Microsoft Archives - Stefcho's Tech Blog

pfSense 1.2.3 as Virtual Machine on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V

Posted on 27/02/2011 - 18/02/2019 by Stefan

After seeing pfSense working more than half year flawlessly on Alix, recently I’ve test it as virtual machine.

To avoid some compatibility issues a “Legacy Network Adapters” must be used.

For my surprise even with that trick, there was no network connectivity. The work around for this problem is explained in this thread: Pfsense 2.0-BETA4 in Hyper-V: Throughput not as expected

Open shell from the console, create new document

vi /usr/local/etc/rc.d/startup.sh

and type in

ifconfig de1 down
ifconfig de0 down
ifconfig de0 up
ifconfig de1 up

Just check before that the names of your interfaces, mine were de0,1.

For now it is stable, no issues, with very basic configuration. On the forums there are topics about possible problems with VLANs, but I didn’t need this functionality.

File Sharing Protocols and Ports in XP and 2003

Posted on 24/07/2010 - 18/02/2019 by Stefan

After digging around for open ports I have found TCP port 445 open on one of my machines. For what this port is used? The answer was here:
What’s TCP port 445 used for in Windows 2000/XP?

“Among the new ports used by Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, is TCP port 445 which is used for SMB over TCP.
The SMB (Server Message Block) protocol is used among other things for file sharing in Windows NT/2000/XP. In Windows NT it ran on top of NetBT (NetBIOS over TCP/IP), which used the famous ports 137, 138 (UDP) and 139 (TCP). In Windows 2000/XP/2003, Microsoft added the possibility to run SMB directly over TCP/IP, without the extra layer of NetBT. For this they use TCP port 445.
”

Then found this article:
How can I configure TCP/IP networking while NetBIOS is disabled in Windows 2000/XP/2003?

Perfect! Petri IT Knowledgebase

If you are interested in the topic references are very good source of information.

Import Microsoft VMs in VMWare Workstation

Posted on 24/07/2010 - 18/02/2019 by Stefan

I was trying to test System Center Essentials 2007 SP1 Evaluation Copy. But did not happened to have virtual server or hyper v. So I decide to import it in VMWare Workstation. The following error appeared when I try to import it “source format was not understood”.
After googeling it, the only relative result was : Converting Microsoft’s Virtual Server Machine to VMWare

“Today I downloaded a SharePoint virtual machine from Microsoft. When I tried to import it to VMWare I got an error that said “source format was not understood”. I google the error and didn’t come with a solution to my problem. So I did the next logical thing, I open the VMC file for the Virtual Server and poked around. I found that the attribute didn’t have any value. I changed that value to the physical location of the machine. In my case it was F:\Virtual Machines\MOSS Demo\WIN03_MOSS.vhd

When I started the import from VMWare, it worked.”

Close, but did not do the job for me. After reading the .vmc file.

Obviously this portion was the problematic one:

First I fixed the first absolute with new path, but still it was not working. Then think about it VMWare have completely different way of managing disk, to the relative and the differencing did not seem to fit in the picture. Removing the “relative type=”string”.\SCEsp1VHDSERVER_Diff.vhd” do the trick.

Hope this will be fixed later on.