- Blind-sysadmins - lists.hodgsonfamily.org

xen virtualization
by mattias 08 Feb '16

08 Feb '16

i experimenting with xen i playing with the old xen-tools any have experience with hvm guests? pvm or what are called are easy to install

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Access to consoles of VMWare VM guests
by Phil Rigby 05 Feb '16

05 Feb '16

Hi, This is my first posting to this list and I'm hoping one or more of you can be of help. I work for an IT services company as a Unix systems specialist. Over the last few years more and more of the system builds I am being asked to do have moved from physical servers to VMs. Our company's virtualisation provider of choice is the ESX platform running VMWare. I am trying to find out if there is any way I can get input access to the console of a VM guest. I realise there are many methods for installing and configuring the OS in an unattended manner using kikstart and other such tools but the problem comes when a VM guest running Linux has a problem and cannot complete an orderly boot up. In the days of physical servers, I could ssh to the ILO and, with the console output configured to be sent to the serial port device, I could read what was on the console, diagnose the issue and make corrections via input to the console to get the VM guest to boot up successfully. However, with a VM guest, I can't work out any way of being able to interact with the VM guest's console. I know that one can configure a virtual serial port to be used by the VM guest which will direct console access to a file that can be read on the ESX host machine but this is only half the job. I have no way of actually typing commands into the console during a live boot up. For background, I am a totally blind user of JAWS and use Reflections for my terminal emulation software to communicate with any Linux OS that has a network configured on it or, if the machine is physical, I can, as stated earlier, get a session going with the ILO. I just don't know what to do in the case of a VM. Sighted colleagues can of course just use vCenter's vSphere to get to a graphical version of the console for any VM guest but this is inaccessible with JAWS. I've even tried using the JAWS OCRfeature but this isn't accurate enough and doesn't allow positioning of the cursor precisely where I want it. Have any of you faced this issue and found a way to work round it? Regards, Phil.

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Installing Windows 10 64 bit
by Christian 30 Jan '16

30 Jan '16

Hello all, I lost the Win PE that I used to install Windows 10 64 bit. I am just wondering if anyone has a link to some Win PE which I can use to install? Many thanks, Christian

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security + scripts + SSH + screen
by Jad Wauthier 27 Jan '16

27 Jan '16

Hi, everyone. I wrote a simple bash script to alert me when anyone logs into my CentOS Linux server. It simply sends me an email with the username for the account that logged in, the hostname of the server, the date and time, and the IP recorded in the SSH_CONNECTION environment variable. I realize that, as a security measure, it's very weak, but I plan on expanding it. yesterday, I logged in from a new location, resumed a screen session, and proceeded to create a new window. My script reported the new IP upon the initial login, but, when I created the new screen window, it sent the IP that was recorded when I first created the screen session. Do you know of a way to force screen to update the SSH_CONNECTION environment variable when a new window is created? Is there a better place/way to find the IP of the current SSH session? Do you know of a free tool that can report account logins as they happen and send emails and or text messages? Thank you! Jad Wauthier

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Domain laptop boot issue
by Troy Hergert 27 Jan '16

27 Jan '16

All of our computers are on a Windows 2012 domain. Most of the laptops reportedly work well out in the field. But a handful of them are reported to have very slow bootup and login processes when not able to find the domain controler. The boot up and login take more than 5 minutes on some ocasions. These are all windows seven professional machines set up on a 2012 domain. Have any of you encountered this issue, and do you have any tips or tricks that helped laptops boot up faster when they can't find the domain controller? My minimum specs are I5 with a minimum of 4 gigs ram.Thanks.

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Domain laptop boot issue
by Troy Hergert 26 Jan '16

26 Jan '16

All of our computers are on a Windows 2012 domain. Most of the laptops reportedly work well out in the field. But a handful of them are reported to have very slow bootup and login processes when not able to find the domain controler. The boot up and login take more than 5 minutes on some ocasions. These are all windows seven professional machines set up on a 2012 domain. Have any of you encountered this issue, and do you have any tips or tricks that helped laptops boot up faster when they can't find the domain controller? My minimum specs are I5 with a minimum of 4 gigs ram.Thanks.

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accessible Speedtest
by Troy Hergert 25 Jan '16

25 Jan '16

Hi, Has anyone found an accessible speedtest site to measure your Internet bandwidth and speed. I'm not having luck with speedtest.net. Tried JAWS and Window-eyes. Anyone know of something accessible? Thanks.

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accessible Speedtest
by Troy Hergert 25 Jan '16

25 Jan '16

Hi, Has anyone found an accessible speedtest site to measure your Internet bandwidth and speed. I'm not having luck with speedtest.net. Tried JAWS and Window-eyes. Anyone know of something accessible? Thanks.

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Wetting up Windows VMs with Vagrant boxes.
by Jen Bottom 22 Jan '16

22 Jan '16

Hi all, Now and then I need access to Windows VMs, for testing customer stuff, or sometimes for evaluating different solutions to an accessibility problem I am having at work, with our ever growing horrible tool set :) I just found that there are Windows boxes for Vagrant here: https://atlas.hashicorp.com/boxes/search?provider=virtualbox&q=windows&sort… I am installing one now. Just wondering if anyone else has used these boxes and has any tips for provisioning them with NVDA etc. I was planning to install something like LinuxTools or Chocolaty on them/it, then use 'wget' or similar to download NVDA. I am assuming that NVDA has an installer that can be run from the command line, but I have never investigated this. Any advice appreciated. Cheers, Jen.

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some good news around System Center Configuration Manager
by Ryan Shugart 22 Jan '16

22 Jan '16

Hi: For those of you who have access to the Configuration Manager tech previews, download the 1512 build and give it a go with a screen reader. Microsoft has fixed the issue where quite a few of the list views throughout the product are inaccessible in that a screen reader doesn’t announce anything when using the arrow keys. All the list views I have tried work properly although there may be some that are still broken, I obviously couldn’t test in production. However, I did look at the screens that were causing the most issues in production and know those are fixed. Microsoft says they’ll be working on the ribbon next, although I can’t say when this work will be completed, so keep watching the tech previews. Ryan

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