If you get the following error when generating a pacman keychain master key: pacman-key –init gpg: Generating pacman keychain master key… Not enough random bytes available. Please do some other work to give the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 288 more bytes) It can be quite tricky to introduce entropy into this low powered headless system. I tried various methods all of which failed. You can monitor the available system entropy here:

I can’t seem to remember this: sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-uname -r Which is strange considering how often I use it.

To get the vSphere Management Assistant appliance to run under VMware Fusion use the ovftool. You will need to download the VMA appliance from VMware, extract it and then cd to that directory. You will have to include the full path to the ovftool or include it in your classpath. Then: ovftool vMA-5.0.0.0-472630_OVF10.ovf folder_name/ Where folder_name is a subdirectory in your extracted directory. When you run that command you will will have to accept the license agreement first.

I am sure this is not supported and therefore not recommended but installing software in the vSphere Management Assistant is possible as it is just a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 virtual machine. You can use the following to search for software: sudo zypper search nano This will search for nano. Once you have found the package you want to install then use the following to install it: sudo zypper install nano Note the first time you run this you are prompted to accept the openSUSE package signing key.

Some times it is necessary to force finder to restart. You can do this from the GUI using the ‘Force Quit’ menu item, however sometimes it can be quicker to use the Mac terminal: sudo killall Finder You may need to manually start finder if it doesn’t automatically: open /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app Sometimes you can’t beat a good old fashioned reboot: reboot This is rather a harsh way of rebooting as it just sends out a sigterm and subsequently a sigkill.

These days most computers struggle to play WAV files recorded by the Witness Contactstore. Probably the easiest way to make these files play is to use ffmpeg to convert them as follows: ffmpeg -acodec g726 -i original_file.wav -f wav out_file.wav The converted WAV should play fine now on most operating systems.

Windows device manager does not always allow you to see old adapters once the hardware has been removed. You can enable it to do so but when you are dealing with large numbers of virtual machines you need another approach. Devcon can enable you to do this and can be found here if you are after the 32bit version. However there is no 64bit version (just the 32bit & itanium version).

Recently I have seen Microsoft Office 2003 taking an age to open Excel documents over the network. You can use Wireshark to see what is happening at the network level: You can see that it is opening the file a teeny tiny piece at a time. This can cause quite a delay as the spreadsheet gets larger. It turns out that it had been caused by an update to Excel called ‘Microsoft Office File Validation Add-in’:

Use netdom to find where the current FSMO roles are assigned in Active Directory: netdom query fsmo This will return something like: Schema master DC01.local Domain naming master DC02.local PDC DC01.local RID pool manager DC02.local Infrastructure master DC01.local The command completed successfully. The ‘netdom query’ command can also return other useful information. Valid types include: Server, Workstation, DC, OU and Trust

There a quite a few ways of finding the Fuctional levels of Active Directory. Dsquery is a good option as it usually is distributed with windows. This will give you the Domain Functional Level: dsquery * DC=DOMAIN, DC=LOCAL -scope base -attr msDS-Behavior-Version ntMixedDomain Replace DOMAIN and LOCAL with your directory details. You can check the result with the following table: 0, 0 Windows 2000 Native domain Level 0, 1 Windows 2000 Mixed domain Level 2, 0 Windows 2003 Domain Level 3, 0 Windows 2008 Domain Level 4, 0 Windows 2008 R2 Domain Level To find the Active Directory Schema Version: