I confess… Sometimes I just need Linux. I’ve tried everything from live disks to running an “Administrative” VM.  The main problem with all of them is the break. What would take 5 min if I could do it from within windows, takes 30min and destroys my thought process along the way.   There are tools that I can run from within windows.  Unfortunately most of them either suck or cost too much.  I don’t have room for another PC/thin client at my desk, and I’m NOT giving up my Vista rig… What to do?

Enter DSL (Damn Small Linux) I stumbled upon this little treat on accident a couple weeks back. They have many versions available and I’ve played with several, but the QEMU VM is simply brilliant.

Not only is It easily configured, but the dang thing just works.  Now when I need to modify a config file on a NetApp, or fix a VMX. I fire up DSL, it launches as a windowed app (on my vista x64 rig!).  90 seconds later I’m logged in and continue working, NO break in work flow!

Couple disclaimers: I still hate it, and think it is beyond legacy, but there is no fighting it anymore. Some form of UNIX will always be in the data center.  So for now I’m using DSL to fill that gap…  Got a better solution?

~Glenn

This morning I had a couple app servers just giving me fits. I turned to powershell to quickly to a diff on the servers. I started to backup the regisry and do a diff there, but decided that I should start somewhere simple. My solution was to “snap” the state of all the services on one that was working. I then restored those setting on one of the trouble nodes, rebooted problem solved.

gwmi win32_service | % { write-output "sc config $($_.name) start= $(($_.startmode).replace('Manual','demand')) " } | out-file restore_service.bat