1. Open Admin command prompt or powershell
2. Remove the unused KMS key: slmgr -upk
3. Install your MAK key: slmgr -ipk XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX
4. Activate Windows

For a raw filesystem try:

fdisk -l harddrive.img
mount -o ro,loop,offset=xxxxxxxxx harddrive.img /mnt/loop

or for filesystems with volume groups etc try:

losetup /dev/loop0 disk.img
kpartx -a /dev/loop0

Then to mount the first partition:

mount /dev/mapper/loop0p1 /mnt

Or to activate the volume group then mount the logical volume:

vgscan
vgchange -ay vg
mount /dev/vg/lv /mnt

Hope that helps.

It seems that Nagios is logging in two places on my CentOS 7 build.
Once in /var/log/nagios/nagios.log and also in /var/log/messages.

Considering I like my builds nice and tidy and don’t want contamination of my log files, I needed to filter out Nagios using rsyslog.

Because rsyslog processes it’s rules in order, we need to insert the following rule

# Stop nagios going into messages - it already has a log
if $programname == 'nagios' then stop

before:

# Log anything (except mail) of level info or higher.
# Don't log private authentication messages!
*.info;mail.none;authpriv.none;cron.none                /var/log/messages

Then restart rsyslogd!

If you are downloading and opening a lot of documents directly from Firefox. Firefox, by default will write them to disk with read only permission, causing OpenOffice to open them read only. This is annoying if you want to make minor modifications before copying and pasting into a report. The solutions is within Firefox. Go to “about:config” and set “browser.helperApps.deleteTempFileOnExit” to false.

I recently tried to copy a VMDK from ESXi version 6.0 to another server which was version 5.0 It failed the first time due to the virtual hardware being version 11, which isn’t supported on ESXi 5.0.
The next thing I tried, was to copy a VMDK across, that got added to the new virtual machine with no problems but when I attempted to boot the VM I received the following error:

An unexpected error was received from the ESX host while powering on VM vm-622.
Module DevicePowerOn power on failed. 
Unable to create virtual SCSI device for scsi0:1, '/vmfs/volumes/54813a47-8d0eedcc-43c8-001e0bd161d0/yubikey/Yubi-0.vmdk' 
Failed to open disk scsi0:1: Unsupported or invalid disk type 7.  Ensure that the disk has been imported.

I knew that it would be a problem and the solution was a simple one. Having recently migrated 40 KVM based VM’s to ESX, I was quite familiar with vmkfstools. To make the VMDK bootable perform the following:

vmkfstools -d zeroedthick -i server.INPUT.vmdk server.OUTPUT.vmdk

Then attach server.OUTPUT.vmdk as the new virtual harddrive.