Sam has been working in the IT industry for nearly 20 years now, and is currently working for VMware as a Senior Technical Marketing Manger in the Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU) focussed on Automation. Previously, he has worked as consultant for VMware PSO, specializing in cloud automation and network virtualization. His technical experience includes design, development and implementation of cloud solutions, network function virtualisation and the software defined datacentre. Sam specialises in automation of network virtualisation for cloud infrastructure, enabling public cloud solutions for service providers and private or hybrid cloud solutions for the enterprise.
Sam holds multiple high level industry certifications, including the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) for Cloud Management and Automation. He is also a proud member of the vExpert community, holding the vExpert accolade from 2013-present, as well as being selected for the vExpert NSX, vExpert VSAN and vExpert Cloud sub-programs.
I’ve just had a frustrating few days trying to downgrade 4 Dell Latitude E6500 laptops to XP. The problem was, whenever you booted to the XP cd you would get to the point just before you agree to the license and then hit a blue screen with a SATA error code. It seems that the bundled driver for the SATA storage controller incorrectly identifies it and causes a fatal error as it’s loaded.
Having recently installed an ESXi server, I am getting to grips with the management and administration of it, one of the things that I wanted to be able to do was connect to the remote terminal through SSH.
I downloaded my SSH client of choice, PuTTY, and set about connecting, however the server refused the connection. It seems that SSH is not enabled out of the box for ESXi and you need to go through some steps to get there - I found some helpful hints here.
If anyone visits here regularly, rather than by google search, you’ll have noticed that I haven’t posted much lately. This is because of a major office move at work which I have been managing from the technical side of things, and moving a 25 server operation isn’t an easy job. I’ve upgraded the entire network infrastructure throughout from SOHO to enterprise products.
Normal service will resume shortly!
I was configuring our new Cisco ASA 5510 firewall today, as part of a major infrastructure upgrade. I’m pretty comfortable with the Cisco IOS, but I still prefer the GUI for the basic set up, using command line to tweak the finer or more complex configurations. However, straight out of the box, I had a very hard time getting the ASDM to load. Being familiar with the PDM from the PIX range of firewalls, I should have guessed the problem straight away.
I recently tried to use Microsoft reader on my iMate K-Jam mobile, it’s Windows Mobile 5 powered, so according to Microsoft it’s fully supported. However, when I tried to activate, I got the following error:
“You have an older version of Pocket PC which does not support Activation”
Not true I cried, and after a lot of Google-ing and trying various different fixes that are posted on the net, I found the only one that actually worked for me!
32-bit processors have a limitation of only being able to directly address 4GB RAM - their architecture was never designed to address more. 64-bit processors get around that limitation by being able to us 64 bits to address RAM (potentially 16,777,216 GB), but what do you do if you have an application that won’t work on a 64-bit copy of Windows, but does need to utilise more than 4GB of RAM?
For a little while now I’ve had an irritating problem with my Vista laptop. Whenever I insert a DVD, CD of any kind, pops up the message asking me to prepare a blank disk:
It’s impossible to access the files on the disc and I don’t want Vista trying to “prepare” my data disc. Quite irritating, but not irritating enough to fix right away.
Microsoft have a KB article about it, which has worked in some cases, but not in most.
If, like me, you enjoy a bit of design in your free time then I have a great site for you…
Blog Spoon Graphics is a fantastic site, with loads of free vector graphics downloads that you can use in your designs. It’s also got some great tips and stuff on vector art - take a look!
This is probably a little off-topic, but hey - I like this site! And no, I haven’t sold out, it’s not a sponsored link…I just like it!
So I was testing the configuration on my Exchange 2003 server in preparation for the roll out of some Windows Mobile devices when I recieved the following error:
Outlook(R) Mobile Access is supported only on Microsoft(R) Exchange Server 2003. Currently your mailbox is stored on an older version of Exchange server. Please contact your system administrator for additional assistance.
“That’s odd”, I thought, “I only have Exchange Server 2003 in my organisation, how can I have an older version of Exchange?
Recently I wrote a little utility for a client using the excellent Html Agility Pack to read and navigate through a HTML page, selecting the data that was needed and parsing it - basically a screen scrape. I downloaded the source, compiled it, added a reference to the dll in my project and tapped away for a few minutes and et voila, within a few minutes a working screen scrape. A fantastic library.
