Ajaxplorer

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

### Note: I originally wrote this in 2012, but never published it. I haven’t looked at Ajaxplorer since then for many un-related reasons, but thought I would post it as-is in case it helps someone ###

 

I recently decided to test Ajaxplorer as an FTP replacement. Right now FTP is used for simple file transfers and data uploads, but its not secure, and its not the most user friendly way of transferring files.

Ajaxplorer is attractive because it’s a PHP front end for file transfers with a Windows Explorer-like interface. It can be secured with SSL and offers many other nice features.

I wanted to set up an instance of Ajaxplorer on a spare VM which didn’t have very much storage space. With the help of a forum topic on the Ajaxplorer forums, I managed to set this up with the actual data repositories on a different UNC path.

 

Copy to c on Web server
Create sym link to storage server with Mklink /d
Copy data folder to storage instead of Web
Add URL rewrite module to iis
Add info to Web.config for redirect to https
Add certificate to iis
Modify php.ini with file size and mail smtp options
Modify the boot strap plugin file for ldap authentication plus serial
Add repository for crew ftp
Email: – have master user QCdata, click on individual folder, share it out with the named user, choose read and write, set email address.

Linux Hyper-V Guest VHDX resize

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

I inherited a Linux virtual machine that had been converted from a VMWare ESXi 5.0 install to Hyper-V. The VHDX file I ended up with was an 800GB dynamic VHDX with only about 250GB of data in it.

Because of this I embarked on a task of shrinking the VHDX file to be much more reasonable to the VM file contents, not knowing what I was getting myself into working with a Linux file system. I’m sure I’m going to butcher the terminology here based on my ignorance and lack of knowledge.

Here’s the steps I performed to achieve my goal. I’m writing this quite some time after I actual did it, so I’ll try to fill in the gaps of my documentation as much as possible.

At this point I couldn’t shrink the actual VHDX because some of my Logical Groups were near the end of the disk extents.

  • Still within the liveCD environment, use following command list extent locations on the disk
pvs -v --segments
  • This gave me output like the following (numbers roughly simulated): 
    PV         VG     Fmt  Attr PSize   PFree   Start Size
/dev/sdb1  home   lvm2 a-   50.50g  123     0     4234
/dev/sdb1  gd01   lvm2 a-   50.50g  123     14234 4234
/dev/sdd1  office lvm2 a-   500.00g 123     20000 12450
  • I used this to calculate the actual start and end locations of each segment, to be used in the next commands.
  • From here I took my second segment and moved it into the first available free space, like this (original extent location, followed by destination extent location):
pvmove --alloc anywhere /dev/sdb1:38400-39039 /dev/sdb1:1280-1920
pvmove --alloc anywhere /dev/sdb1:38400-39039 /dev/sdb1:1280-1920
  • I continued to do this for each segment as I slowly consolidated my free space with my segments previous to it on the disk
  • Next I shrunk the physical volume (and confirmed with system-config-lvm GUI):
pvresize --setphysicalvolumesize 250G /dev/sdb1
  • Then I booted GParted liveCD to shrink /dev/sdb1 to 250GB, and put the free space into Unallocated space
  • Finally, I could use Hyper-V Manager to shrink the dynamic VHDX file to my destined size

 

After all of this, I turned the VM back on, and Linux booted as if nothing had changed except the size of my disks were quite a bit smaller.

Microsoft Ignite – Cancellation

Jeff Miles Leave a comment

Despite writing about my approval to attend Microsoft Ignite in May only a few days ago, I’m disappointed to say that approval has been removed, and I will no longer be attending.

With the local economy in my area under some upheaval, there are many cost-saving measures being implemented at my company and this is one of those measures.

I can understand the reasoning, although I am very disappointed. Unfortunately I can’t put an actual dollar figure on the value my attendance would bring, which is the only way I think it could be justified at this point.

Here’s hoping that my request for 2016 fares better next year!

Microsoft Ignite – Approval

Jeff Miles 1 Comment

I’m going to Microsoft Ignite!

 

In early May I’ll be traveling to Chicago for a week, and am extremely excited that my request to attend was approved by my company.

I have never been to a large conference like this, although I have attended a smaller single-vendor conference in 2013. At this point I don’t really know what to expect, but I’m most looking forward to the following areas:

  • Networking and discussions with companies and IT experts who see the same struggles I do
  • Using Hyper-V in real world scenarios
  • Server 2012 R2 features like DirectAccess and Remote Desktop Services

Having never been to Chicago, and not knowing what to look for in accommodations I took a stab in the dark and will be staying at the “Hotel Rush”.

I hope that my attendance this year proves very valuable to my company, so that justification in 2016 is stronger; with Windows 10 and Server vNext coming in late 2015 I anticipate Ignite 2016 to be even more exciting.

Benefits of networking – and Panzura

Jeff Miles 2 Comments

The concept of networking is very often mentioned within IT, but examples of it do not come up nearly as often in my experience.
However recently I do have such an example. A colleague attended Autodesk University in late 2014, and attended a session regarding file collaboration for products like Autodesk Revit and AutoCAD.
This is an area which I have been struggling with for many years. How does one give LAN-like speed to a single set of data across many geographical locations? I’ve tried many solutions as posted about previously: DFSR, PeerLock, PeerSync, GlobalScape WAFS, Citrix XenApp and others.

And yet all of these have not proven effective enough to permanently rely upon.

But at Autodesk University the session was talking about Panzura. A representative of a company almost exactly like mine was talking about the benefits, and how it has solved the file collaboration problem for them.

When this news was returned I became very excited, and eventually came across this testimonial video: this video is even more evidence that this might be the right path to travel down.

I was put in direct contact with this representative and can now communicate without sales over-exaggerating the benefits of the product.

 

There is still a large amount of research and testing ahead before Panzura can be seriously considered in my environment, however it is something I would not have seriously considered without the networking.