Holy wow it's been a long time since I've posted anything.

Add more memory and reinstall Windows. That fixes just about anything.

Updating ESXi with RCLI Appliance

If you're running ESXi and connecting directly to the VIC you do not have the option to update your host. This can be done easily with the Remote Command Line Utility. This is installed as part of Virtual Center, you can download it or can be downloaded as a virtual appliance. The virtual appliance is free and can be downloaded here: VI-RCLI
I prefer the virtual appliance, even thought it's a couple of extra steps. Start the virtual appliance with VMPlayer. Make sure you have a DHCP server on your network. Create a root login and password. This doesn't have to be the same as your ESXi server. This is only for the appliance. Access the following website to download your desired patch. Here Get the URL by right clicking on the link for the download and selecting properties. You should have something like this: http://download3.vmware.com/software/vi/ESXe350-200811401-O-SG.zip. Go to your virtual appliance and execute the wget command with the above URL.




Once the download is complete you can view your download, saved in whatever directory you saved it to by using the dir or ls command.





To update, 20081114 or whatever image you downloaded use the following command:

vihostupdate.pl –server IP of ESXi server -username root -password root password -i –b ESXe350-200811401-O-SG.zip





Hit enter and grab your favorite beverage.

The appliance will unpack and install the requested files. Once complete you will get a message that says you will need to reboot for the new firmware image to take effect. After typing yes the host will reboot. After the host is back up you can verify that your machine has been updated by executing the following command from the RCLI: vihostupdate.pl –server IP of ESXi server -username root –q





If there was a problem installing the new image you can revert back to a prior image by holding down the shift button and pressing the R button while the "Loading Hypervisor" screen is up. You will see the prior image and can revert back to it by selecting it and pressing the Y button. Now if you don't use the RCLI you can delete the appliance, and the patch downloaded to the appliance will be deleted.

Two broken hands

Some time I feel like a man that has two broken hands...that is all

quicky but a goody

Error : The messaging interface has returned an unknown error. If the problem persists, restart Outlook

First open the calendar.
Click on file and select print.
Under print select page setup and untick the option TASK PAD.
Click OK and then print.

Expanding your Active Directory by employee numbers

Microsoft’s Active Directory is a very interesting “program” in itself. Active Directory gives administrator the ability to apply policies from a central location. It’s kind of like your local users and computers, but for a whole organization. AD is very customizable. A while back I was faced with a dilemma. When reviewing termination reports there was no way of telling the difference between Bob Miller in business unit 1 and Bob Miller in business unit 2. The only difference was the employee number. You could flip a coin and go by that to see who you would delete and who would stay. With our JDE system we have the ability to run reports that would allow us to see who has a user profile by their employee number. The employee number was assigned to each employee at their hire date and was unique to each employee. Why not bring this to AD or is this even possible? After doing much research I ran across the following site that would give me a step by step walk through of what to do: Here
This of course is for entering a SSN for each account. This would work, but definitely isn’t the brightest idea. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you should be able to query something like this with a tool such as Dameware. Dameware is a very cool tool. It’s much like MMC for MS Windows, however you can do much more without going to another window or tab. Dameware has cool things like Remote Control (that works without terminal server clients), remote command line and so on. Dameware can be found online at: here Anyway; this; in theory; with a little programming, would give anyone with Domain User rights access to query Active Directory and grab SSNs with no problems. Well anyway, after setting up AD to add employee numbers to accounts I was set with the long arduous task of adding employee numbers to each account. After about a month of this I was done. With a little programming I setup Dameware to view these employee numbers when I query AD. Term reports go peachy and I can sleep at night knowing a job well done!

Issues with installing a new certificate Windows Server 2003

So a couple of weeks back we installed a new certificate on our Exchange front end server. The certificate had expired so instead of putting our users through the pain of clicking an extra button to accept the expired cert when they accessed OWA, we got a new one. A certificate is a basically adding another layer of encryption and authentication to a computer by making a secure connection to the server. Normal port 80 traffic is not encrypted. The new cert was installed without any problems. The next day we started getting calls that users were unable to access the front end server web page without being prompted several times for their credentials. Not all users were having this issue which pointed the individual problem to each computer instead of server. After scouring the internet for some kind of resolution I determined that the issue could temporarily be resolved by deleting temporary internet files, restarting IE and accessing the shortcut. Odd I thought, everything was working fine until we installed the new cert and now we’re having issues only a day after installing the new cert. Everything looked right. Computers were making a secure connection to the front server. We went to the CA with this issue and they told us everything was fine. I even reinstalled the cert. Everything pointed to the issue being with access to the directory, but didn’t make sense being prompted for credentials several times. Wouldn’t the browser just give an access denied? I kept trouble shooting the issue and determined that users were being prompted for the password, but as soon as they quit they were getting a message that access was denied. Additionally some were getting only part of the frames loaded when OWA came up. Again I thought it was odd when a user would try to access the front end, shouldn’t it give an all or nothing respond? Shouldn’t it load the whole page or give a straight up access denied? It was almost like OWA was asking for credentials for each frame on the front end. Well after more research and working with HP we discovered it was an issue with the URL. When users were setup for a shortcut to OWA we noticed that the server address was the same on all: https://frontendserver.domain.com/exchange/, but what about users that weren’t having issues. It turns out when you type in the https://frontendserver.domain.com you are directed to the Exchange/ after authenticating. I determined that the issue was something to do with the exchange/ on the end. After additional work with HP we determined that the problem was with anonymous access to the default web sites directory. After allowing this users were able to access the website with the / on the end or not. I’m not sure how this got changed? Was this a default change after installing a new certificate? At any rate this resolved my issue and I was happy. <3

Fun with VMWare install

So being the loser I am, I decided to buy a server for my home network. I got a Rackable server online for about 200 bucks. The server came with two dual Xeon processors, 4X 36 GB SCSI drives, 4 GB of ECC Ram and two NICs. (Four are on the front, maybe for diagnostics???) My plan for this little diddy was to turn it into a VMware server. VMWare gives you the ability to turn one computer into several computers. This can be used to save space, computers and money. This would give me the most functionality for my bottom dollar. My plan was to use it as a test environment to test out new software and operating systems. Being free, I downloaded the ESXi version of VMWare. This software runs directly on the metal, meaning it’s basically an OS and installs directly on your machine with no other OS required like WINNE or even VMServer (which is also free). I believe VMWare uses a moded version of a Linux distro for it’s ESX series. So I go on the site, download the .ISO file and burn it to a CD. I used CD Burner XP freeware, thinking nothing of it. I get home and hooked up a DVD-ROM to the drive, which is a pain in the ass. The server is obviously rackable so all the components are kind of jammed on top of each other. So anyway, the IDE controller is under one of the drives, so I was like no big deal, I’ll pull out the drive and plug in my IDE. “No big deal” IS THE STORY OF MY LIFE. I try to take it out and the screws are stripped, so after about 20 minutes of finagling with different screw drivers I get it out. Hook it up and boot up the computer. Wow, super loud. This thing has like 5 fans. I go into the SCSI configuration screen to configure this bad boy for RAID 5. To my disappointment this wasn’t an option on my Intel SE7500WV2 . Oh well. I restart it again which take about a good 5 minutes and go into BIOS. I get into BIOS and get the bright idea to flash the BIOS. Why not I figure? No OS installed and the worst that happens I crash it, send it back, tell them it doesn’t work and get a new server. I go in and tell it to boot to floppy, pull out a floppy drive and try to hook it up. To my surprise, no floppy interface. So no big deal, I could get a USB floppy and flash, but that would be too much effort so a go back into BIOS. I tell it to boot to the DVD drive so I can install ESXi and get to my multiple machine goodness. I try to boot and I get this goofy ass message: Error 001: Drive not found. What the hell I think? I go back into BIOS and reset it to factory defaults. Same message. Well, to make a long story short, I figured out that I enabled the floppy and the system was looking for the drive and couldn’t find it so I turned off the floppy drive. By the way. Nothing on the Intel site or the internet found anything on this error message. Well I turn it off and boot to the ROM drive. It boots to the ROM drive and I get a cursor blinking at me. Well what the hell? I used a brand new CD for the image. Is this thing broken? Did some renob get the same idea as me? So I try everything; check the jumper settings on the drive, hook up several different drives and change the boot settings in BIOS. Finally I get the idea, maybe I should try the CD in another computer. I put the CD in another computer and it doesn’t work either. So I re-downloaded the ESXi image and burned it to a CD with Nero. Booted the CD and it came right up. (Yeah, I’ve wasted like 2 hours on this) I install for the ESXi server (super simple) and only took about 20 minutes. ESXi is available online for free from VMWare (without support). You can get it here.