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Agile in practice

On Thursday I gave presentation for Java Users Group in Lodz about implementation of Agile methodologies in real projects in enterprise world. The presentation has been interrupted frequently with questions and has been followed by interesting discussion. The PPT accompanyingthe presentation can be downloaded here (in Polish):  Agile w praktyce_public.

The most important observations and conclussions so far:

  • There’s huge gap between wikipedia style theory and real world practice
  • There are tons of obstacles in implementation of agile processes
  • The benefits of Agile are enormous!

I need an excuse to investigate some more and prepare English version of the presenation – I hope some event like unconference will be comming soon!

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Disabling VT-x/AMD-v in VirtualBox on Ubuntu

VirtualBox on Ubuntu has an issue preventing host waking up from suspend. This issue is marked as resolved, but unfortunately it’s still present in 3.1.2 r56127 running under control of Ubuntu x64. The workaround for this issue is well documented: disable VT-x/AMD-v support. Fine, but… the option is greyed out in the settings:

To change it, you have to go directly to vm configuration file and change enabled attribute in HardwareVirtEx to false. After the change CPU node should look similar to:

      <CPU count="1">

        <HardwareVirtEx enabled="false" exclusive="true"/>

        <HardwareVirtExNestedPaging enabled="false"/>

        <HardwareVirtExVPID enabled="false"/>

        <PAE enabled="true"/>

      </CPU>
Now restart VirtualBox and you’re done!
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Windows 2003 server password recovery on VMware ESX

Having too much systems to work on has one small disadvantage – there’s a hell of a lot of Administrator and root passwords to remember. And yesterday happend what was meant to happen for some time  – I forgot an Administator password for one of my Windows 2003 Servers. For obvious security reasons (I had no pencil on my desk) I haven’t noted password to this machine anywhere.

The server is running on my company VMware ESX server and I decided to hack into it. VMware Infrastructure Client has great ability – it let’s you share your local CD (or .iso image) to the server. I don’t need to say more, do I? ;) Yes, it is so simple.

So, here’s a step by step tutorial how to reset Administrator’s password on Windows 2003 server running on ESX. Prerequisites:

– VMware Infrastucture Client

– Permission from system’s administrator (don’t be naughty!)

– Live CD with your prefered password tools (I took http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/ 3MB only!)

Disclaimer: The procedure below can destroy data on your server, use on your own risk! I don’t take any responsibility of the damages you may cause trying to runt the procedure (or any of its parts).

1. Stop the server. I had to shut down VM image, not good for file system, but I had no choice.

2. Edit preferences of your image to enable remote CD drive:

3. Change boot options to set boot delay

My image has been set to boot from Hard Drive first. I had to go into bios settings to set boot order. I’ve also set 10s delay on booting to give myself time to connect CD image – on power on it’s unconnected.

4. Power on machine and set up boot order

5. Connect iso image. Quickly, before system start booting :)

6. See system booting from CD, use your the tool to reset Administrator password.

7. Enjoy!

Hint:

It was impossible on my machine to set new Administrator password using ntpasswd. I had to use option to blank the password.

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