Let me start off by stating that this is NOT supported…..
I wanted to attach a local drive to a VM, but wanted the ability to move this drive to a physical Windows server at a later time without the time consuming data migration or drive reformatting. Although there is no way to do this through the VIC, there is a way to do this in the console.
If you have been configuring Kerberos, you are aware of setting up delegation on computer and service accounts. I recently tried to configure this on a Windows 2008 Domain Controller and was confused as to why the delegation tab was missing. I went through the usual checking of the Domain Functional Level to ensure it was set to at least Windows 2003, but was still unable to see the delegation tab for my service account. I was however, able to access the tab for a computer account. After further investigation, I discovered that the delegation tab will not appear until the account has a servicePrincipalName or SPN. Once I added the appropriate SPN to the account, the delegation tab was accessible.
Whether I am looking to test out a new capability or solution, or simply grabbing screenshots for documentation, I almost always turn to VMware Workstation in order to quickly and easily deploy a test environment in order to get this done. In this post I will show you how to deploy a test environment in VMware workstation. It is assumed that you are familiar with OS deployments and this will not be covered in this article.
VKernel is offering perpetual license for their Capacity Modeler from now through the end of the year. I have not had time to take a look at the product, the price is definitely right to add to the bag of tools I carry around. I will write more on this once I’ve had time to take a look.
Remote access to your servers and workstations through terminal services or RDP is an easy way of doing work away from the office. However, without taking into consideration the security of these connections you are opening up a fairly large whole for someone to exploit. There are many applications and scripts available that a would be attacker can use to gain access to these terminal servers if you simply opened up port 3389 to the rest of the world. Windows 2008 introduced the Terminal Server Gateway and is rebranded as the Remote Desktop Gateway in R2. By using this gateway, you not only provide pre-authorized access to you terminal server, you also gain the benefit of using RPC over HTTPS, eliminating the need for additional ports to be open on you firewall and the ability to use RDP behind most corporate firewalls using port 443.
I have been working in the application consultancy for quite some time and it is hard to remember the last architecture or implementation I have done that has not included VMware. For many of my customers, this was the first time the virtualization concepts became a reality within their datacenter. Although they were aware of virtualization, they had some animosity and overall fear that this technology could actually perform “real” workloads. Often times it took some hard convincing before they would actually accept the proposed architecture.
Duncan Epping over at Yellow Bricks has posted a great article explaining the inner-workings of VMware DRS. Like he states in his article, I have never had to trouble shoot any DRS issues and have taken for granted that it just works. It is good to understand what is actually taking place under the hood. Thanks Duncan!!
With the recent update to OS version 3.1, AT&T closed the hole that allowed many of us to tether our iPhone’s to our laptops. I was not one of those individuals that used their phone to download large amounts of data, but rather, I used tethering for many of the tasks I would normally use my phone for in the first place (email, web-browsing, chat, etc…), only on a much larger screen and keyboard. I recently jailbroke my phone and found an app called MyWi, which, once again, brings back the beloved tethering. Although you still have the standard USB / Bluetooth tethering options, MyWi adds the ability to set up a wifi ad-hoc network, allowing you to connect to your phones connection over wifi. You are even able to connect more than one device utilizing wifi at the same time. The app costs $9.99, but if you have a jailbroke iPhone and are looking for a tethering option, I would definitely recommend purchasing MyWi
I recently installed ISA Server 2006 and was unable to add the second server to the array. While investigating the issue, I could see RPC failures in the log. It was showing that the traffic was being allowed by one of the system rules, but the server failed to connect. I was able to telnet to the target domain controller on port 135 with the Microsoft Firewall disabled, but as soon as the firewall was running this communication would quit functioning. I was able to overcome the issue by changing the following registry keys:
Paul Buckle over at xtravirt has created a very useful batch file for downloading all the VMware documentation. This makes a really handy offline reference library especially if you need the information at the speed of fast. You will need to register in order to download this, but it is worth the registration. Thanks Paul. You can find the download link here
