openVPN - GPL?

OpenVPN is a possible use of VPN by small companies. Not too sure if this is for free or there is a small fees. This supports Windows, Linux & Mac clients to access corporate network. Like all VPN, the vpn will issue a new IP address for the communication through the vpn

PCI device drivers database

http://www.pcidatabase.com/

All PCI Drivers have vendor ID. This database enables searching the vendor database by name or by Device ID.

VSS - microsoft Shadow Copy or Volume Snapshot Service

Snapshot on Windows file system provides a stable version in time of all the files.

vssadmin create shadow /for=c:
vssadmin list providers

vss writers are available for the following Windows Services

1. Microsoft Exchange Server
2. Microsoft SQL Server
3. Microsoft Share Point servers

For efficient use of the shadow copy, the log files need to be flushed.

winexe - GPL

WinExe is a software that allows user to execute commands remotely on WindowsNT/2000/XP/2003/Vista systems from GNU/Linux.

http://eol.ovh.org/winexe/

Currently at 0.90 version. Main short coming is the return code from the Windows is not returned.

Watch out for the special characters in the credential are properly escaped.

This is not in active maintenance.

Microsoft's PsExec is the windows flavor of this product.

Xen Virtualization

Free Xen Server download ISO from citrix
http://downloadns.citrix.com.edgesuite.net/akdlm/5158/XenServer-5.6.0-install-cd.iso

Xen also available as LiveCD at http://www.xen.org/download/LiveCD/livecd-xen-3.2-0.8.2-i386.iso & http://www.xen.org/download/LiveCD/livecd-xen-3.2-0.8.2-amd64.iso

Not too sure what's xen Cloud Platform cd

Xen for some reasons don't want to shutdown (poweroff). This could be due to dom0 running on the hypervisor. The system running on Dom0 not able to shutdown the hypervisor.

Hyper-V

Hyper-V comes in 2 flavors

• Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
• part of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2

Standalone Hyper-V server is free to use. The Hyper-V management console has to be from Windows paid products like Windows server 2008 R2.

If you want a reasonable working system, install Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and use the Hyper-V console that comes with it.

The following servers run happily on Hyper-V

1. Windows 2003 32 bit
2. Windows 2003 64 bit
3. windows 2008 32 bit
4. Windows 2008 64 bit
5. Windows SBS 2003 32 bit
6. Windows SBS 2008 64 bit

Caveats (or known limitations)

1. The mouse don't work on remote desktop to Hyper-V console (I would prefer vmware esx/esxi to over come this shortcoming)
   
2. Grub4Dos based boot system has trouble under Hyper-V (This is not an issue with vmware esx/esxi)
   

There are many demo video for installing, configuring and using Hyper-V on YouTube.

Few learning

1. Make sure VT enabled in BIOS
2. Make sure you connect to Legacy Network (non-default) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770380.aspx
3. Dell PowerEdge 1950 (1U) and 2950 (2U) are known good candidates for hosting Hyper-V
   

ETags for caching

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_ETag

http://www.infoq.com/articles/etags

ETags does not seem to be 100% reliable. There is notion of strong & week ETag - still not 100% reliable.

ETag also can be used like Cookie - including tracking purpose.