vmware, qemu & winxp

so linux now has great support for virtual machines. i use virtualbox on my macbook but for years have used vmware on my debian box. now that i don't have to rely on vmware's resource-intensive hypervisor, i started to research alternative solutions. i came across qemu; apparently xen open source and kvm use qemu under their hoods. qemu can also be utilized independently, so i decided not to bother with xen or kvm. my first problem was that i my vmware vmdk image file was distributed instead of centralized (i had multiple vmdk files).

matthew@hufflepuff:~$ ll ~/vmware/
total 11G
drwxr-xr-x 2 matthew matthew 4.0K Jun 8 14:18 .
drwxrwxrwt 3 root root 4.0K Jun 8 20:19 ..
-rw------- 1 matthew matthew 8.5K May 18 19:37 nvram
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthew matthew 43K Mar 19 2010 vmware-0.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthew matthew 49K Mar 18 2010 vmware-1.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthew matthew 49K Mar 17 2010 vmware-2.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthew matthew 50K May 18 19:37 vmware.log
-rw------- 1 matthew matthew 2.0G May 18 19:37 Windows XP Professional-f001.vmdk
-rw------- 1 matthew matthew 2.0G May 18 19:37 Windows XP Professional-f002.vmdk
-rw------- 1 matthew matthew 2.0G May 18 19:37 Windows XP Professional-f003.vmdk
-rw------- 1 matthew matthew 2.0G May 18 19:37 Windows XP Professional-f004.vmdk
-rw------- 1 matthew matthew 2.0G May 18 19:37 Windows XP Professional-f005.vmdk
-rw------- 1 matthew matthew 1.3M Dec 5 2007 Windows XP Professional-f006.vmdk
-rw------- 1 matthew matthew 732 May 18 19:25 Windows XP Professional.vmdk
-rw------- 1 matthew matthew 0 Dec 5 2007 Windows XP Professional.vmsd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 matthew matthew 1.4K May 18 19:37 Windows XP Professional.vmx
-rw-r--r-- 1 matthew matthew 1.7K Mar 16 2010 Windows XP Professional.vmxf

i needed to merge these files without damaging the windows' ntfs. i came across a utility called "vdiskmanager". this merged all my files into one vmdk:

matthew@hufflepuff:~/vmware$ vmware-vdiskmanager –r Windows\ XP\ Professional.vmdk –t 0 WinXP.vmdk

i then needed to convert it to a qemu raw image format:

matthew@hufflepuff:~/vmware$ qemu-img convert -f vmdk WinXP.vmdk -O raw WinXP.img

then to verify the conversion:

matthew@hufflepuff:~/vmware$ qemu-img info -f raw WinXP.img
image: WinXP.img
file format: raw
virtual size: 10G (10737418240 bytes)
disk size: 7.4G

and double check (because i'm paranoid):

matthew@hufflepuff:~/vmware$ file WinXP.img
WinXP.img: x86 boot sector, Microsoft Windows XP MBR, Serial 0x2e682e67; partition 1: ID=0x7, active, starthead 1, startsector 63, 20948697 sectors, code offset 0xc0

i then proceeded to launch my vm:

matthew@hufflepuff:~/vmware$ qemu -hda WinXP.img -m 365 -vga std

but it blue screened ... the only reliable function in windows. so, i researched the issue, turned out it was because i didn't remove the vmware drivers before performing all this work on my image file.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324764

The agp440.sys service had to be disabled so that WinXP would only load basic vga drivers.

i made an image of my WinXP install cd via dd:

matthew@hufflepuff:~/vmware$ dd if=/dev/sr0 of=./XPInstall.img bs=1024

then i ran qemu, let the cdrom image boot and followed microsoft's instructions:

matthew@hufflepuff:~/vmware$ qemu -hda WinXP.img -cdrom XPInstall.img -m 365 -vga std

and after making the changes, i booted my vm as normal:

matthew@hufflepuff:~/vmware$ qemu -hda WinXP.img -m 365 -vga std

tada! we have a hypervisor running a vm and utilizing less resources than vmware.

houston, mission accomplished!

egrep an ip using a regex

i'm not the greatest at regular expressions, but with some help from a friend i finally developed a nice regex that will grab an ip address out of a log file.

i have postfix setup on my mail server to greylist new addresses automatically. i'm working on developing a plugin for that will take addresses that don't follow smtp rfc standards and automatically blacklist them. at any rate, here's the regex ... maybe it'll help someone else out there keep from pulling their hair out:

rosebud:~# egrep /var/log/your_mail_log 'client_address\=[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}\.[[:digit:]]{1,3}'

of course, client_address is relative to postfix, but you get the idea. cheers!

ffmpeg - rip the audio track from a video file

i've been toying around with ripping the audio track from a video file and mplayer just wasn't living up to the job. i have used ffmpeg in the past but hadn't recently so i took a look at the man page and found i could accomplish this task very easily in one line with a pipe to lame.

matthew@hufflepuff:~$ ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -f wav - | lame -V 3 - audio.mp3

this takes video.mp4 and dumps the audio track in wav format then pipes it to lame and creates an mp3 of the dump. sweet.