I found this and thought it was motivating:

My experience is that there is no such thing as “A Marine”. Oh, there are individual Marines, but not singular Marines. There is one Marine, there is Marine by himself, but no such thing as “a Marine”. The very word is plural in its spirit. Every Marine who ever earned the title United States Marine is permanently connected to every other Marine that ever wore the Eagle, Globe and Anchor. From the first recruit, to the last we are bound together by the Corps’ Values: honor, courage, commitment. By our shared history. We are connected by blood. They are the bedrock of the character of Marines. Like links in a chain stretching from first to last, always faithful to each other, to our mission, to our country.

On November 10, 1775, the Continental Congress commissioned Samuel Nicholas to raise 2 Battalions of Marines. That day, Nicholas set up shop in Tun Tavern (Philadelphia), and appointed the proprietor, Robert Mullan, the job of chief Marine Recruiter . Prospective recruits flocked to the tavern, lured by cold beer and the opportunity to serve in the new Corps of Marines.

On March 20, 1779, Capt. William Jones, USMC, advertised for "a few good men" to enlist in the Corps. The term seemed ideally suited for Marines, fueled by the implication that "a few" of the right men, “good men”, would be enough. The term has become synonymous with U.S. Marines.

Semper Fidelis, the official motto, was adopted in 1883. From the Latin, Semper Fidelis means "Always Faithful." Other terms like First to Fight, Once a Marine, Always a Marine, Gung-Ho, and OOH-RA have united marines over our 230 year history.

The heroes of the Corps, Smedley Butler, Dan Daly, Presley O’Bannon, Archibald Henderson, "Chesty" Puller, and John Archer Lejeune, are linked with names like:

Charles Colson, John Glenn, Charles Swindoll, F. Lee Bailey, James Baker, John Basilone, Robert Bork, Art Buchwald, Steve McQueen, Oliver North, Ken Norton, Lee Trevino, Montel Williams, Bea Arthur, Philip Caputo, Drew Carey, Rod Carew, James Carville, Eddie Collins, Don Adams, Mike Anderson, Paul Arizin, Monte Barrett, Hank Bauer, Hugh Brannum, Roberto Clemente, David Dinkins, Art Donovan, Terry Downes, Buster Drayton, Nick Barone, R. Lee Ermey, Don & Phil Everly, Bill Fitch, Glenn Ford, Christopher George, Gene Hackman, Sterling Hayden, Ira Hayes, Elroy "Crazy Legs" Hirsch, Gil Hodges, "Don" Imus, George Jones, Bob Keeshan, Raymond W. Kelly, Jim Lehrer, Jim Mora, Zell Miller, Ray Mercer, Steve McQueen, Ed McMahon, Lee Marvin, Robert A. Lutz, Pete Wilson, Chuck Wepner, Mike Weave,r John Warner, Robert Wagner, Bill Veeck, Gene Tunney, Lee Trevino, Leon Spinks, Frederick W. Smith, George Schultz, George C. Scott, Buddy Rich, Burt Reynolds, Tyrone Power, Bum Phillips, George Peppard, Sam Peckinpah, Ted Williams, Nicks, and thousands more…

From General John A. Lejeune’s Birthday Message for 1921-

On November 10, 1775, a Corps of Marines was created by a resolution of the Continental Congress. Since that date, many thousand men have borne the name Marine. In memory of them, it is fitting that we who are Marines should commemorate the Birthday of our Corps by calling to mind the glories of its long and illustrious history.

The record of our Corps is one which will bear comparison with that of the most famous military organizations in the world’s history. During 90 of the 146 years of its existence, the Marine Corps has been in action against the Nation’s foes. From the Battle of Trenton to the Argonne, Marines have won foremost honors in war and in the long era of tranquility at home. Generation after generation of Marines have grown gray in war in both hemispheres and in every corner of the seven seas [so] that our country and its citizens might enjoy peace and security.

In every battle and skirmish since the birth of our Corps, Marines have acquitted themselves with the greatest distinction, winning new honors on each occasion until the term "Marine" has come to signify all that is highest in military efficiency and soldierly virtue.

This high name of distinction and soldierly repute we who are Marines today have received from those who preceded us in the Corps. With it we also received from them the eternal spirit which has animated our Corps from generation to generation and has been the distinguishing mark of the Marines in every age. So long as that spirit continues to flourish, Marines will be found equal to every emergency in the future as they have been in the past, and the men of our Nation will regard us as worthy successors to the long line of illustrious men who have served as "Soldiers of the Sea" since the founding of the Corps.

Happy Birthday Marines…

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.

First we need to find the disk we want to use as an RDM. This is accomplished by running the following:

ls -al /vmfs/devices/disks/

In this example the disk I needed was vmhba0:1:0:0….. Take note of  the string starting with vml.

Now we need to create the placeholder vmdk we will attach to our vm. We do this with the following command:

vmkfstools -r /vmfs/devices/disks/vml.<String we retrieved above> /vmfs/volumes/<Existing DataStore>/<VM Path>/<NAME>.vmdk

Now the only thing we need to do is to add the existing disk to our VM. You will notice the summary shows the new disk as a “Mapped Raw LUN”

Fire up the VM and format the disk for whatever file system you require.

Enjoy

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.

Prepare Base OS VM

Open VMware Workstation and create a new Virtual Machine

I name the template with the OS type and “Template” as the suffix

Install the OS and configure this VM with any necessary customizations or base software.

Shutdown VM and create a snapshot.

Deploy VMs required to stand up test Environment

Create a Clone of the newly created and configured Base OS VM.

When asked for “Clone Source” choose “An existing snapshot” and select the snapshot created in the previous section.

For “Clone Type” choose “Linked Clone” this will allow you to deploy the new VM with limited disk space requirements.

Name the new VM

Click Finish and your new VM is created

Repeat this process for all VMs needed for your test environment. This will quickly deploy your test lab, with a minimum amount of disk space required. I will cover the use of “Teams” in a later article, but these steps can be used there as well.

     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.

For more information visit VKernel

Now through December 31, 2009, you can download VKernel Capacity Modeler absolutely free — these are perpetual licenses for use on unlimited sockets.

VKernel Capacity Modeler is a free alternative to the expensive VMware vCenter CapacityIQ software, which can cost you upwards of $1,000 per socket.

The free VKernel Capacity Modeler software provides VMware customers the ability to quickly plan, simulate, and validate hundreds of real–world “what if” VM deployment and resource allocation scenarios in an interactive sandbox before going live in the production environment.

With VKernel Capacity Modeler, user can perform:

• Capacity Planning
• Interactive “What If” Modeling Scenarios
• Proactive Problem Prevention
• Predictive Capacity Impact Analysis

     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 will explain the steps necessary to configure this service as well as the RDP client in order to access your servers in a more secure manner.

Open Server Manager and select Roles –> Add Roles

Select “Remote Desktop Services” from the role list

And “Remote Desktop Gateway” from Role Services

You will be prompted to add additional services. Click “Add Required Role Services” and click Next

When prompted to Choose a Server Authentication Certificate for SSL select “Choose a certificate for SSL encryption later”. We do not currently have a certificate loaded and need IIS to generate the request which we will take care of later in this tutorial.

When prompted to Create Authorization Policy for RD Gateway select “Later”

On the “Network Policy and Access Services” Select Role Services page ensure the “Network Policy Server” is selected.

On the “Web Services (IIS)” Select Role Services accept defaults.

On the “Confirm Installation Selections” page ignore the 2 warnings as they will be addressed later.

Once complete it is time to move onto configuration.

Generate SSL Certificate:

Open Server Manager –> Web Server (IIS) –> Internet Information Services (IIS) –> Hostname –> Server Certificates

I have an Enterprise CA so I am selecting “Create Domain Certificate” if you needed to use a third party CA you would select “Create Certificate Request” (3rd party Certificates are not covered in this document)

Fill in your appropriate details

Select your Online Certificate Authority

Assign Certificate to the RD Gateway

Server Manager –> Remote Desktop Services –> RD Gateway Manager –> Hostname –> View or modify certificate properties.

Select “Import Certificate”

Import the recently created certificate

Create connection authorization policy

Name your policy

On the Requirements tab, Add the Users or Groups you want to have access

You can make changes to the other options as you see fit.

Create resource authorization policy

Name your policy

Select which Users or Groups can connect to remote computers

On the Network Resource tab you can specify which resources are available to connect the the RD Gateway. for the purpose of this tutorial we will use “Allow users to connect to any network resource”

On the Allowed Ports tab accept the default “Allow connections only through TCP port 3389”

Client Configuration

Open Remote Desktop Connection

Enter the host you want to connect to:

On the Advanced tab click “Settings” under Connect from anywhere

Select “User these TS Gateway server settings” and enter you server name

Enter you credentials

You should now be connected to your intended host.

You can monitor the remote connections through the Monitoring tab under “RD Gateway Manager” in Server Manager.

I may cover more of the features and configuration of the RD Gateway at a later time, but for now you should be able to enjoy most of the benefits and security this service provides.

     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.

     Like most, once the implementation was complete and they could actually touch, feel and interact with this new architecture, they quickly gained confidence and were looking for other avenues to leverage their new found love for virtualization. The biggest problem my customers faced was still maintaining the belief in dedicated resources for specific applications. They would deploy silos of ESX servers to support a specific application needs (SharePoint, Exchange, etc…). While this appears to be a logical approach, it does not leverage the virtual infrastructure to it’s fullest. Yes, they are able to achieve server consolidation and a reduction of power, HVAC, and rack space, but they cannot fully appreciate the drive to maximum utilization of their computing resources.

     The hardest thing to communicate to customers new to virtualization is that they not only remove the OS from the hardware, they also remove the dedication of assets from applications. Most customers maintain separate shops for applications. These divisions not only own the applications, but the hardware they are running on as well. It is hard to convince an Exchange admin that they no longer have to worry about which physical “box” their application is running on.

     I often try to communicate this new ideal by leveraging what my customers currently know about their SAN. They have a centrally managed set of disk resources that are presented and consumed by an application. The application admin, although they know how much storage they can use, cannot point to a rack of disks and show you which physical drives they actually “own”. With virtualization, computing resources can be managed in much the same way.

     With virtualization, physical servers are grouped together in a cluster, much like the physical drives in a SAN. The resources of these servers can than be managed as a single entity and presented to applications based on their requirements. These clusters can be leveraged to drive maximum utilization of the physical resources, while maintaining application requirements regardless of which “box” they are running on. This allows the individual application owners to focus on their application and remove the physical requirements they previously had to manage.

     While the end goal is not always achieved quickly, most customers are evolving their virtual infrastructure and driving toward  this end. Once they see the benefits virtualization brings to the table, the long term vision starts to become reality. Removing the physical boundaries normally associated with application deployment, maintenance and disaster recovery allows my customers to not only see a reduction in operating costs, but they also achieve less downtime and easier management.

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:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\TCPIP\Parameters

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