Month: May 2012

Easily Backup and Restore VMWare Virtual Machines

The Webernets0 comment

Recently, a Webernets reader (Yes, there is at least one person looking at this site) crashed their XP Pro virtual machine, and it made me think about a really quick and easy way to back up and restore a VMWare Virtual Machine in the unfortunate event of a terminal failure.

As VMWare Virtual Machines can grow in size pretty quickly, especially if they are not regularly “cleaned up“, in most cases you will need to use an external hard drive or a very large USB key to store your back up. Whilst it is convenient to keep your back up on the same computer, its also no help to you at all if that computer is the one that fails, so keeping a back up some where else is a pretty good idea. I actually would recommend doing BOTH. You can never have too many back ups in multiple locations – ask any one who has ever had a catastrophic failure!

To get started, you need to locate your Virtual Machines, and this is REALLY easy! Open a finder window, click “Documents”, and you will see a folder called “Virtual Machines”

To back up your virtual machine, simply drag the virtual machine file to your back up destination. As you can see below, I have a virtual machine called “XP with Apps”, which is my main Windows computer, and I would be pretty lost if anything happened to it. I also have a FREENAS server, which is just basically a big hard drive that is attached to my home computer network, and shows up as a “Share”, so to back up my XP Machine, I just drag the virtual machine file onto the Freenas entry in the side bar menu, and let it do its work. As my Virtual Machine is quiet large, it does take some time for it to copy over.

Now that we have our Virtual Machine backed up, you are probably wondering how easy it is to restore it? Its just as easy! Check this out!

To restore a saved virtual machine, just locate it on your back up source (In my case, it is on my Freenas server), and drag it into your virtual machines folder. For this demonstration, I am going to restore my most FAVORITE Linux distro, PUPPY LINUX! I started by dragging the Puppy Linux Virtual Machine from my Freenas server to the desktop on my Mac.

Once the file had copied over, I moved it into the “Virtual Machines” folder in my “Documents” folder with my other virtual machines. Then to begin the restore, just double click the virtual machine file.

When you double click it, a window will pop up asking if you have copied or moved the virtual machine. In this case, we have performed both actions, we have moved, as well as copied the machine. Given the wording in the dialogue box, and the confusion that arises after being presented with a multiple choice question where both answers are applicable, I went with “If you don’t know, answer “I Copied It””, and I clicked “I Copied It”.

Almost instantly, my Puppy Linux virtual machine sprang into life, and before you can say “How the heck did I do that?” my Puppy Linux Virtual Machine was up and running!

Thanks to the folks at VMWare for making this so easy!

How to deal with and block phone spam and unwanted calls on a iPhone

The Webernets0 comment

At least three times a week my phone will ring between 11pm and 4am, repeatedly. When I answer it, there is someone there, who (with a very strong Asian accent) asks for what sounds to me like “Allan”. I have responded pleasantly saying “wrong number’, “not Allan’s phone”, “sorry, you have the wrong number” etc etc etc, to no avail. I hang up and 5 minutes later, the phone rings again…..”Allan…Allan…”……

Your probably saying “Just Turn The Ringer Off”, which is what I do when my wife is at home, but her job requires her to spend on average 1 or 2 weeks a month away from home. When she is away, I really like to leave the phone on so if there is a problem, and she needs me, she can reach me. Not unreasonable.

I set about finding a “Blocking App” in the Apple App Store, and I must say, I was really disappointed not only at the amount of fake apps that are available for purchase, but the fact that Apple has allowed them to be made available for purchase in their store.

After further investigation it seems that Apple doesn’t allow access to the particular part of the iPhones software that would need to be accessed in order to intercept and block an unwanted call…

If you choose to Jailbreak your phone, you have options, but for the 95% of people who use their iPhone as it came, anything you purchase from the App store to block an unwanted number is going to disappoint you!

In short, at this point in time, I can only offer a “Workaround” – A way to deal with the situation. And as my mystery caller shows me no respect, I will now return the favor and publish their number on this site – please call them at 3am!

My mystery caller phones me from two different numbers. They will try two or three times from one number, and then switch lines and try a few more times from another number. To begin handling this problem I created a contact for my unwanted caller with both of the numbers, and called it “Spammer”,

Now that I have created a contact for my phone spammer, I needed a way to silence them! The best I could come up with was a “Non Ring Tone”. A ring tone that doesn’t make any sound. After a bit of searching (and finding fake files, popups, porn links etc) I did find a silent ring tone. To make your life easier, here it is:

SilentRingTone

Once you have downloaded the zip file, extract it so you have the “SilentRing.m4r” in front of you, then open iTunes and connect your phone. On the top left side of the iTunes window, select “Tones”. Once you have Tones open, drag and drop the SilentRing.m4r file into the open field window.

Once the silent ring tone has copied into iTunes, you can now drag it from the iTunes window to your connected iPhone. When you drag the “SilentRing” file over your iPhone in the device menu, I have noticed that all categories seem to highlight/illuminate (in my case a blue color). It doesn’t seem to matter where you drop the ring tone file, it is automatically copied to the right place on your phone.

After dropping the ring tone file, you will need to click the “Sync” button in the bottom right corner of the window to make your changes stick. You may also have to click “Apply” if a pop up window appears.

Once you have successfully copied your new ringtone to your iPhone you can then choose to apply it to your unwanted caller only, that way when they ring at 2am, you don’t hear it, but if your loved one calls with an emergency, your phone will ring normally. To do this, select your unwanted caller/spammer from your contacts, open their information window, and in the top left corner select edit.

A new window will open with more details. As you will see, the ringtone will be set to your phone’s default ringtone.

This is where you can assign different ringtones to different callers. Now that you have a “Silent” ring tone on your phone, it is just a matter of changing this from “Default” to “SilentRing”.

Once you have made your changes (I changed the text message tone to silent as well), click “Done” in the top right hand corner, and your all set. Next time they call, you wont hear a thing! Your phone may still vibrate though, so it might pay you to disable that feature as well if your a light sleeper.