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 upgraded my VMWare Server install to the latest version of the VMWare Server beta, which I have to say, is looking pretty good! One slight niggle that I had was that when I opened the VMWare Remote Console it would tell me that I could not connect, with the error:
Error opening the remote virtual machine SM-00109:8333\16: The host name could not be resolved.
Clearly THAT’s a pain in the proverbial.
I’ve just added some code syntax highlighting to this blog using SyntaxHighlighter and a great how-to article by Scott Dougherty this means that any code I post should look like this:
public static string SayHello(string name){ return String.Format("Hello, {0}!", name);} There are a few bugs at the moment, one being that tiny_mce is stripping linebreaks from the code posting (just a minor one) and the theme somehow removes the line numbers, but I’m sure I’ll find a way around them…somehow.
One of my unpublished gripes with the DotNetNuke blog was that it was a pain to make work with WLW. One of the cool things with BE.Net is that it does work with WLW, not only that but it works well. Setup was a breeze and within 2 minutes I’m now writing my first post, including tags and categories (hit F2 if you’re trying to do that in WLW).
Now this is cool!
Well my first real post on BlogEngine.Net is…about BlogEngine.Net!
After running the import program from my old DotNetNuke blog I found that the importer had worked, but that the blog entries had not shown up. This was because the cache that BE.Net uses for the XML data files. Since I’m on a shared hosting I couldn’t just run an IISReset.exe, so I obviously needed a work around, and here it is:
I miss WordPress. I miss the fact that it would save my work periodically, and that if my session timed out while the I was writing a blog, it would be there when I logged back in as an unpublished daft. I miss having my categorised posts. I miss having tags to tell me what I’ve written about. Even Google seems to prefer my old blog, old pages that don’t exist are returned where these ones sit in anonymity.
We were integrating a 3rd party product’s web parts with MOSS the other day and came accross an interesting problem. In site editing mode, all the drop down menus would appear for a flash and then go blank. The actual admin pages we were trying to get to would work if you entered them into the browser directly, but that isn’t an easy way to manage the site!
The problem turned out to be that in the process of getting the 3rd party web parts to work, the support team had added a MIME type to the IIS installation.
Had an interesting one yesterday, my bosses Vista laptop booted as per normal, making all the right pictures until just before the log in prompt popped up, then a black screen in what looked to be VGA graphics with the white default arrow cursor.
Corrupted graphics drivers, I thought. A quick boot into safe mode…but no, the same black screen and over-sized pointer.
No problem, Last Known Good Configuration will save my day…except that LKGC points are set when the OS manages a successful boot, and Vista had, in it’s own opinion, successfully booted.
I was adding a shiny new domain controller to my server farm earlier today, we have just two Windows 2000 SP4 domain controllers on old kit and they are due to retire. With the hardware selected, purchased and a fresh copy of Windows Server 2003 R2 installed, I set to installing Active Directory. DCPromo.exe fires up and I go through the configuration steps until… "The Active Directory Installation Wizard cannot continue because the forest is not prepared for installing Windows Server 2003.
If you’ve logged onto the properties for your IIS install and found that the ASP.NET tab has mysteriously disappered, you can try a couple of things.
Firstly, try re-registering ASP.NET with IIS using the ASPNET_REGIIS.exe located in the .NET installation folder:
c:\WINDOWS\MICROSOFT.NET\framework\\aspnet_regiis -i Chances are though, that it won't work, and that you can try and number of command using aspnet_regiis.exe or even uninstalling and reinstalling .NET and you won't actually fix the problem.
When the Dell engineer said “they’ve asked if you can reinstall the OS” my heart sank. Not because I felt like he was weasling out of work - unusually they were very helpful. Not because installing XP is a hard task, I’ve done it over 100 times on all sorts of hardware.
No, the reason I let out a sigh was because this particular laptop, the Latitude X1, has no internal CD/DVD drive.
