Author: tabcom

Posted on

Remote Desktop – Accessing Task Manager

Problem

I am connected to a remote server using Remote Desktop.  However, the desktop and start menu fail to initialise properly.  The explorer.exe process appears to be affected somehow.  How can I run Task Manager to run other programs like the Registry Editor or Explorer.exe manually?

Solution

Press the [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[End] keyboard key combination to force Task Manager to appear inside your Remote Desktop (mstsc.exe) session.  From here you can use ‘Run Task’ to launch additional programs.

Posted on

Koozali – Mounting a RAID1 partition from a 2nd server or snapshot backup.

I have an SME server v9 up and running on a VPS (virtual private server).
The provider makes snapshot based backups daily, weekly and monthly.
You can switch to an alternate snapshot in seconds, which works great for an instant full system restore.

Instead of switching you can also attach a snapshotted volume to the live server as an extra hard disk and use this to restore individual files and folders.

When I try to do this I can see the additional hard disk, but I have no idea how to safely mount it properly and browse its content.

Continue reading “Koozali – Mounting a RAID1 partition from a 2nd server or snapshot backup.”

Posted on

Koozali – Virtual Private Server – Extending storage (/dev/vda)

If you clone your VPS to a server with a larger disk, or something goes wrong when expanding your available disk space you may have a situation where your root partition on /dev/vda1 is not taking up all the space available.

For example, here we have a root partition of 10G  on a 30G disk  (commands entered are shown starting with #, notable parts in bold):

# df -Th /
Filesystem     Type  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1      ext4  9.7G  2.6G  7.1G  27% /

# fdisk -l /dev/vda | head -1
Disk /dev/vda: 30 GiB, 32212254720 bytes, 62914560 sectors

 

To expand /dev/vda1 so that it takes up the full 30G available, there are three steps to take:

  1. Take a backup.  While always a good idea, editing the partition table incorrectly will mess up the disk.
  2. Modify the partition table so that /dev/vda1 is 30G in size
  3. Resize the ext3/ext4 partition so that it takes up the new, full size of /dev/vda1

Continue reading “Koozali – Virtual Private Server – Extending storage (/dev/vda)”