Van xkcd.com.

Last week I attended a course at Commvault in Oberhausen, Germany. The course was “QiNetix Galaxy System Administration Level I”.

There was a lab setup for the students with Wyse Thin Clients connected to a Dell PowerEdge 850 with 2Gigs of RAM. Nice hardware setup. During the labs we also had some virtual servers running in MS Virtual PC 2004 (a pity, i prefer using VMware)…

Because we are running NetWare 6.5 at our company I was interested in how Commvault would work on that OS. The solution of course was to install it in VPC, but then i ran into a problem with the network driver of the virtual machine.

The solution was quite easy, as Novell delivers some unsupported drivers with it’s OS.

During installation the next error will occur:

No network board driver has been selected.
Press [enter] to continue.

This is how to continue when you experience this error:
Press [Enter] to accept the error message.
Select Modify and Press [Enter] twice
Press [Ins] twice to add an unsupported driver
Press [F3] to enter the driver location
Specify c:\nwserver\drivers\upsupdrv as location and press [enter]
The driver named DC21X4.LAN will appear. Select it by pressing [enter]

You can now continue installing Netware on Virtual PC.

Another interesting read might be this: Running NetWare 6 Under VMware Workstation for Windows.
The solution provided here (using the nw5-idle.nlm in the Netware guest) will work with VPC too. Without running this Idle manager Netware will use 100% CPU, you will not regret using it.

Since i primarily use Linux and Mac on the desktop at home, i sometimes point visitors to MSN Web Messenger when they want to IM. This way they don’t need to learn to work with a new program (Adium/GaimPidgin/Kopete) as the Web Messengers interface is quite the same as the original one.

There is only one drawback in using this messenger, they do not offer the option to disable the sound alerts you get when a contact comes online, or when a message is received.

I posted an inquiry to Microsoft to ask for this feature. In the meanwhile i kept searching for a solution, this is what i found:

Short version (how to disable it):

• Create a new AdBlock rule, and filter the following address: http://*.webmessenger.msn.com/*.wav

Long Version (how i found it):

• i signed in to Web Messenger using a Squid HTTP proxy server.
• I then played with Web Messenger a little, enough to make it beep (for example: when you are in a conversation with someone, and you do not have focus on that window, you will be alerted through a little sound)
• After that i checked my proxy server’s logfile for the existence of .wav documents
• # grep "\.wav" /var/log/squid/access.log*
• What i found where these two matches, the first one is the ‘new message’ sound, the other is the ‘user online’ notification:
• http://sc.webmessenger.msn.com/10.1.0323.0/session/sound/type.wav
• http://sc.webmessenger.msn.com/10.1.0323.0/session/sound/online.wav
• Being a Firefox user i have the ability to filter the content i download with an Add-on called AdBlock. I created a new rule, and filtered the following address:
• http://*.webmessenger.msn.com/*.wav

So there you have it, a silent MSN Web Messenger. It took a little time to find it out, but it was more then worth it.