We use some virtual machines at work for testing. For example, if someone reports some weird bug that only happens on a specific OS we can just fire up the machine and debug it. Problem is that we may be outsourcing part of our testing workflow and we were discussing if it is legal or not to have Windows VM images available for third party download.
I would think that if we just set them and then remove the Key it is fine, but I cannot find somewhere were this is written explicitly. Has anybody had any problem like this before?
Related
I'm using WKHtmlToPdf to generate some docs here at work, in internal applications, for over one and half year without any problem. Some applications are coded in C++, some in AutoIt3, and today, after restarting all the computers due to external reasons (power generator would be tested), wkhtmltopdf stopped working on all machines at my company.
I can't even run it from command line. Whether I try to convert a webpage or a local HTML file, it always hangs on 10%. All our machines are Windows 8 32 bits and runs their own install (the applications aren't running under a network share).
I tried downloading wkhtmltopdf again from the website, installing it, etc, but nothing worked. I also tried adding --disable-javascript option, which also didn't work. Cleaning %TEMP% folder did not help too.
I never faced anything like this. All the machines were restarted normally, going to start menu, etc. And it does not look like a network issue, since I'm accessing internet to write this, and we are a small company, we use a standard Wi-Fi router, just like your house. Nothing was changed, no file deleted, no Windows update, no network settings... just a restart. I saw some guys facing the same problem when trying to run wkhtmltopdf from PHP, but in this case, I have this problem even by running it from DOS, as anyone would do.
wkhtmltoimage is working fine. Just wkhtmltopdf stopped working.
Screenshot
In my case, wkhtmltopdf was hanging on files locally stored after the progress counter had made an initial jump to the percentage corresponding to 1 page. It turned out that I had an http_proxy variable set to some unaccessible proxy server. Clearing this environment variable solved the issue.
I need to see the working of a malware (stuxnet) as a course reading assignment. I have its source code in C, but I don't know how to see its working. I though of running it in a virtual machine in Ubuntu but I am not sure if it will infect my computer or not.
How should I run, rather, test it?
Too see how it works, you don't need to be an expert in C, but it will help if you are familiar with the language.
To test the file, compile it to a windows or linux binary and then run it from inside a virtual machine (VM). Malware can break out of the VM and infect the host machine, so backing up your data or using a separate computer might be a good idea.
If I recall correctly, stuxnet had a very specific start routine and wouldn't start unless a number of hardwareIDs existed.
I'm trying to find a decent standalone webserver that I can load up on a jump drive.
My wife is a photographer, and I'd like to present the clients with their images on usb. When they plug it in, I'd like a web page to load up, and run some jQuery magic to show them a nice carousel of all there images.
So far, this is all fine since it can all be done client side and doesn't need a server at all.
The problem I'm facing is that I'd like some server-side code to be able to read the images out of the directory so that once the interface is built, I don't need to manually create all of the <img /> tags.
If it was primarily going to be used in a Windows environment, I'd have no problem going with IIS Express, since I'm mainly a .NET MVC developer and this would be perfect for me... However, the fact of the matter is that a large amount of our client base is also OS X users.
I did find this Java one jlHttp, and I also found this thread here on SO, but I don't think I understand enough about either one of them to accomplish what I'm looking for.
Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
I'm looking for the same thing, and the two best options I've found were Flying Ant cd web server and Stunnix. Of the two, Flying Ant is cheaper, and I've tested it with success on my project.
I found Mongoose very convenient for this exact purpose. It's crossplatform, lightweight and requires minimum configuration. You may be interested in this project that uses Mongoose to display pictures in a folder tree or FTP directory.
How about Node.js
It says it runs on Linux, OS X, and Windows.
We have a VB.NET applciation that is run from a mapped network drive. This works fine on all PCs expect those with Windows 7, on those we get the following:
"application generated an exception that cannot be handled" System.Security.SecurityException was unhandled
If the application folder is copied locally and run from there it works fine.
Anyone know a way aroudn this issue? I assume it is related to Windows 7 netowrk security but not sure how to work around it.
Well, normally you should get this error on all PCs, not only on your Win7 PCs. But I guess for your older Windows PCs someone has solved this issue some time ago. Read this article
http://thebackroomtech.com/2009/04/01/using-caspolexe-to-grant-net-applications-rights-to-a-remote-network-share/
how to deal with the problem. Here is an SO post
.NET Deployment to Network Share
which might help you, too.
There is a reason this error comes up, It is not a good idea to grant applications access to network shares just to run them.
.Net and Click Once makes it very easy to deploy an application to a network share and distribute it to all the client computers to be run from there.
The app can then check for updates whenever it is launched and download any changes. You get all the ease of deploying to a shared drive without mucking about with code access security policies and potentially leaving a nasty hole in your network security.
If you look at the Linux ecosystem (especially the Ubuntu and Alestic EC2 images) there is a common technique where the VMs are pre-configured to look at the EC2 user-data and use it as a boot script. The nice thing about this approach is that you can write a boot script that further provisions your machine, allowing you to avoid making a new image every time your software that runs on the machine changes.
I want to do the same thing for Windows, but given that I'm an Mac and Linux guy, I'm a bit lost on where to start. My requirements are:
This must run on Windows Server 2008
A bootstrap script needs to start when the machine boots up, read the user-data file by pulling down the contents http://169.254.169.254/1.0/user-data
The bootstap script then needs to run the contents of that file as if it were a script
The script embedded in the user-data needs to run in such a way that it has access to the desktop environment (ie: it can launch a browser, etc).
I'm not quite sure how services work in Windows or if I need to enable auto-login, so any advice here would be appreciated. The ultimate goal is to run a Java program that launches some custom software that in turn launches a web browser (IE, Firefox, etc) and is capable of taking screenshots.
The screenshot part is interesting, because in the past when I've tried this the only way I could get something other than a black screen was to have UltraVNC or RealVNC boot up as a service, though I don't know why that helped.
I'm looking for answers to three specific questions, as well as any general advice:
Should I be focussing on a Windows service or auto-login + bat file in the "Startup" folder?
If I use a Windows service, is there anything special that I need to do to make sure desktop access and/or screenshots are available?
Do you recommend any tools for common Linux commands, like curl or wget? Last time I used Windows I used Cygwin a lot, but is there something more appropriate to use here?
I have not tried auto-login on Windows instances in EC2, but here's the support document on how to enable it.
We boot-strap our Windows instances using a custom AMI with a custom Windows 'install' service already installed. The boot-strap installer reads a URL from user-data at startup. The URL points to a ZIP file stored in S3. The installer then downloads, un-zips, and executes the actual application installer -- in our case a simple CMD fie.
This setups allows us to have one base AMI and then be able to easily overlay 15+ different application configurations (without having to rebuild the AMI). If you only have one application configuration this may be overkill for your situation.
The only trouble we ran into was having our installer service start to early -- changing the service startup mode to "Automatic Delayed" fixed that issue.
We wrote our boot-strap installer in Java, launched via YAJSW, because we're comfortable with it. If you just want a few simple Unix tools, most are available pre-compiled for Windows, for example wget.
For something completely different, you could try PsExec to configure the instance after it has booted.
You can try using RightScale's free developer account to create plain Powershell scripts and associate them with your Windows instances to run at boot time. The RightScale dashboard solves exactly the problems you are trying to solve above.
DISCLAIMER: I work for RightScale.
As for screen capture CutyCapt is a simple tool you can point at a URL and generate an image from.
Unxutils is a great solution for those looking for unix tools on Windows. It's got the wget.exe that you're looking for, however, using Powershell to download stuff is not so bad either:
$wc = new-object system.net.webclient
$wc.DownloadFile("http://stackoverflow.com","test.html")
If you can write a batch file to do your setup, then you can run it at startup of the vm by doing this:
1. Run REGEDT32.EXE.
2. Modify the following value within HKEY_CURRENT_USER:
Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ParseAutoexec
1 = autoexec.bat is parsed
0 = autoexec.bat is not parsed
As an answer to #3, I would say that you can do just about anything in a batch file that you need which includes downloading from a ftp server (but not from a http server). I am really interested in this stuff and so if you have questions, try asking me.
If you use Elastic Beanstalks you can use this:
Customizing the Software on EC2 Instances Running Windows
It uses YAML formatting standards, e.g.
packages:
msi:
mysql: http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/Connector-Net/mysql-connector-net-6.6.5.msi/from/http://cdn.mysql.com/
or
sources:
"c:/myproject/myapp": http://s3.amazonaws.com/mybucket/myobject.zip
I know this is a little bit late to help out with the original post but for anyone who is still reading this one solution is to use the http://cloudinitnet.codeplex.com/ project. The service is easily installed using a powershell script and will create a local administrator account to use while running.
The goal for this project was to replace the Cloud-Init project used in Amazon Linux and Ubuntu.