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VMware Fusion 5.02 Linux VM Crashes During Login (Ubuntu)

After running an update on my Macbook Pro, my linux VMs stopped allowing me to login and would simply crash.  I contacted VMware support and they advised that the update, along with Fusion update 5.02, don’t play very well together due to a graphics driver issue.  See the short post: http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2012/11/macbook-air-and-macbook-pro-update-2-0-and-vmware-fusion-5.html. The workaround requires that …

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Comparing Microsoft Communicator Versions

Microsoft Office Communicator for Mac 2011 Crashes in OSX Lion – PATCHED!

In the compatibility war, I’ve come across my first real casualty after my OSX Lion upgrade.  What’s strange is this didn’t appear until today, and I’ve been running Lion and Communicator for more than a few weeks now. The symptom appears to be that when Microsoft Communicator, which is part of the Microsoft Office for …

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Protecting Yourself and Your Passwords on the Internet

*** If you think one of your online accounts is hacked or compromised in some way, and that’s how you got here, immediately log into whatever account it is and change your password. *** Recently a friend of mine’s Facebook account was phished which is the impetus for me creating this entry.  All of his …

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Create an ISO From Any Folder On Your Windows Computer

Today I was building a VM in VMware VI3 (ESX), one that was completely isolated from my network and I realized that one of the pieces of software that I wanted to install was in a folder on a share.  Since this system was on an isolated virtual switch (vswitch), I realized that I had …

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Now That’s Customer Service! Good Job Apple.

I love it when companies use technology to increase efficiency, and Apple has at least one part of customer service ‘down to a science’. This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced this with an Apple Store, but it’s the third time which tells me the prior two times were not flukes.  The latest time, I …

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VMware Fusion 5.02 Linux VM Crashes During Login (Ubuntu)Microsoft Office Communicator for Mac 2011 Crashes in OSX Lion – PATCHED!Protecting Yourself and Your Passwords on the InternetCreate an ISO From Any Folder On Your Windows ComputerNow That’s Customer Service! Good Job Apple.

Apr 21 2010

Team Foundation Server 2010 Installation Experiences and Lessons Learned

Categories:

Application Development, Infrastructure, SharePoint, Source Control, SQL Server, Team Foundation Server

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April 21, 2010

Do it right the first time! :)

There’s quite a few posts on Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS) and how to install and configure it, as well as a really good CHM file from Microsoft on the same topics, so I won’t go through duplicating what everyone else has done and will link to one at the bottom of this post.  I’m writing this just to relay the experience I had with getting the product configured just the way I wanted it, or some facsimile thereof and some lessons learned.

 tfs001

After viewing some videos on YouTube of TFS, reading some of the Microsoft marketing material, and some of the posts on it, I decided to stand up TFS in my environment to see how well it works and to explore changes since the last version.  Right now, the team I lead isn’t really using any ‘set’ collaborative product.  We tend to work in small teams on projects so the need isn’t really there, though I’m sure the organization wouldn’t hurt.  We’re currently using Subversion as our source repository and occasionally use MOSS or WSS to collaborate.  Otherwise it’s phone calls and emails since we also tend to bounce around the country.  Enough background, on to TFS installation…

After reading through a few blog posts and Microsoft’s documentation on how to install and configure TFS, I stood up a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM and installed SQL Server 2008.  I was going with a single server install.  I followed the documentation to the letter for a single server install, and everything worked out just fine.  WONDERFUL!  GREAT!  So far…

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Permanent link to this article: http://d3planet.com/rtfb/2010/04/21/team-foundation-server-2010-installation-experiences-and-lessons-learned/

Apr 17 2010

Creating and Managing a DNS Zone Using Windows Server + Quick DNS Primer

Categories:

Active Directory, Infrastructure, Windows

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April 17, 2010

This is a quick post, or maybe not so quick, just to illustrate how to create and add records to a DNS zone on your own Windows Server with the DNS role configured.  This server can be a domain controller with DNS installed or just a DNS server, it doesn’t make any difference.

A quick primer on DNS.  DNS, or domain name servers (services), provides the ability for servers to access systems by name instead of IP address.  Without DNS servers, we would all have to navigate the Internet by typing in IP addresses, like http://74.125.19.99.  From reading this link, you’d have no idea where you were navigating to, but it just so happens that this is one of Google’s many public IP addresses.  Try it.

dns 001

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Permanent link to this article: http://d3planet.com/rtfb/2010/04/17/creating-and-managing-a-dns-zone-using-windows-server-quick-dns-primer/

Apr 13 2010

SQL Server 2008 Installer Fails on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2

Categories:

Infrastructure, SQL Server, Windows

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April 13, 2010

Have you tried rebooting?

I ran across an issue on Windows Server 2008 R2 but also found the issue to happen on Windows 7 installations.

Apparently this will be fixed in the R2 releases of SQL but since those aren’t available yet for the enterprise and similar versions, there’s a pretty simple fix.  I found an article that references a few fixes that I’ll link to here in case the fix that I have doesn’t work.

The error states that “Invoke or BeginInvoke cannot be called on a control until the window handle has been created.”

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Permanent link to this article: http://d3planet.com/rtfb/2010/04/13/sql-server-2008-installer-fails-on-windows-7-and-windows-server-2008-r2/

Jan 30 2010

The iPad, to wreak havoc on current tech?

Categories:

Application Development, Infrastructure

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January 30, 2010

Havoc \Hav"oc\, v. t. To devastate; to destroy; to lay waste. [1913 Webster]

I’ve seen some really negative reviews on the iPad and it’s potential and feature set. I’ve talked to some friends about it, mostly PC users, that are less than thrilled with what the iPad has to offer.  I can understand people potentially not wanting to go out and jump on the boat immediately due to costs, but the shortsightedness of the negative reviewers never ceases to amaze me.

iPad001

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Permanent link to this article: http://d3planet.com/rtfb/2010/01/30/the-ipad-to-wreak-havoc-on-current-tech/

Dec 07 2009

VMware Tools Fail During Upgrade / Uninstall

Categories:

Infrastructure, VMware, Windows

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December 7, 2009

As I’ve upgraded my lab environment to vSphere over the weekend, I’ve been running across the occasional VM that fails to allow me to upgrade it’s VMware Tools.  This seems to be predominantly happening with my Windows Server 2008 VMs. 

I’ve received various error messages including ‘can’t find vmware tools.msi’ looking at c:\windows\installers, and messages stating that Installation cannnot continue because a previous version is installed, even though it had just been removed.  FRUSTRATING!  Fortunately, this isn’t the first time people are running across it and there’s a VMware KB article on how to address this.

Issues as noted on the VMware KB:

  • Unable to upgrade existing VMware Tools
  • Unable to upgrade existing installation of VMware Tools because the previous installation fails to be removed
  • The uninstall feature of VMware Tools fails to complete, and finally
  • Cannot uninstall VMware Tools.

All this boils down to ‘IT’S BROKE!  HOW CAN I FIX IT!?’

Keep Reading…

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Permanent link to this article: http://d3planet.com/rtfb/2009/12/07/vmware-tools-fail-during-upgrade-uninstall/

Dec 05 2009

Use Console to Connect ESX to a NAS

Categories:

Infrastructure, Linux, Storage, VMware

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December 5, 2009

UPDATED 12/5/2009 to include vSphere commands.

This is a quick note, mostly to help remind me and hopefully help someone else out.

You can use standard Linux commands to connect an ESX host to a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device.  You can use a NAS to store things like ISO’s and backups.  I have many gig’s of ISO’s and I really don’t like them taking up valuable storage on my ESX host.  In production, they’d be taking up SAN space, so I offload them to a Buffalo Terastation, and use Linux commands to mount the Terastation so that ESX can utilize it.

First you can make a directory under vmimages.

mkdir /vmimages/ISO2

ISO2 is the directory that you are creating.  For me, ISO already points to a local directory on my server where I keep one or two ISO’s that I am continually using.  Then you can run the command:

(ESX 3.5)  mount –t smbfs //[nas]/[folder] /vmimages/ISO2
(vSphere) mount –t cifs //[nas]/[folder] /vmimages/ISO2

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Permanent link to this article: http://d3planet.com/rtfb/2009/12/05/use-console-to-connect-esx-to-a-nas-2/

Dec 05 2009

Upgrading ESX 3.5 to vSphere 4 Using Host Update

Categories:

Infrastructure, Networking, VMware, Windows

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December 5, 2009

Tonight I decided to go on the magical journey of upgrading my ESX 3.5 environment to vSphere using the Host Update Utility.  I’m usually a firm believer in ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!’ but this time I decided to take the plunge and see what happens.

A few months ago, I ran through the Host Update Utility and failed a hardware compatibility check.  I was running a few Intel Pro/100 NICs that ESX 3.5 was more than happy to work with but vSphere said, NO WAY.  After tracking down a few Broadcom 5701 NICs, installing them without a hiccup, I honestly still considered sticking with ESX 3.5, but after talking to a few friends who have had no trouble with their upgrades, I figured the most that I had to lose was a little time.  I ran through the wizard again, of the Host Update Utility, it complained about nothing this time and continued.

After a short while, maybe 10 minutes or so, I was up and running on vSphere 4.  No hiccups!  I immediately started booting up VMs.  I ran into my first problem. :)

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Permanent link to this article: http://d3planet.com/rtfb/2009/12/05/upgrading-esx-3-5-to-vsphere-4-using-host-update/

Dec 02 2009

Windows Server 2008 and Subversion over HTTPS

Categories:

Application Development, Source Control, VS.NET, Windows

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December 2, 2009

Here’s the scenario, I decided to try out Subversion as a source control repository on a Windows Server 2008 server, attached to a Win Server 2008 domain, with ISA Server forwarding HTTP traffic.  After doing a little bit of research, I decided to give VisualSVN Server a try.  If you don’t know it, it’s a very small footprint product produced by VisualSVN Limited, that installs Subversion and an Apache server, on Windows, to handle the HTTP connection to SVN (Subversion).

The product installed and configured very easily, ‘hats off’ to VisualSVN, and I was immediately able to connect to it from internal on my network.  There are a few self-explanatory questions that are posed in the installation wizard.  Tough things like where do you want to store your repositories. ;)   (If you’re going to use a file share as a repository, make sure that you use the UNC and not a mapped drive.)

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I’m amazed that I’ve come across yet another tech product that is actually behaving as advertised.  Is it just me, or is that odd???

Not the fault of VisualSVN, I began to run into configuration issues when I tried to route the traffic through ISA Server.

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Permanent link to this article: http://d3planet.com/rtfb/2009/12/02/windows-server-2008-and-subversion-over-https/

Nov 10 2009

Install Certificate Services on Windows Server 2008 R2

Categories:

Active Directory, IIS, Infrastructure, Security, Windows

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November 10, 2009

This post picks up where the last post left off.  In the last post, we created a Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory Domain Controller and stopped short of going on to add Certificate Services into the mix.

If you’re not sure if you need certificate services for your environment, it never hurts to have it available.  It does not add much overhead so for development environments and small businesses you can consider adding the role to a DC (domain controller) as we are here.  Certificate Services will allow you to issue certificates to your internal resources, use client/server certificates for authentication, and set up SSL enabled websites.

I believe best practice is, and I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong, to set up an Enterprise Root CA (Certificate Authority), then set up one or more subordinate CA’s.  You can then make your Root CA unavailable for access and have the subordinates handle all of the traffic without fear of compromising your Root CA.  In this tutorial, we’ll just be installing and configuring a Root CA, but the process is basically the same for the subordinates.

Now that you’ve got some background information, onto the installation/configuration of Windows Server 2008 R2 Certificate Services.

In ‘Server Manager’, select Roles in the left pane, then Add Roles in the right pane.  Place a check mark in the checkbox for Active Directory Certificate Services.  Then click Next.

002

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Permanent link to this article: http://d3planet.com/rtfb/2009/11/10/install-certificate-services-on-windows-server-2008-r2/

Nov 09 2009

Build a Windows Server 2008 R2 Domain Controller

Categories:

Active Directory, Application Development, Infrastructure, Security, Windows

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November 9, 2009

I posted a tutorial on creating a domain controller using Windows Server 2003, and decided to post an update that included step-by-step instructions for Windows Server 2008 R2.  This should be the same for Windows Server 2008.

This is great for developers, testers, and anyone looking to learn Active Directory or deploy to a small network.  If this is for a production deployment, you might want to bring in a professional to help you.  There are many other things to consider, like ‘hardening’ your server and setting up Group Policy.  Having an insecure or unprotected domain controller is inviting havoc on your network.

So without any further ado and in the immortal words of ‘Marv’, “Let’s get to it!”

In the Server Manager click on Add Roles.

001 

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Permanent link to this article: http://d3planet.com/rtfb/2009/11/09/build-a-windows-server-2008-r2-domain-controller/

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