Ever feel the need to mount a Windows or Linux .vmdk on windows, I have. Here are a couple of utilities that make it possible to open Linux and Windows .vmdks on Windows in read-only mode or read/write mode.

Virtual Disk Driver for Windows (http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vdk.html)
Ext2IFS - Ext2/3 file system driver for windows. Required to mount Linux Virtual disks on windows (http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html)

I have been using SYDI for quite a while now. The 2.0 release of sydi-server has added some nice features, the ability to generate Word output from .xml files is huge. The only think that I found to be annoying is that the sydi-transform.vbs script does allow the input of an entire directory.

cscript.exe sydi-transform.vbs -xServer.xml -sServerhtml.xsl -oServer.html

This can make the transformation process from .xml to .html fairly labor intensive for a large environment. This little script solves that problem.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# syntax: perl transform.pl dir_where_xml_files_live
# e.g. - perl transform.pl ./xmlfiles
# Will walk the file system and output filename.xml.html for each .xml file
#
# Edit these variables to match the location on your system
$pathtotransform=”g:/sydi/tools/sydi-transform.vbs”;
$pathtoxsl=”g:/sydi/xml/serverhtml.xsl”;

#DO NOT EDIT BELOW THIS LINE
$dirtoget=”$ARGV[0]“;

opendir(IMD, $dirtoget) || die(”Cannot open directory”);
@thefiles= readdir(IMD);
closedir(IMD);

foreach $f (@thefiles)
{
unless ( ($f eq “.”) || ($f eq “..”) )
{
system “cscript $pathtotransform -x$f -s$pathtoxsl -o$dirtoget\/$f.html”;
}
}

It has been a few weeks since my last post. I have been really busy kicking off a new initiative and working on a number of other projects. I am knee deep in a VMware replication whitepaper which is slow going just because of all the documentation and my home lab just is not really equipped enough to handle all the things I want to try and document. In my next few posts I will provide some of details that will eventually be found in the complete whitepaper. Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know I am still alive.