Getting Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Customize Properly With Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2

As most people do know, it is possible to get Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Manager to deploy and customize a Linux based OS automatically. Officially Microsoft supports Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as a one of Linux distributions they support, however in practice any Debian like distribution can be supported as long as the locations of the network configuration, hostname configuration and SSH Host Keys are in the same locations as Debian and/or Ubuntu place them.

However in the upcoming Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release, there were some changes that can potentially cause VMM’s guest agent not to customize the virtual machines properly. In order to make VMM’s guest agent to provision correctly there are 2 options:

  • Write your own VMM guest agent
  • Modify a few file paths so Ubuntu 14.04 will look somewhat like Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in terms of network configuration

I choose the latter option. Now I do have a custom VMM Guest Agent written for FreeBSD in Perl, however creating a VMM guest agent for this specific reason isn’t a good utilization of time.

I’ve taken the following actions to make Ubuntu 14.04 to appear like Ubuntu 12.04 by doing the following:

  • Remove the line in the /etc/network/interfaces file where it references to /etc/network/interfaces.d/*.cfg

Surprisingly there’s only one thing you really need to do. There’s more if you decide to be even lazier and download the cloud image provided here, but it’s beyond the scope of this tidbit.

Seriously friendly scanners…

Here’s my word to friendly scanners out there:

Why are you even spoofing the SIP User Agent Cisco-SIPGateway/IOS-12.x anyways? Because doing that will eventually get that UA added to a hot-list.

Of course, I can always do a fail2ban with FreeSWITCH, but seriously?

Tony of FreeSWITCH… Very Funny…

Ha Ha very funny of you…

In case if you’re wondering, yes Tony of FreeSWITCH did add that colorized banner in fs_cli.c with the effect of advertising that ClueCon is coming in a month…

For people who are getting annoyed at it, I’ve reverted that and you can use my patch to get rid of that banner:

From 23526fe0cbd306c9e993e31e679ff8f8f185f14b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Jeff Leung 
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2012 23:28:07 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] Haha very funny...

---
 libs/esl/fs_cli.c         |   11 ++++-------
 libs/esl/src/include/cc.h |    3 ---
 2 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)
 delete mode 100644 libs/esl/src/include/cc.h

diff --git a/libs/esl/fs_cli.c b/libs/esl/fs_cli.c
index 8532e23..408c946 100644
--- a/libs/esl/fs_cli.c
+++ b/libs/esl/fs_cli.c
@@ -916,18 +916,15 @@ static const char *banner =
        "* Paypal Donations Appreciated: paypal@freeswitch.org *\n"
        "* Brought to you by ClueCon http://www.cluecon.com/   *\n"
        "*******************************************************\n"
-       "\n";
-
-static const char *inf = "Type /help  to see a list of commands\n\n\n";
+       "\n"
+       "Type /help  to see a list of commands\n\n\n";

 static void print_banner(FILE *stream)
 {
-#include 
-
 #ifndef WIN32
-       fprintf(stream, "%s%s%s\n%s", output_text_color, banner, cc, inf);
+       fprintf(stream, "%s%s", output_text_color, banner);
 #else
-       fprintf(stream, "%s%s\n%s", banner, cc, inf);
+       fprintf(stream, "%s", banner);
 #endif
 }

diff --git a/libs/esl/src/include/cc.h b/libs/esl/src/include/cc.h
deleted file mode 100644
index 573a7f7..0000000
--- a/libs/esl/src/include/cc.h
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,3 +0,0 @@
-

*Note: This patch isn’t meant to offend anybody. If it did, well there’s not much you can do about it 😛