Debian Squeeze on Dell Poweredge 2950 Hyper-V

So my latest adventure has been attempting to install Debian Squeeze in Hyper-V on a Windows 2008 Server. While the first attempts have been very unsuccessful, I've finally got everything working. Hopefully, this will help someone in a similar situation.

The main issue I had was getting the NIC to work. I was using the amd64 netinstall iso as the installer. However, a netinstall doesn't work if the NIC is a non-free Broadcom BCM5708 NetXtreme II. Lots of anger on my part after this discovery. Not to mention that I couldn't get the Hyper-V installer to recognize my USB stick when it asked for the drivers that were not listed.

What I decided was the best plan of action was to go ahead with the standard amd64 stable squeeze install, non-netinstall version obviously. To circumvent the NIC issue, I would skip the ethernet installation and configuration, then install the driver after the fact. Everything went hunky-dory. Debian was up and running, meaning I'll just install the firmware-bnx2_0.28_all.deb non-free package and I'm on my way! Then, I couldn't get the interface to work. Demesg and lspci gave me literally nothing to go on. The .deb package installed fine but I was dead in the water. It was almost as if, the network card wasn't being detected; that was exactly what was happening. Time for a plan B.

Plan B involved sleeping on the issue and lots of morning coffee. With both of those accomplished, I decided to look into the virtual network adapters in Hyper-V. I tried, unsuccessfully to get the network card to work by switching the virtual adapters since the physical box had two NIC's; my thought process being, "maybe I selected the wrong adapter in the initial setup?" This didn't fix anything. I was close to the solution, but, not quite there. Simply put, I needed add a legacy network adapter to my virtual machine settings for the installation; I can then go back, if I wish, to reinstall drivers for the Broadcom NIC. However, the NIC is working just fine right now.

Instant Messaging at work

There was an interesting article on Lifehacker.com today about instant messaging at work. In my experience at work, only the techies have IM applications running on their desktop. I could see this as a nice addition to the workplace. It would be an easy way to keep in touch and see the availability of colleagues in the office and around campus.

UPDATE: Since writing this we've adopted google talk in our office. The only problem I'm finding is getting everyone to buy into it's usefulness. A majority of the staff either, don't use it, or still use e-mail as their main method of communication.

Handy Query

I was looking for an SQL query that would list all the tables I have on our server. Well, found it! Here it is if you're interested:

use (database name)

GO

Select *
From sys.Tables
Go

Encrypting E-mail

I have recently setup encryption on my office e-mail client, Mozilla Thunderbird, and have contemplated whether or not this would be worth the time to setup for each of our Career Counselors. The benefits are obvious; e-mail signing that would verify the identity of the sender, as well as the ability to have privately encrypted conversations. No longer would you have to add a disclaimer like, "The information contained in this email and any attachments is confidential and may be legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient you are hereby notified that you must not use, disclose, distribute, copy, print or rely on this email's content. ...yadda yadda, or you'd be in big trouble." That disclaimer, by the way, always makes me chuckle, because if you really didn't want anyone else to see your message, encrypt it! But, back to the topic at hand, the question isn't of the value, it's of the utilization. (Take that Hamlet!) The utilization problem has a couple facets to it. It isn't limited to the users in our office, it is also involves those users receiving messages from outside of our office. Are they going to have e-mail encryption setup? Will they have the correct keys downloaded? Will they even know where to begin with e-mail encryption? Unfortunately, I already know the answer to this. Which therein defeats the whole purpose.

I do see a lot of good out of a project like this. Yet, there needs to be a lot of buy-in, not only from our office, but from everyone. Which makes this the impossible dream. Well, I guess I answered my own question on this topic. However, if you're interested in how I setup Enigmail with OpenPGP, here is where I went to install it:

http://enigmail.mozdev.org/home/index.php