Myself and a colleague wasted most of today (and some of yesterday) trying to get a VMWare installation of XP to connect to the office domain, after mucking around with various settings, IP configuration, services and Windows patches we got as far as “access denied”, which we assume is due to our users not having permissions to actually join a domain – although in true Windows fashion, the error message probably relates to something like we’ve got the wrong wallpaper/screensaver or something entirely unrelated to access permissions.

What was odd is that one old VM of XP Home did work for a bit. I even installed SP3 – which took over an hour and seemed to practically completely re-install Windows (which was XP Pro Corp SP2 already). No difference between VMWare Server 1.0.6 on Fedora 7 and Fusion 1.1.2 on MacOSX 10.4.

I also restored my Acronis image of my laptop – which went pretty well, didn’t even have to fix the MBR or reinstall GRUB, just restore from USB disk and reboot. Hopefully next week I’ll get a proper XP installed on there (after I’ve fdisk’ed it and deleted the MBR again!)

I also helped another colleague get IPv6 working on his test server. We basically installed CentOS 5.1 (after Xubuntu 8.04 had really poor performance on the 512Mb Pentium3/1GHz), configured the interface with IPv6 and disabled IPv4, changed Apache’s Listen directive and then tried out ping6 and traceroute6 etc between that and my laptop. For some reason we didn’t manage to get Firefox to connect to the website (even using a DNS entry) but I think that had to do with a static route or interface binding.

My agency is mucking about again – switching our payment terms from two to about six weeks and making us use multiple timesheet systems – Excel/Email, website and paper!