Final Fantasy XIII-2 Ending Rant

Sorry, but this is a non-technical post.  So if you're only looking for the system administration type stuff, you can skip over this one.  I just needed a place to rant.  This post also contains a spoiler for the new video game Final Fantasy XIII-2, so stop reading unless you want to see it.

With that said, on to the rant...

I've been a huge fan of the Final Fantasy franchise ever since its early days.  I'm also more forgiving of others for titles in the franchise that most people deem unpopular.  Probably because the ones that are good, are so good, in my opinion, that I'm willing to look past the shortcomings of the other titles.  For instance, I thought Final Fantasy XIII was a good game.  I certainly don't think it was the best game in the series, but I also didn't jump on the "this game sucks" bandwagon that many chose to. 

I purchased a copy of Final Fantasy XIII-2 just a couple of days after its release.  I spent most of this weekend playing it non-stop.  I thought the game was great.  It was fun and it looked beautiful.  It seemed like Square Enix had accounted for and rectified most of the complaints people had with the first title.  As is usual for me, I wanted to first see the story and ending, so I played through the game quickly and at high enough levels just to get by.  This usually works out until some boss battle at or near the end in which I have to deal with a very precarious balance of healing and attacking in order to achieve a very narrow victory.  This time was no exception.  The final boss battle lasted just about an hour for me.  It was quite a rush, so I was thrilled that I had finished it and sat back to watch the ending. 

Well, the ending takes a turn for the worse and I start wondering what is going to happen next to resolve things.  Then, blammo!  There are those three little words..."To be continued". 

I immediately turned to the internet to see what plans Square Enix has for another sequel.  And I'm shocked at what I find.  Apparently, SE has announced to the press that there are no plans at this time for a sequel to FF XIII-2.  Instead they are suggesting that the game's true ending will be experienced via downloadable content.  And that's where I start to have a problem. 

So, as far as I understand, what they are trying to tell me is that they charged me full price for an incomplete game.  On top of that, they are suggesting that I spend more money on content that will complete that game.  Seems a lot like highway robbery to me.

I'm not 100% against downloadable content.  After all, it can be used to breathe new life into an old game.  Charging me to download side quests that aren't part of the original game is fine.  But the ending?!  When I pay almost $60 for a video game, I expect it to have a beginning, middle, and end.  You've left off the ending this time.  Do I get some of my money back now?  Or surely you're at least going to let everyone who bought the game access the ending for free, right?
 

Home Virtualization Server

I chose to install Citrix XenServer 6 on my server.  The bad news is that Citrix doesn't offer a management console for Linux or a web console, so it's next to impossible to manage your virtual environment without a Windows machine.  I found a project called OpenXenManager that tries to fill that void.  I installed it on my Ubuntu machine by following some instructions I found (see below).

sudo apt-get install subversion python-glade2 python-gtk-vnc

svn co https://openxenmanager.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/openxenmanager openxenmanager 

cd openxenmanager/trunk 

./openxenmanager 

I first had to edit the openxenmanager file in the trunk directory and replace the occurrence of python2 with python before it would run correctly.

I'm glad I was able to find OpenXenManager because it does allow me to do a lot of management tasks directly from my Linux workstation.  However, it is not a polished product.  It will occasionally lock up or crash.  I also didn't see a way to activate my XenServer installation from the OpenXenManager interface.  Same goes for applying patches to XenServer.  But I was able to use it to install a few Windows server guests.

Ironically, it doesn't work so well for Linux guests.  At least for the Ubuntu 10.04 releases I have tried to install using it.  Actually, it will install an HVM Linux guest without any problems.  But with HVM you don't get features like live migration.  For that, the virtual machine needs to be running in paravirtualized mode (PV).  Doing this from OpenXenManager is a lot of extra work than doing it from the Windows-based XenCenter console.  And even when I did this from OpenXenManager, I still couldn't access the console of the VM.  I could, however, access the console from XenCenter.  Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the latest SVN release of OpenXenCenter is still the equivalent of XenCenter 5.something instead of the latest version 6 release.

Speaking from experience, if you have a motherboard that supports it, make sure you disable AMD's Cool & Quiet feature in your BIOS.  Before I disabled this, VM guest installation was incredibly slow.  It sped up tremendously with this feature disabled.

Other than the stuff I mentioned above, XenCenter 6 is doing a great job.  Honestly, if you running this in a Windows environment, I don't think you'll have any issues.  Most of my complaints so far are based around the fact that Citrix isn't planning to offer a Linux management console.  Even better would be a web based management interface.  Something that would work across most platforms with a browser. 

Switching Desktops at Home

Yesterday I changed out my primary desktop machine at home.  I decided my existing desktop would be better served as a host server for my virtual machines.  Since I still like having a machine other than my laptop, I found an old HP Pavilion a220n in my junk collection (c'mon you know you have stuff lying around like this, too).  I installed Ubuntu 11.10 on it and it's running surprisingly well.  There is a slight delay when launching programs and it certainly isn't nearly as "zippy" as my six core machine, but I think it'll be fine for a while.  Since I still have a four core processor that I'm not using, I may look at ordering a motherboard and building a new desktop.  Until then, the old pavilion will have to do.

Update:   I decided the delays on the pavilion when launching applications were a bit too much for me.  If I had a decent video card that would fit in one of the PCI slots in that machine, it might improve.  I think the onboard video is my main bottleneck (or at least a bottleneck).  I remembered that I had another AMD Athlon 64 system in my closet.  I have since hooked that system up and loaded Ubuntu on it.  It seems to be running much more smoothly.  I think I'll stick with it for a while. 

Web Conferencing and VOIP

I realized that I was missing something with OpenMeetings.  With WebEx, I get a phone number for the conference that participants can dial into.  It looks like OpenMeetings was designed only for web based conferencing.  From what I've read on mailing lists, the devs suggest that you hire someone familiar with the telcom aspect to help build an integration for you.  This is a little disappointing, but I still like OpenMeetings as a conferencing tool. 

This also made me realize that I don't really have any experience with VOIP.  Well, at least outside of the enterprise with an Avaya PBX.  I'd like to do something on a smaller scale with something like Asterisk.  I think I'll start coming up with a plan to introduce an Asterisk box into my home.  I don't have a land line, so it would kind of fill that void.

I'll post more about this as things start to develop with it.  I'm fairly lazy, so it might take a while.   

Linux and Active Directory Integration

I've been down the road of integrating Linux machines with Active Directory before.  I thought I had pretty much done it all.  I've installed the Unix tools on Windows domain controllers before.  I've setup a Samba 3 PDC that used OpenLDAP for authentication for all Linux and Windows clients.  I've even setup an alpha release of Samba 4 for Active Directory services instead of a Windows domain controller.  My favorite option thus far has been using Samba 4.  Of course, Samba 4 isn't quite ready for prime time yet.  It is just an alpha release at this point, after all.  Some things still don't work quite right (or at all), such as allowing Exchange to extend the schema during installation.

I'm writing now to tell you about something I just found out about.  It's called Likewise Open.  Actually, I think that it's most recent name is Powerbroker Identity Services Open Edition.  I'm still going to call it Likewise Open, though.  In short, it's an application that allows you to very easily join a Linux machine to an Active Directory domain.  Once joined, you can login to your Linux box using your AD credentials.  It even supports changing your AD password from Linux.  You know, if you're required to change your password every so often by policy.

The tool, like most Linux apps, supports command line usage.  It also has a simple GUI that allows you to join or remove a workstation from AD.  If you use a Debian based distro like Ubuntu or Mint, it's even available in the repos.  I tested it on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and joined a Windows 2003 AD domain in a matter of minutes.  The only tweak I had to make was to replace the "hosts" line in /etc/nsswitch.conf with "hosts:  files dns".  After that, joining the domain was a cinch.

I'm very impressed with Likewise Open.  I can definitely see how valuable it could be in an enterprise environment.  BeyondTrust, the company that makes the product has some commercial versions with extra features as well.  According to their website, with the "enterprise" version of their product you can define Group Policy Objects for your Linux machines.  You can even manage AD (think ADUC) from a Linux workstation.  They offer a trial download on their site, but you have to fill out a form and someone from BeyondTrust will contact you with the download details.  That is what is keeping me from testing what sounds like an awesome product.  If you want me to buy your product, just let me download a trial immediately.  Don't make me talk to one of your sales goons.  I'd rather your product speak for itself instead of having to listen to some sales pitch.  Don't get me wrong, I'm very intrigued by what you have to offer, but I'm not giving your personally identifiable information for something that I might decide isn't even a good match for me or my company.

But as far as Likewise Open goes, you should all try it out.  You'll be amazed at how easy it is to install and start using.    

Big Blue Button Web Conferencing

A few days ago, I mentioned that I had found an awesome open source web conferencing software (ala WebEx) called Big Blue Button.  I am now looking at alternatives to BBB. 

Don't get me wrong, I really, really like Big Blue Button.  It just seems to me to be a bit more of a developers tool.  It doesn't integrate well with things that I would see a business needing, such as with calendaring systems for scheduling meetings in advance.  Granted, they do say it is intended for educational institutions and not for the corporate world.  There are some integrations already built for several Content Management Systems, but those are no good if you don't have a need for a CMS.  I even tried one of those integrations and found that it still lacked certain features that I wanted.  They do offer an API so you can perform such integrations with your existing applications, but if you're not a developer, you might just be wasting your time. 

Right now my focus is on a project called OpenMeetings.  Honestly, I don't like it as much as Big Blue Button, but it seems to fit all my needs.  I can even tell OpenMeetings to allow my Active Directory users to log in and schedule meetings instead of having to maintain a separate database of user accounts.  There are some things that bother me about OpenMeetings, though.  One of which is the lack of a "raise hand" button.  You can achieve the same result by clicking on a button that is used to request "Moderator" permissions.  It will show up on the screen as "<user> has a question".  It will have a check mark and an "X" next to it.  If the moderator clicks the check mark, then that user will be granted "Moderator" permissions for that meeting.  This can be misleading as it never says, "so and so is requesting new permissions", it just says "so and so has a question".  Little stuff like that always finds a way to irk me.

Overall, OpenMeetings does seem to put me much closer to an out-of-the-box experience than Big Blue Button.  And that's the reason I'm now putting my focus into using OpenMeetings.

Migrating Exchange Mailboxes from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010

After adding an Exchange 2010 server to my lab, I wanted to shut down my Exchange 2003 server.  Before I could do that, though, I needed to migrate the Exchange 2003 mailboxes to the new 2010 database.  Fortunately, this can be done from the EMC on the 2010 server.

Unfortunately, after I tried to migrate one of the mailboxes, I noticed that the process was failing after a couple of minutes.  I fired up the handy dandy Exchange 2010 Powershell prompt and used the command "get-moverequeststatistics -id <mailbox name>.  It showed me that it was failing at 95% completion due to a problem with msExchVersion.

I fired up ADSI Edit and located msExchVersion in the schema for that particular user.  Sure enough, it was null.  I guess the migration process was expecting some value there and failing because the field was empty.  I looked at that field on a user I had added an Exchange 2010 mailbox for and just copied the value for msExchVersion to each of my old 2003 mailbox users.  After doing that the migration worked without a hitch.

I'm sure there must be some way to correct this in one fell swoop, but since I didn't have that many accounts, I chose to just add the value to each user manually.  This would have been a pain in a large organization, though.