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I recently started using Zenoss (an open source application, server and network management platform) to monitor servers. One of the options that can be configured for each of the devices being managed is a hyperlink that can open a website or application of some relevance. In a situation where I am informed of an issue with a server/application I instinctively try to open a Windows remote desktop session to the server. This used to involve manually opening the Microsoft Terminal Services Console (mstsc.exe), keying the server name and then clicking the connect button. I wanted a way to click a hyperlink from the Zenoss web console and establish an rdp session to the relevant server.

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Posted by James Clements to Command Line, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Zenoss | 3 comments | show comments » | « hide comments

When vSphere 4 became available I was keen to upgrade all of my hosts and vCenter servers to start testing features like Fault Tolerance, Site Recovery Manager, and vCenter Linked Mode e.t.c. The host upgrade went smoothly using VMware Update Manager. Similarly, the upgrade of all vCenter servers was also without issue. A short while after, I needed to add RAM to a group of hosts and all was fine until I booted the first host post upgrading it's RAM.

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Posted by James Clements to VMware | add a comment

I have been using System Center Configuration Manager to deploy software to clients for a while now but I recently had a requirement to control a client remotely. In order to control clients using the SCCM Remote Tools feature, some ports needed to be opened on the client in the Windows firewall.

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Posted by James Clements to SCCM, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP | add a comment

I was trying to deploy some software to a Windows XP SP3 client when I noticed that there seemed to be an issue with network connectivity. For some reason the client hadn't downloaded and installed any software hat had been pushed to it via SCCM. On the off chance, I happened to check the computer name in 'System Properties' (to see who the computer belonged to) and I noticed that the buttons for 'Network ID' and 'Change' were greyed out.

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Posted by James Clements to Registry, Windows XP | add a comment

I wanted to install some DRAC 5 cards into each of my Dell PowerEdge 2900 VMware ESX hosts, so I decided to VMotion off the Virtual Machines onto other hosts in the cluster before shutting down the node. The first Virtual Machine migrated without a problem but when I tried a second I received an error stating the there was a CPU incompatibility between the host and the Virtual Machine.

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Posted by James Clements to VMware | 5 comments | show comments » | « hide comments

Every now and then I need to resize (usually extend/enlarge) a disk attached to a Virtual Machine. I have tried several methods to do this over the years (including combinations of VMware Converter, third party partition manager apps, diskpart etc) but none have been as efficient as the method I discovered during recent VMware training for my VCP4 exam.

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Posted by James Clements to Hardware, VMware | 8 comments | show comments » | « hide comments

At work, people were using VPN to access their email out of the office, but I have always thought that logging into a corporate network via VPN for most users is an extra hassle that they could probably do without. I had considered setting up RPC over HTTPS for Exchange 2003 but during a meeting regarding disaster recovery it became evident it was actually now a necessity. So, after configuring the server for RPC-HTTPS I had the small problem of deploying the settings to Outlook clients en masse.

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Posted by James Clements to Office, Registry, Scripting | 1 comment | show comment » | « hide comment

Post the upgrade of a VMware infrastructure from ESX 3.5 to vSphere 4, I encountered an issue when upgrading the Virtual Machines. I had already installed the latest VMware tools and after upgrading the hardware from version 4 to version 7 I wanted to remove the standard NIC attached to each Virtual Machine and attach the new vmxnet3 NIC.

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Posted by James Clements to VMware | add a comment

I had a problem the other day when I went to logon to a server using RDP and the text fields where you enter your username and password were black! I typed in my credentials anyway and found that I could still logon to the server. After this there seemed to be no other issues.

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Posted by James Clements to Registry, Windows Server 2003 | 1 comment | show comment » | « hide comment

I have just tried to open a file with a .chm extension on a computer running Windows Vista. The file is located on my desktop yet when I tried to open it only the table of contents would display and not the actual pages containing any content. Instead I was presented with a screen that said: 'Navigation to the webpage was cancelled'.

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Posted by James Clements to Windows Vista | add a comment