My first SQL 2008 cluster on vSphere

Recently I had to install a SQL 2008 cluster on Windows 2008 cluster which was virtualized. I learned some valuable lessons I want to share with you.

First of all there is this new feature in the VM Tools called shared folders. Make sure it is off. It causes an error message and the description has nothing to do with the cause.

The second thing is if you want to install service pack 1 for SQL Server, slipstream it. There is a bug that crashes your installation and you can't actually remove it. The term slipstream is a not really the correct term but it works.

First you unpack the service pack with the /x option and then you need to run /x64/setup/1033/sqlsupport.msi and run it. The next step is to start the SQL Server setup and start it from the command line with the parameter /PCUSource=

More info on slipstream can be fount at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955392.

My struggle with VMWare server

Like so many of my fellow IT collegues I run VMWare server on my laptop to do tests. I had my laptop scratched by our internal IT a couple of days ago and when I installed the latest VMWare Server (2.0.1) it worked fine and suddenly I got this.

The first thing I got was this error message:
Failed to Connect
The connection was refused when attempting to contact :8333.
Though the site seems valid, the browser was unable to establish a connection.
* Could the site be temporarily unavailable? Try again later.
* Are you unable to browse other sites? Check the computer's network connection.
* Is your computer or network protected by a firewall or proxy? Incorrect settings
can interfere with Web browsing.

When I had a look at the services I noticed that the VMWare Host Agent service was down.
I tried to start it but no luck. It stayed down. In the Windows System Event log mentioned
"The VMware Host Agent service terminated with service-specific error 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF)." I googled it and found in the VM communities that my datastores.xml file was corrupted.

The way to repair this is to go to "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Server\hostd" and rename the old datastores.xml and make a copy of the datastores.xml.default and rename that copy to datastores.xml. I started the service and the service started without any problem.

But I was still not at the end of the tunnel. The error message in my browser was still the same. Next thing I tried was to change the computername by localhost. I got a message to tell me the SSL certificate was not installed. So I installed it and it loaded the login interface :).

The situation is now that I can open it through localhost but not via computername nor through the IP-address. Interestingly enough I tried the loopback IP address 127.0.0.1 and got the message again that the certificate was not installed. I added my hostname to the hosts file with no success. So I wonder how the name resolution is done, I thought the first place where Windows looks to resolve a name is in the hosts file. I talked to a VMWare specialist at my job and although he is only familiar with ESX he thinks that I should look at the implementation of the tomcat. If anybody has a clue about this, please contact me.

On my linux box at home I run the same VMWare server and there I did not have the same problem since I made the shortcut in my browser myself and pointed it to localhost :). I guess there are just some bugs in it.

Foxit Reader & JBIG2

I made a post about Didier Stevens a while ago who found vulnerabilities in Adobe pdf. But not only Adobe made mistakes. In the SANS newsbite newsletter is an article that the popular alternative Foxit Reader has vulnerabilities in the JBig2. (JBig2 is an image compression standard.)

I am not a programmer but I know from the little programming experience at school I have that every code has bugs and the main goal of a programmer is to make things work. Therefore it is important that professional programmers get educated about common problems and mistakes. Once the code is written I think the code has to go through a peer revision system. I know there are things called deadlines but still QA of code is not something that can be skipped because the impact (Foxit has a user base of 50 million users) can be enormous.

Even if you are somebody that likes to write code on your own make sure you have a kind of
QA and practice secure programming.

cp- i and mv -i are not so interactive

I've build a DHCP-server today on a VM using Ubuntu 8.04 just to play around with. As part of the exercise is hardening the system I found some odd behaviour.

To protect me from my own mistakes I thought it would be nice to alias the commands rm, mv, and cp and each time ask for interaction. This is when I noticed that the commands mv -i and cp -i actually ignore the -i. I've tested it with --interactive but the same here. There is no problem for rm.

I've reported the bug at launchpad and it is now known as Bug 247973.