Windows 7 Activation Error 0x8007232B

If you get the error 0x8007232B when you try to activate Windows 7 installed from volume licensed media you can run the following from an elevated powershell window:

slmgr.vbs –ipk [product key]
slmgr.vbs –ato

I installed the Elevation PowerToys for Windows Vista to simplify getting an elevated powershell window. Unfortunately, the powertoys didn't seem to work with Win7 so I had to start powershell by ctrl-right-clicking the link and selecting run as Administrator.

Offline spelunking of Active Directory - setup

Needed to extract some historical information from Active Directory (AD) backups stored in NTBackup BKF files.  First challenge was extracting the NTDS.DIT from the BKF.  How do I get that snapshot loaded up so I can query the backup?  I didn’t find a way to directly query for results from the NTDS.DIT without loading it into a running Domain Controller (DC) instance.

  My approach is loosely modeled on the technique outlined at technet to “mount” a snapshot in VMWare Workstation on a server configured as a DC that closely models the forest structure of the targeted AD backup.  I’d prefer to use a clone or image from the actual DCs but I can not disturb the online production environment.

I set up a VMWare team consisting of a Win 2008 R2 x64 server configured as a DC and a Vista x86 32-bit Workstation with Windows Server 2008 Remote Server Administration Tools; Active Directory Explorer and some custom/hand built ADSI based tools.  I’ll be pushing tests of the custom tools from Visual Studio on the host to the virtualized Vista box in the team because I don’t want to directly mess with the virtualized DC.  Now to get the directory backup loaded so I can do some offline spelunking.

Lightweight Portable Security – access .mil portal from public computer

SPI has put out a bootable live Linux ISO with CAC support.  It’s called “Lightweight Portable Security”. Very nice (in my opinion) if you need to get onto a .mil portal like the AF Portal from a public computer.  Downloading it now to setup in a virtual machine and USB CAC reader.  Hopefully it works out.

General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory

Recommend surfing the  very cool robotics research from the GRASP lab.

MP3 tagging - foobar2000

Just noticed how jacked up my MP3 tags were when I copied some mp3s over to my phone.  Lifehacker had some recommendations for MP3 tagging for Windows boxes.  I ended up going with foobar2000.

Install MySQL Connector/J for use from Eclipse

I already had a JDK, Eclipse, and MySQL installed but I needed to install the MySQL Connector/J so I could use it with the Eclipse SQL Explorer plugin to access the database with JDBC instead of the JDCB-ODBC bridge.  There are many ways to get the job done.  Here is what I did:

First I downloaded MySQL Connector/J; created a directory “C:\Devel\Java\JRE\ext”; extracted the binary jar for the driver from the download and copied the  mysql-connector-java-3.1.14-bin file into “C:\Devel\Java\JRE\ext”.

Started Eclipse; in the preferences dialog edited the settings for the Installed JREs.

Specifically, I used the “Add External JARs…” to add the MySQL connector I put in C:\Devel\Java\JRE\ext.

First select the installed JRE you want to edit.

Next “Add External JARS…”

Then you should see the driver show up in the “JRE system libraries” list.

Now I have a working MySQL Connector/J JDBC driver ready for use with Eclipse projects. Yay!

Clear resume state from a paused VMWare VM

Had a team that I copied from another location with saved resume state that was not compatible with the new host workstation.  As mentioned here I deleted the *.vmem and *.vmss files while VMWare was off then resumed the team on the new host.