.

The other reason for going to Exchange was the desire to setup an easier way to read e-mail at home while traveling. I’ve always done it using Mutt (you’ve gotta love it when the tag line for Mutt (originally said by Mutt’s author) is “All mail clients suck…this one just sucks less” — how right he is) through an SSH session but my wife doesn’t like that — she’s a total Mac fan and while I could setup an L2TP/IPsec VPN for her when we travel I can’t always guarantee that it will work wherever we go. With a web interface I know it will work. Yeah, I could have gone down the SquirrelMail route or any one of a myriad of other web based e-mail systems but I figure with Exchange I get it (as well as Outlook Mobile Access for my phone) on top of the server and that makes it a little easier. With Exchange I can at least expose OWA (once I’ve gotten ISA 2006 setup in the production environment) to the Internet and then we’ll have an easy way to remotel get e-mail while traveling. At this point the only thing I need now is a way to bulk import my current mbox formatted mail from my UNIX server over to Exchange as I’d rather have it in the .ost file than in the .pst file.