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 .These are the steps that I took, based on the advice and some other research.

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. Essentially, whatever problem you’re having with the ASDM, whether it’s not loading, not reading the configuration or whatever, the answer is likely to be “uninstall your current version of Java, google java 1.4.2, install it, try again”. It was the same with the PDM, and guess what? It’s the same with the ASDM.

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.

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?” It turns out that this has nothing to do with the version of Exchange you are using. I have set up my Exchange OWA to require SSL (see previous article on SSL and Integrated Authentication ) and apparently this can cause issues for OMA.

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.

I needed to use PowerShell for something today on my Vista laptop, but was unable to install the file. I had the normal UAC permission required when I ran it,  but then it failed with this error

Installer encountered an error: 0x80070422

The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it

has no enabled devices associated with it.

It turns out that you need to enable the Windows Update service in order to use an MSU file. How backwards is that? Well, lets see, I have to run a SERVICE in order to be able to install applications.