In theory, you should be able to simply set up Internet Sharing on your Windows Mobile device with Bluetooth PAN. Then on your Mac, simply create a BlueTooth PAN connection. The problem with this is that you run the risk of eating up your mobile device’s battery much quicker as its using its 3G connection and its bluetooth connection simultaneouslly. Even though it should work, I never could get it going, anyways. Ideally, we want to plug the phone in via USB, so that it is charging while sharing its connection. OSX won’t support the standard ActiveSync USB Internet Sharing method, so you’ll need to do a little work to get it going.

First download these files

Unzip and Copy all three files to /Library/Modem Scripts

Back on your Windows Mobile device, in the USB connection settings, change USB to mode to MODEM instead of ActiveSync. You may get a warning here that ActiveSync won’t work when Modem is selected. Remember to change it back later when you are ready to sync up again with a Windows computer. Once you’ve selected modem, plug your device into your Mac via USB.

Now, go to your Network Preferences menu.

On the left side, you should see your list of Network Interfaces. Click the little “+” sign to add an interface. Click Interface drop down menu, and you should see a choice for “Samsung CDMA Technologies”. Go ahead and choose it, and click CREATE. it should populate itself on the left-hand pane now.

Highlight the new Samsung Entry, and on the right side make the following entries:

Configuration: Default

Telephone Number: wap.cingular

Account Name: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM

Password: CINGULAR1

Now click Advanced…

On the Modem Tab, make sure Vendor is Samsung and Model is GPRS (GSM/3G)

On the PPP tab:

For Session, Uncheck “Redial if Busy”

Next to Settings, choose CONFIGURATION and select “Send PPP echo packets” and uncheck: Use TCP header compression.

Apply all these changes and lock the Network Preferences, and you’re ready to test.

Its a good idea when testing to disable your Wi-Fi so you can be sure you’re genuinely using your mobile devices WAN.

Now, highlight the Samsung modem, and on the right side, click CONNECT. If all goes correct, you should see a little meter with your connection strength, and you should now be able to surf the web. Go for it!

First, shut down the virtual guest with the full hard drive. Once it’s shut down, commit any snapshots to disk by deleting all snapshots in the snapshot manager.

Connect to your ESX server host via console or ssh, and navigate to the directory where the .vmdk files reside for this guest. Decide on a size that you want to increase your hard drive to. Make sure to leave room for future services packs and patches, etc.,

type this:

vmkfstools t -X 50g myvmguest.vmdk

Replace myvmguest with the appropriate vmdk file name and replace 50g with the appropriate size for your environment.

It should only take a second or two, as all its doing is making a change to the file’s header so it thinks its now larger than it was.

Now, go grab a copy of GPARTED here. Download the ISO. In the CD-ROM Settings for your Virtual Guest, point it to the ISO you just downloaded. You may need to SCP this file to the server. Make sure its set to CONNECTED and CONNECT AT STARTUP.

Now power on the virtual guest, but quickly get keyboard control and hit ESC to choose another boot device. Choose CD and the GPARTED live CD should fire up.

Answer the keyboard questions when they come up. After a minute or so, GPARTED should load up and discover your hard drives automatically.

You should see a visual representation of your boot drive now, with a bunch of free space at the endthe partition. Right-click on the partition and choose Resize/Move. Drag the slider to increase the partition to the new size. Click Resize. Click Apply at the top. Depending on the size of your partition, this may take a while. Check the progress, and when its done, quit, reboot back into Windows.

Your boot drive should now be larger.  No charge.

Windows Mobile 6.5 Running on HTC from Jesus Diaz on Vimeo.

Here’s what the home screen looks like on the BlackJack II.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:32399c2b-866b-4dc3-868e-f18de0efd390&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Demo: Windows Mobile 6.1 Home Screen">Video: Demo: Windows Mobile 6.1 Home Screen</a>

WinDirStat

Here are three FREE tools you can use- one for each OS- Windows, OSX and Linux. They are all fairly similar.

WindirStat (Windows) – Great graphical disk analysis tool. Lots of custom settings like # of threads, color coding, etc.,This program is fast. Its good for running against a shared directory to see who’s taking up all the disk space.

Disk Inventory X (OSX) – The author says that this was written to be like WindirStat, so its basically the same thing. Although it doens’t seem quite as feature rich. Gets the job done on a Mac.

Disk Inventory X

KDirstat (Linux) – Supposedly, Windirstat is a clone of this bit of software. Although it’s a KDE program it will run in any X11 environment.

KDirStat

All three of these programs can help recover disk space, and keep that old hard dirve from filling up quite as fast.

Svchost.exe is a generic host process name for services that run from dynamic-link libraries (DLLs) within the Microsoft Windows operating system.

In XP you can run the following command to see what services are behind each svchost:

tasklist /svc /fi "imagename eq svchost.exe"

Alternately, you can run this great FREE piece of software called SVCHOST viewer. It’s a nifty little gui to let you see vital info about each svchost instance.   Check it out here…

In computing, the iSCSI (for “Internet SCSI“) protocol allows clients (called initiators) to send SCSI commands (CDBs) to SCSI storage devices (targets) on remote servers. It is a popular Storage Area Network (SAN) protocol, allowing organizations to consolidate storage into data center storage arrays while providing hosts (such as database and web servers) with the illusion of locally-attached disks.

There are a number of high-end hardware/software solutions you can use, but if you’ve got a small home or office network that you need to add some storage to and you have a spare PC laying around, you should be able to add quite a bit of storage on the cheap.

I won’t go into all the dirty details of how to set this up, but here’s basically what I did to test this with VMWare:

• First I loaded Vmware ESXi on a spare server with only a very small hard drive and dual GB NICs. Got it up and running and manageable with VMware infrastructure client.
• Next, I found a spare PC with a Gigabit NICand threw an extra IDE hard drive in it. It now had a 30GB and a 80GB hard drive in it. I downloaded OPENFILER and installed it on the 30GB hard drive. OpenFiler allows you to share hard drive space to your network clients in a variety of different ways including NFS, SMB, and for this test – iSCSI.  No problems. It found all my important hardware – NIC, Drives, etc.,
• I decided I would carve the 80GB disk into two “volumes” for this test. 30 GB which I shared via iSCSI. and 50GB which I shared as SMB (Windows).
• There are a few steps to creating the iSCSI target on OPENFILER  which I’ll post some other time. In VMWARE I configured the  iSCSI Software Adapter to point to the OPENFILER address and like magic , the ESX server has 30GB of usable space to build VM’s on. Nice! Windows, Linux, and OSX all have free iSCSI software initiators so I could have just as easily have test with either of them.
• I created another 50GB EXT3 volume in OPENFILER, turned on SMB/CIFS service, configured the SMB share, and then it showed up on my network as \\ipaddress\share.  Sweet!
• I went through the usual steps of installing Windows in the new iSCSI attached space and it worked fine. In the real world, you’d use dedicated NIC’s, perhaps Gigabit switches, redundant hard drives, authentication, etc., but for my test I think the performance was adequate, and I got a good feel for how to configure the different pieces of software.

OpenFiler also supports all kinds of nifty features like replication, snapshots, High Availability, etc., Did I mention it’s FREE?  Go Get OPENFILER….

Its great for home machines, too. I came across this software on Lifehacker recently that’s free (personal edition) and looks easy to use. Try it out…

http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm