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XenServer Virtualization Now Free!

Feb 23

Posted by admin in Citrix, Microsoft, Terminal Server | No Comments

From the Citrix blog :

If you’re reading this, you already know the news: XenServer, our enterprise virtual infrastructure platform is now free (including resource pooling and live relo), and we have announced Citrix Essentials for XenServer, and Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V as our virtualization management portfolio that offers a rich set of automated functions that drive the compatible virtualization layers beneath – the free Hyper-V hypervisor from Microsoft, and the free XenServer Enterprise virtual infrastructure platform from Citrix.  Finally, and most importanly, we announced a powerful go-to-market roadmap with Microsoft.

XenMotion will let you move VMs between boxes without downtime…for free.  Nice!

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Mac RDP Console Connections

Dec 9

Posted by admin in Apple, Microsoft, Terminal Server | No Comments

There seems to be some confusion about how to access the Windows Remote Desktop in console mode from a Mac computer.   The information given out was about holding the option or command key while hitting connect, but in reality, simply format your connection string as:

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx /console

or

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxxx /console

This is specifically for connecting from a Mac.

The Cloud: And so it begins…

Aug 12

Posted by admin in Microsoft | No Comments

It was only a matter of time, same as the stories that began emerging about SaaS.

Perhaps the greatest fears of the all-encompassing latest trend known as Cloud Computing is who owns your data, who actually has your data, and is your data safe & reliable?

The question really is, is the cloud meant for data storage, or is it a solution for highly-scalable on-demand distributed computing?  I vote for the latter.

Customers at The Linkup (formely MediaMax) just found this out the hard way.  On August 8th The Linkup apparently shutdown after losing almost half of their customer’s data. The data is gone, never to return.  This article from NetworkWorld mentions that the Industry Standard indicates The Linkup had 20,000 customers. Due to a company split data migration/integration was necessary.  When the migration went seriously wrong, they shut the doors.

Serious VMware Bug: Ouch

Aug 12

Posted by admin in Apple, Linux, Microsoft | No Comments

So it appears that there is a bug in VMware’s licensing code (see below for updates) that will effectively not allow systems running ESX 3.5U2 in Enterprise configuration to run.  System’s that are already running should not be affected.

Matthew Marlowe has posted a blog entry indicating the following work around:

  1. Find the host where a VM is located by getting the list: 
    vmware-cmd -l
  2. Issue the commands: 
    service ntpd stop

date -s 08/01/2008

vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/vm path/vmname.vmx start

service ntpd start

Updates from VMware can be found on this page (UPDATE: Due to timeouts, use this static page).  Apparently a fix is minimum 36 hours away…

More than just a bit scary if you ask me…

UPDATE:

Just received an e-mail from VMware.

Problem:

An issue has been discovered by many VMware customers and partners with ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 where Virtual Machines fail to power on or VMotion successfully. This problem began to occur on August 12, 2008 for customers that had upgraded to ESX 3.5 Update 2. The problem is caused by a build timeout that was mistakenly left enabled for the release build.

Affected products:

  1. VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2 & ESXi 3.5 Update 2
  2. Reports of problems with ESX 3.5 U1 with the following 3.5 Update 2 patch applied.
    1. ESX350-200806201-UG
  3. No other VMware products are affected.

Resolution:

VMware Engineering has isolated the root cause and is working to produce an express patch for impacted customers today. The target timeframe is 6pm, August 12, 2008 PST.

UPDATE:

The express patch can be found here.

UPDATE:

This message is to inform you that we are experiencing a delay in releasing the new version of ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2. Our testing of this release is taking longer than anticipated. We are now targeting to release the update between 2:00 AM PDT (0700 UTC) August 14 and 8:00 AM (1500 UTC) August 14 PDT.

UPDATE:

We have re-issued the entire ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 release (ISOs, upgrade tar and zip files, and patch bundles). They are available for download at http://www.vmware.com/download/.

Please note this update is only relevant to customers who did not install the impacted release of ESX 3.5 Update 2 (build number 103908) or ESXi 3.5 Update 2 (build number 103909). If you have installed either of these please visit http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/esxexpresspatches.html and install the express patch.

BIND Still Vulnerable

Aug 10

Posted by admin in Apple, Linux, Microsoft, Security, Terminal Server | No Comments

Looks like Russian Hacker Evgeniy Polyakov has successfully poisoned the latest version of BIND which was supposed to have been patched in that massive, coordinated release.  The release was supposed to randomize the ports to make it much more difficult to poison.  Using Evgeniy Polyakov’s exploit code and some common hardware, it took 10 hours.  Yikes.

The New York Times article by John Markoff has more details.

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When Big News Goes Down

Jul 16

Posted by admin in Apple, Citrix, Linux, Microsoft, Performance, Terminal Server | No Comments

Following up on our previous post, pingdom has a blog post on downtime for the major news sites.  They cover all the big boys.  ABC News, Christian Science Monitor, International Herald Tribune and Times Online had the most downtime since Jan 1 with up to a whopping 23h 31m.  On the flip-side The Washington Post, CNN and the New York Times were all under 40m and Forbes came in with zero downtime.

You can checkout the pingdom blog post for an interesting analysis.

When Big Sites Go Down

Jul 15

Posted by admin in Apple, Citrix, Linux, Microsoft, Terminal Server | 1 Comment

Data Center Knowledge picked up on a New York Times article about Internet downtime and the reality of trying to provide 24/7/365 uptime for the worlds most popular, and most relied upon, websites and services.

They run through a recent list of outages affecting The Planet, HostDime, ICE, Netflix, YouTube, T-Mobile, Yahoo Stores, Rackspace, Alabanza, ValueWeb, and 365 Main that took sites down anywhere from several hours to several days.

An interesting read to say the least.

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Bagle’s Back?

Jul 4

Posted by admin in Microsoft, Security | 1 Comment

We’re seeing a lot of recent activity related to an (unconfirmed) version of the 4 year old Bagle virus.  The impact is the blacklisting of IP subnets — and it’s unpleasant to say the least.

Essentially users get infected with the Bagle virus and it collects personal favorites including FTP URLs, usernames and passwords.  Spammers then run scripts which test the FTP connections and drop files like:

ftpchk3.php
ftpchk3.pl

which test functionality on the target website.  Their bot then covers its tracks by deleting the files.  Several days later, new files are uploaded to the site, which can include:

hot_video.exe
index1.php
index6.html
load.php
logs.txt
movie.gif
pindex.php

The file hot_video.exe contains the trojan horse Downloader.Tibs.9.V.  As soon as the above mentionned files are uploaded to the FTP of the site, SPAM starts to go out using the host server’s domain name and referencing the URL to the files uploaded by FTP.

The end result is most likely the blacklisting of your entire IP class, not by the RBLs, but by internal corporate networks.  A serious pain in the ass because there is no centralized location to verify and then delist your addresses like there is for RBLs.

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New Remote Desktop Wiki

May 4

Posted by admin in Apple, Citrix, Linux, Microsoft, Performance, Security, Terminal Server | No Comments

Most of the information that is being collected for remotedesktop.com is more efficiently presented as a Wiki rather than a blog.

You can visit our new Wiki at:

http://wiki.remotedesktop.com/

Dedicated Page for Beta 3

Apr 22

Posted by admin in Apple, Microsoft, Terminal Server | No Comments

There is now a dedicated page over at Microsoft Connect for the Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac 2 Public Beta where you can download the new Beta and submit feedback (Windows Live ID sign-in required).