[fedora-virt] Got Windows guests?

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Thu Oct 29 18:59:04 UTC 2009


Hello fellow Fedora, libvirt and libguestfs users,

If you have any Windows guests, then you can help Fedora to support
Windows guests better by spending a few minutes testing the Windows
Registry feature we just added to libguestfs 1.0.75.

You will need:

 - A Windows NT/200x/XP/Vista/7/... guest

 - Fedora 12 or Fedora Rawhide host

 - libguestfs-tools >= 1.0.75
     (from updates or
      http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=8391
      )
 - a few minutes of your time

The tests:

(1) Run the virt-win-reg commands shown in the following web page,
  where "MyWinGuest" should be replaced with the name of the Windows
  guest as known to libvirt:

  http://libguestfs.org/virt-win-reg.1.html#examples

  Do the commands run without any errors?

  Does the output look sensible?

  If you have several Windows guests, please try as many different
  sorts as possible!

(2) Download the registry binary files and try to convert them to XML:

  guestfish -i MyWinGuest --ro <<'EOF'
  download win:\windows\system32\config\software software
  download win:\windows\system32\config\system system
  download win:\windows\system32\config\sam sam
  download win:\windows\system32\config\security security
  EOF

  hivexml software > software.xml
  hivexml system > system.xml
  hivexml sam > sam.xml
  hivexml security > security.xml

  Do those commands run without error?

  If there's an error, try adding the hivexml -k option.

  Does the XML look complete?  (Try running the XML through
  tidy -xml -indent -quiet < foo.xml | less
  )

I hope you don't find any bugs, but if you do:

  Send a reply to this message, or report a bug in Bugzilla:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?component=libguestfs&product=Virtualization+Tools

  It's useful to include the following details:

    HIVEX_DEBUG=1 hivexml regfile 2>&1 > log.out

    The Registry file itself that is failing (but note that Registry
    files can contain sensitive data).

It's also useful to have positive feedback ("it worked!").

Thanks for any testing you can give, and if you have any other
suggestions for handling Windows guests from Fedora, please let me
know.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any
software inside the virtual machine.  Supports Linux and Windows.
http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/




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