citrix.pvs.large.ad.slow.console.hotfix.092908.txt

quick note - http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX118566

this hotfix along with it's rudimentary installation method of manually stopping a service and then copying in files and restarting a service does work to dramatically increase the speed of the management console when working with any size PVS farm with a large AD environment.

if you are looking to deploy PVS 5.0 and/or demo some of the features and it is looking rough with the response times to change device properties this patch is for you! the bad thing is that it doesn't show up in a small demo vm lab since you usually don't have a large AD environment to deal with, then you go and rebuild in production and everything slows to a crawl.

I'm just curious how many PVS hotfixes will have to be deployed like this.. I think there are a few application packagers out there under GPL.. you know, Citrix being an "Application Delivery" company any all...

silly.vendors.ft.is.for.everyone.092408.txt

From Mike D's blog entry: Time for Some Real Names Stratus

It is only advantageous to the end user for you guys to duke it out in order to weed out the marketing fluff.. not sure you should "ban" a user from posting comments because he may have lied about his site being down. He did say "my site" and not necessarily that of the company that his ARIN ip lookup shows. I think people have many facets, and the fact that a Stratus employee is running VMware and updating it to the latest code should be a good sign.
I was affected by the time bomb bug as well, and I do feel VMware should have had a bigger hit.. it was a grave mistake and you guys got off pretty easily. Congrats, when yahoo or blackberry has an outage, people start getting skeptical.. just remember it was your loyal customers that wanted to make sure your product looked good that kept you afloat during this.
As for FT, everyone is on this bandwagon.. I don't care so much for the super-high Stratus tax and the fact the even the $40k servers run 80gb SATA drives, or that Marathon has teamed up with Xen only, or that you guys haven't released the product and that it will only support 1 core. The bottom line is that it is a race, and there is going to be pushing and shoving... All I can say is supply your engineers plenty of energy drinks, and may the best vendor reach the market first with a FT product that is semi-affordable for the masses.

Until then, we will continue to rely on the software manufacturers to develop active-passive and active-active configurations.. oh wait! That is what they should be doing and you shouldn't even be worried about FT anyway! Unfortunately that will never happen.. so you guys are still in luck.

thinlaunch.quick.take.092008.txt

after reading Michael Keen's post at: http://www.brianmadden.com/blog/MichaelKeen/Have-you-heard-of-ThinLaunch I headed over to http://www.thinlaunch.com/ for the eval since repurposing existing winxp clients is something I am interested in..

first thing is that it requires .net 2.0 framework.. this shouldn't be an issue but just another hurdle and for whatever reason I don't have snapshot for my winxp sp2 vm with .net 2.0 already installed.. atleast not on this laptop.

quick install and at the end it asks you for what executable you want to run at startup.. browse and select something.

now for the guts.. it's is scary!!

it creates a local user that is a member of Local Users AND Administrators called:
ThinDesktopUser with a password of: test!123abc!!@#

then proceeds to modify the registry to autologin and run C:\Program Files\Thin Desktop\ThinDesktop.exe /s, via the UserInit key.

ThinDesktop.exe then reads: HKLM\SOFTWARE\ThinLaunch\Thin Desktop\LaunchCommand (which has the full path to the exe you defined earlier)

so... my quick and dirty lockdown that is going to set me back $20-26 per workstation has created a local admin account with a standard password and is still running explorer.exe as the shell..

good news is there is an alternative and Microsoft was so kind to provide it for free.. regedit.exe

simply browse to: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon and change the Shell key to the full path of the executable of your VDI client, XenApp full client or better yet, frontend a web-portal with Public Web Browser from TeamSoftware Solutions

PWB will set you back $125 per year for a site license so you'll need atleast 5 clients to repurpose to realize your ROI versus ThinLaunch. This is only if you want to do the web portal, setting the Shell key to any other .exe is free and requires a keyboard, but PWB does give you alot of other neat features.

The above solution works as a local or domain USER not admin, and won't expose you to the vulnerabilities that appear very obvious with ThinLaunch.

Sorry, throwing together a quick .NET 2.0 app that modifies the registry and perform a ShellExec API command (possibly more, don't want to understate it) isn't worth $26 per client when there is alot of hard work and engineering that goes into many other client licensed products around that price range such as appvirt, antivirus, device control, and full disk encryption.

kayo.fs.aka.crippled.melio.fs.091808.txt

(enter rant mode - you've been warned)

- bear in mind I am looking at using one of the Sanbolic products for a HA solution, but with all of the potential announcements with vmworld and the new release of Sanbolic Kayo FS, I have to stop and wonder where it is all going..

Kayo FS is priced at $299/physical server designed to run on a Windows 2008 Hyper-V machine to give VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer a run for their money. After all, after 20 some odd years of existance our operating system vendor of choice has never made a true multi-host aware filesystem.. nothing new here, I think they just now gained the concept of a multi-user system. meanwhile the *nix world has their clustered filesystems and have pretty much commoditized them.

enter Sanbolic, filling the niche and making their money.. if you thought VMware ESX was expensive, wait until you see the pricing to patch up NTFS.. I'm wondering if it wouldn't be cheaper to pay premier support to MS and have them rewrite NTFS.. I seem to recall that you could pay a onetime fee for them to program the DST changes for unsupported OSes... maybe they'll do the same for Windows 2008 since they just launched it..

my problem is that I'm not sure how long Microsoft will let them continue.. and at $299/server I wouldn't mind Kayo.. but I want to run it under vmware esx for Citrix Provisioning Server and that is a no no.. the setup.exe pops up a dialog and immediately tells you that is unsupported uner a virtual machine and exits. after quite a few right clicks, double-clicks and drag and drops, kayo_fs looks to have the capability to run under vmware, there is just a nice DetectVirtualMachines.dll that is being called.. that and the combination of HKLM registry keys with per_process keys of vmware.exe, vmserverdWin32.exe, vmserverdWin32.exe set to report_ntfs..

I would come to the assumption that this is clearly a crippled version of melio_fs that is set not to run under any virtualization platform and only to make Hyper-V look good until MS can enhance NTFS.

(end rant mode)

UPDATE - after speaking with Sanbolic, I felt bad and removed the post since it was after a long day of work and school, but after re-reading it, I don't feel there is anything geniunely wrong with my first assumption. I will most likely be utilizing Melio FS Enterprise (since standard isn't supported under ESX).. but it all works out and will only end up being a $30-35/per wks cost.. a few tests next week will help determine this figure.

cisco.virtual.office.redesign.time.091708.txt

- time to stop ordering the cisco 871w and move to the 881w

- consolildate the current rollout of the 871 with an LWAPP and inmotion or junxion box with one device.

looks like the 3G option will be later as there in no sku currently at:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/routers/ps380/data_sheet_c78_459542.html
but instead of using the proprietary wic modules it will be based off of standard express cards. this will be nice since they are easily to replace/upgrade.

thoughts on this would be that the end user would carry the 3g sprint/verizon/at&t card with them (using a pcmcia to express card tray) then unplug the device and place it in their 881w when the are at home "docked" not sure how well the ios will handle hot-insertion and removal of the express card if that is the primary link.. seems doable.

the managed built-in lwapp will be perfect to replace the extra ap that we are currently using.
bumping up to (8) vlans will be great since 4 really never existed since you couldn't get rid of vlan 1.

IP SLA is great and works wonderfully with the voip monitor for IPSwitch Whatsup Gold.
There are plently of other really good products that can read the SLA stats now as well but for straight-forward MOS scoring and the detailed history charts it will accomplish what you need to troubleshoot and trend problems with slow and flaky dsl and cable circuits.

Quick cost run down (street range).. not considering msrp or the typical 35-42% off:

CISCO881W-GN-A-K9 $700 - everything in a box (be nice if they already had express card slots)
800-IL-PM-2 $110 - 2 port PoE module if you have a VoIP phone or IP camera
SL-880-AIS $100 - need this for advanced ip - eigrp and dmvpn back to the 28xx/38xx headends.

So, we are still under $1000 for a fully functional box at a remote site and then I can pull back the lwapp AP and reuse at fiber connected sites so this it an internal discount of $450 per site!

I guess I wil find out tomorrow whether the distribution warehouses have these in stock or not.

The content filtering option is pretty nice and could be used for public lab use - looks like they have a 30-day trial sku but the 1yr is right around $100 so this would be good for split-tunnel use as well.. no reason to backhaul their internet traffic if the policy could atleast be applied at the edge.

datacenter.cisco.vmware.091408.txt

in reference to the link between cisco/microsoft server virtualization validation and upcoming announcements, it clearly look like cisco wants to work with vmware in the datacenter environment and have the full support from microsoft.

this whitepaper @ cisco.com contains more acronyms than you can shake a stick at, but clearly paints the picture of what their vision is in a microsoft shop running exchange 2007. now after reading that article, I would boil it down, to wow, that is alot of infrastructure for email! why not just get a gmail account :)

putting everything together, the following paragraph from that whitepaper sums up why they went for the SVVP:

Solutions built using VMware HA and VMware DRS combined with EMC and Cisco technologies provide out-of-the-box high availability for the entire Exchange environment without requiring any Microsoft or other third-party clustering software. A critical weakness in most clustered Exchange architectures is their coverage of mailbox servers only, leaving critical supporting server roles (DNS, domain controllers, Exchange Hub, CAS servers, etc.) vulnerable to outages due to hardware failure. Cisco provided the necessary redundancy through the Cisco Nexus® 1000v.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/solutions/Enterprise/Data_Center/emcinfra_wp_master.html

since the nx-os is based on linux it makes good sense for this to plug into the vmware environment.

so now you'll have a good reason virtualize all of your critical infrastructure servers (microsoft or not) and feel comfortable that your in good hands.. combine that with the vn-link services that appear to be a service offering from a combination vmware and cisco certified team and you can figure out how to migrate to a completely virtualized datacenter running exchange 2007.

the combination appears to be very powerful.. only next week will tell us if we have to wait for vmware esx 4.0 for this to happen!

this document also gives insight to the ironport purchase and how that fits in.. hopefully that will become a vmware virtual appliance in the near future as well. otherwise it's just another point of failure that would down this really nice virtual exchange infrastructure they just designed.. that and it runs on linux with oem dell hardware so it can't be that hard to build an OVF from..

there has already been some talk of the WAAS having it's own hypervisor and being able to run Windows "blades" so it will be interesting to see how that fits in.. maybe the WAAS itself should just be virtual under vmware..

ASA code can already be virtualized so it shouldn't be too much longer before that should become a VM.. maybe then I would get rid of ISA server.. until then I'll settle for both.

nclgisa.can.teleport.goats.with.google.chrome.090908.txt

- together we can accomplish anything at NCLGISA

to answer the "goats teleported" question I had for some odd reason when I was running bintext against the chome application is:

http://lists.unc.edu/read/messages?id=4792653

[McArdle, Joseph]
It is a covert meaning for Google.

It Means “ Thanks for installing the new browser, we have just stolen all the cookies, temp files, password files, documents, and all other data off your computer and “Teleported” the info
to our “Good Old Application Trusties”, that we will use as we need….

( but the browser is secure against anyone else ) did we mention that we have a Free Email Program for you ?

---

[Jerry Hogan]
I think a running joke based on a documentation reference. See below:

“2. Create a changelist. We use Subversion, but use some tools on top of it for the review and committing process. Make a changelist with the gcl change command. The changelist name is only to help you refer to it on your local computer, so call it whatever you want:

C:\code\src\chromium> gcl change mychange

This will open your text editor. Write the change description at the top of the file. The description should describe what your patch changes and why. This is important for people who are looking at commit logs in the future to track down an issue: they should be able to see why you changed it without going anywhere else. You should also add a BUG=bug_number line at the end of the description so they can find the associated bug. Example:

Increase the goat teleporter timeout threshold to 100 because the old
value of 10 caused problems for extremely overweight goats. Tests show
that the largest goat in existence should be teleported in 50ms, so...

BUG=112358
Cut and paste the filenames above or below the divider to add files to or remove files from the changelist. You can use the gcl opened command to see your changed files and changelists:

C:\code\src\chromium> gcl opened
M browser\browser.vcproj ← this is a modified file not in any changelist

--- Changelist mychange:
M browser\browser.cc”

wireless.pxe.bios.090908.txt

quick thoughts from some conversations today..

- why is there no wireless pxe booting? it should be straight forward to put this in bios..

- bios manufacturers should be bought out by the major companies such as Dell, HP, etc.. the innovation is really lacking and Phoenix's announcement of a hypervisor in bios is long overdue in hindsight.. the bios vendors should have had this underwraps when everything first started to get big.

- with proprietary flash dead and solid state here to stay the bios could really get promising

- place 802.1x wired and wireless in a newly revamped bios with an integrated hypervisor and I'll be happy.

- this brings back memories of trying to find a 16mb cisco proprietary ISA flash card to build my frankenstein PIX box.. good thing the 501s came out before I spend the $600 on the card!

while the bios vendors are at it, they should go ahead and carve up 4/8gb of storage the run their os of choice and our recovery partition.. sounds more and more like the PC manufacturers should gobble up the bios companies now.

Better yet, let's have citrix or vmware purchase a bios mfr since phoenix was supposed to based of xen anyway and then license the whole thing to the pc mfrs for thin clients.. not sure what the point of xp embedded would be if a thin client could boot the xenserver hypervisor then launch an ica client for vdp, oh and be managed with xencenter while we are at it!

or if Microsoft could buy them they could just put Hyper-V in it for everything.. hey they managed to get the keyboard mfrs to put a windows key on every ps2 keyboard in the world..

but back to the basics.. I'd just like an easy way to put the asset tag in the bios of a Dell or HP went I enter the bios menu during an inital boot!

google.chrome.appdata.local.090408.txt

yapagc - yet another post about google chrome.

- no google toolbar, a bit of an oversight

- installing to local appdata?  defeats it governance, causes headaches to it staff.. thanks, google

- talk about the about:internets page.. it calls sspipes.scr, that is why your pipes are clogged under vista, just copy in your favorite screensaver or hexedit and have fun.

- still want to know how to teleport goats.. "Goats teleported" too tired to dig further

- I know its beta, but the size of the app could have been considerably smaller if they would have removed all of the full text and debugging code..

- http://dl.google.com/chrome/plugins/plugins.xml - don't see silverlight in there.. hmm, wonder why!

- back to the appdata stuff.. this is getting ridiculous.. this is where microsoft as an "operating system" vendor of a proprietary OS should step in and say no to running executable content from the "AppData" folder.. maybe I'm reading the folder name wrong, but AppData seems to imply application DATA.. not code!  I think this whole concept has been tackled many times over with DEP, etc...  let's not rely on IT staff setting group policies to prevent application execution to a small whitelisted group of executables with md5 hashes in order to keep this in line.

Microsoft, if this is too hard to comprehend, load up your favorite *nix distro login as root,

cd /, ls -la  take a look at the file structure.. notice the "bin" and "sbin" directories.. you are getting close, and I understand you had no real processes before to keep this underwraps, but it's time to move forward.. afterall, you don't want everyone downloading chrome and bypassing internet explorer 8.0 do you?  just release a "hotfix" and set the disable executables by default in the appdata folder, then publish a kb article that documents why this was poor design and offer a quick registry hack to keep it like it currently is.. problem solved.

esx.cluster.vmware.workstation.6.5.beta

following the directions of a few helpful links:

http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/470-ESX-3.5-is-running-on-Workstation-6.5-Build-91182-!!!.html

grab vmware workstation 6.5 release candidate build 110068 @:
http://www.vmware.com/communities/content/beta/ws65/download.html

need a iSCSI target since the shared scsi bus doesn't work with 6.5 anymore.. why I don't know.. seems like a quick thing.. also seems like I'm taking it upon my self to run the beta version, so I'l up for a non-supported option..

pick up openfiler @ http://www.openfiler.com

good iSCSI setup notes at:
http://www.applicationdelivery.co.uk/blog/leew/how-to-set-up-a-free-iscsi-or-nas-storage-system-for-vmware-esx-using-openfiler/

so end result on a Dell D630 dual-core with 4gb ram running windows 2008 x64:

(2) vmware esx 3.5.0 update 2 virtual hosts (1024mb ram/ea)
(1) virtualcenter (768mb ram)
(1) openfiler 2.3 iSCSI target serving off a simple 20gb scsi vmdk (256mb ram)
(1) windows 2003 server vm under the esx cluster with drs/vmotion/ha (384mb ram)

setup everything at first with a single NIC all set to NAT
went back and configured secondary HOST only NICs for the 4 vmware.workstation VMs for iSCSI connectivity and to assign a new vSwitch1 to both esx hosts to put the vmkernel interface.. needed a second service console as well.

tested vmotion with the windows 2003 server while running and pinging an internet site.. works great but slow.. I have a feeling this would run much better on a quad-core with an external raid array to get the disk speed up as well.

what really struck me about this is the ability to test a small scale enterprise setup of vmware esx on what would appear to be a $600-$700 laptop if the weekend sale papers are good.

ahh.. just waiting for cisco to move over to x64 processors for their routing and switching! I know gns is available but it would be great to power up a cisco catalyst switch vm!