We've all been there. You create a virtual machine thinking it'll be a small utility, so you only give it a 20gb virtual hard drive. But its use unexpectedly grows. All of a sudden that 20gb limit is a problem. You could recreate the machine from scratch, but that would take a long time. Here's how you can do it, if you're using VirtualBox, extremely simply.
First, shut the guest OS down completely. You might be able to do this when paused/suspended, but personally I wouldn't risk it.
Second, in a terminal, type the following command:
VBoxManage modifyhd <path/to/vdi/or/vmdk> --resize <new-size-in-mb>
So when I wanted to resize a 20gb drive to 35gb, I ran:
VBoxManage modifyhd /users/adam/vm/my_vm/my_vm.vdi --resize 35840
This only takes a second or two.
Full documentation for the VBoxManage utility is here. I believe you also need to have chosen to install the command line tools during your VirtualBox install. (Why wouldn't you?)
This increases the "physical" size of the (virtual) drive, but does not touch the partitions it creates. At the moment I only have Windows VM's, so here's how you finish up from inside a Windows guest. I'm using Windows 7.
Boot your VM back up. Right click on "Computer" on the desktop and choose "Manage". Select "Disk Manaement" in the "Storage" section. Note that the drive now has unallocated space:
Right click on that partition that you want to expand, and select "Extend Volume...":
Then just accept all of the defaults that the wizard provides, and it will fill up the unallocated space of the partition.
There you have it. Done. Quick and easy.
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Misc
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November 28 2011
This morning I found this gem in my spam folder:
Normally I would just delete it and go about my day, but there is obviously something clever going on here in an (unsuccessful) attempt to thwart the spam filters, and I wanted to see what.
When I increased the font size of the message, it looked like this:
I have to give them some credit for trying; and it just goes to show that spammers will continue developing new techniques for bypassing content filters, and hopefully that mail clients will continue to get better at stopping them.
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December 13 2010
I'm a bit of a pack-rat, at least when it comes to my email. Add to that my Type-A affinity for organization, and you find yourself square in the middle of Email Routing Rule Hell. When I first started adding rules to Outlook, I made the rookie mistake of creating 1 rule per sender; and I quickly wound up with hundreds of rules, which makes things unmanageable, and fast. I just wanted to post some tips here to hopefully help the pour lost souls out there that might be making the same mistakes I was. Do not give up! There is hope, friends!
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June 14 2010
I'm working on a webservice that has the potential to be quite dangerous. In the wrong hands, it could be used to spoof email, calendar, etc data from any person in our organization. So you can imagine that there is some concern about restricting access, even in development.
Since I'm working on my local machine, I simply need to limit access to this website in IIS to one specific IP address: localhost (127.0.0.1). In the days of IIS6, this was fairly easily done in the website properties dialog. On the directory security tab there were options to restrict to certain IP addresses or ranges.
These days, I'm on Windows 7, which comes with IIS7. And in IIS7, (of course!) this functionality has been buried. So I'm posting this both to help others, as well as to be a reminder for myself later down the road when I want to do this again.
The first thing you need to do is open up Control Panel > Programs and Features, and from there, choose Turn Windows Features on or off. Navigate to Internet Information Services > World Wide Web Services > Security and enable IP Security.
After you do this, you'll need to run iisreset before the change takes effect. If you have UAC enabled, be sure to run your command dialog as an administrator, otherwise you won't be able to run iisreset.
Lastly, to create the restrictions, open up the IIS Manager and select the website that you want to restrict. Open the IP Address and Domain Restrictions module, and then in the actions panel (on the right side) choose Edit Feature Settings.... To only allow local browsing, you should deny by default. Choose Deny from the dropdown, and hit OK. Then add your exceptions -- the IP's or ranges that you want to allow access to. To do that, choose Add Allow Entry... from the action panel, and add all the exceptions you need.
These changes should take effect immediately.
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May 14 2010
