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.

Windows 7, IE, and the EU

Last Thursday Microsoft announced that the next version of the Windows operating system, Windows 7, will ship in Europe without the Internet Explorer 8 browser installed. This new version of the operating system will, like the XP and Vista versions sold without the Windows Media Player, will only be available in the European Union. What prompted this decision? Well, it seems that Opera Software ASA filed a complaint with the European Commission claiming that Internet Explorer was monopolistic and did not give users a choice in which browser they wanted. Microsoft has been down this road before with the lawsuit over the Windows Media Player that is normally bundled with Windows and rather than deal with a protracted legal fight they decided to simply ship a version of Windows 7 that will not include IE8 (or any other version of IE) in it.

This will give the end user a true choice as to which browser they wish to install — IE8, Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera, Google’s Chrome, or Apple’s Safari. So how is the EC responding to this move by Microsoft? You would think that they would hail it as a victory, right? Actually…no. The EC moved quickly to criticize Microsoft’s decision

In a statement issued late Thursday night in Brussels, the EU regulator said it “notes with interest” Microsoft’s announcement and would “shortly decide” the outcome of its own case. But it didn’t seem confident that offering the operating system without Internet Explorer was the complete answer to its concerns that computer users lack “genuine” choice in browsers.

“Rather than more choice, Microsoft seems to have chosen to provide less,” the EU said in its statement.

(Hodgsen, Jessica and Charles Forelle, “Windows is to Drop Browser in Europe,” Wall Street Journal Online, June 12, 2009)

What I can’t understand is how the EC can claim that Microsoft’s move provides less choice. Users in Europe will be able to buy Windows without any pre-installed browser and be able to install whatever browser that they want. Another scenario is where the system vendors — HP, Dell, Acer, etc — will pre-install the browsers for the end user based on the choice they make when they buy the system or sell systems with multiple browsers installed. Any way you slice it Microsoft’s move allows for more consumer choice. But apparently that’s not good enough for the EC.

Perhaps what they want is for Microsoft to install competitor’s products into the Windows operating system and then sell it for them? That seems to be the case since the EC indicated that it would rather see Microsoft offer consumers a choice of browser rather than remove IE8 from the operating system (“E.U. Criticizes Microsoft Plan to Remove Browser“, The New York Times, June 12, 2009). It’s hard to tell what would satisfy the European Commission. What I don’t see is the EC going after Apple for bundling the Safari browser in MacOS X? Or bundling iTunes into MacOS X and leveraging that in iPod sales. Or the EC going after Google as being monopolistic in Internet search. The move last Thursday by Microsoft may not even eliminate the possibility that the EC will levy a fine against the company as the “investigation dates to 1996 — which means it [the EC] still could levy substantial fines for the 13 years during which the browser was integrated, even if it finds that the separation allays its concerns going forward” (Hodgsen, Jessica and Charles Forelle, “Windows is to Drop Browser in Europe,” Wall Street Journal Online, June 12, 2009).

Microsoft is doing the right thing in the EU market in order to meet the EC’s concerns. It would be nice if the EC would acknowledge that and move forward.

(a small caveat here: this is solely my personal opinion and does NOT, in any way, reflect the opinion of my employer)

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.