There are two new certifications (and a VCDX4 is on the horizon!) that have been inserted above VCP:

• VCAP4-DCA (Datacenter Administrator) - Planning and administration side of vSphere, more for the systems administrator. The exam opens July 12th and will be offered at VMWorld. The blueprint isn't available yet, and is marked as "coming soon."  Unlike the VCP, this exam will be 100% lab. Because the exam is more lab based, initially there will not be an immediate pass/fail. Expect to shell out $400 for this exam.
• VCAP4-DCD (Datacenter Design) - Design methods/principles, more of an architect type of certification. Not a whole lot discussion around this exam, it's still pretty far out (August). This exam will be multiple choice, but Jon Hall assured us that it would be more involved than the VCP. No word on the cost for this exam.
• VCDX4 (Design Expert) - VMWare has updated the certification website with a certification path (you can find it here) for the VCDX4. The Enterprise Exam is gone and you will be required to get both the DCA and DCD certifications. This means that for any VCDX4 hopeful, you will need to wait until at least August. Thankfully, Jon mentioned that there will be more opportunities for the design defense this year over last.

Exams will still be done by Pearson View.

Partners, there is no requirement at this time, but you may start being more involved in the VCDX design defense panels.

For more information, see VMWare's myLearn web portal.

I hope that answers a lot of your questions and piques your curiosity. I'll post a link to the brownbag recording when it becomes available.

Thank you Jon and Cody for putting on an informative brown bag and I look forward to more!

I'm a firm believer in the right tool for the job, and when I was recently placed in charge of a couple of development efforts I wanted to make sure the right tools were in place to do my job effectively. The first tool that I needed was a revision control system so that we could keep track of changes. It used to be that CVS was the common choice, but from my quick and dirty research it looked SVN had taken the top spot (later, as it turns out, there are some pretty heated debates about this... some people will tell you git or mercurial).

Since SVN was going to be the system of choice, I decided to put it together on a Linux based virtual machine - mainly because I'm a Windows systems administrator by trade and I like to keep all of my skills sharpened. Some may say it is foolish - especially with such an important system - to run it on a platform that is unfamiliar. The beauty of subversion is that it runs on more than one platform (Windows, even) and you can migrate easily if needed.

The biggest requirement I had was integrating SVN with LDAP(S). I wanted to be able to control access, but through Active Directory and not some sort of file on my SVN server. As it turns out, it wasn't too difficult to do - once I figured out how to do it . Here are the commands in a nutshell (all of these commands are to be run as a root user - sudo or just logged in as root doesn't matter):

Install subversion and apache2 with the SVN module:

apt-get install subversion
apt-get install apache2 libapache2-svn

Enable the SVN Apache module:

a2enmod authnz_ldap

Since I use a self-signed certs and I'm too lazy to install my SSL chain, I have to turn off Apache's checks (you may not want to do this). Add to the end of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf:

LDAPVerifyServerCert Off

After troubleshooting, you need to set this in your /etc/ldap/ldap.conf file to avoid errors similar to "[warn] [client x.x.x.x] [636] auth_ldap authenticate: user foo authentication failed; URI /secret [ldap_search_ext_s() for user failed][Operations error]"

REFERRALS off

Now, you need to add it to your apache2 configuration so that you can access it via http. You will need to edit this to suit your own needs, I hope it's relatively self-explanatory, but I've made some comments in red. Add this after your last </directory>  statement:

DAV svn
SVNParentPath /data/svn - Your SVN repository data
SVNListparentPath on
SVNAutoversioning On
AuthType Basic
AuthBasicProvider ldap
AuthzLDAPAuthoritative on
AuthName "svn"
AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthLDAPURL "ldaps://DOMAINCONTROLLER/DC=domain,DC=com?sAMAccountName?sub?(objectClass=*)" - You want this pointed at your base DN. Also, some (even most) of you may not be running LDAPS (SSL LDAP) - you may need to change this to ldap://.
AuthLDAPBindDN "DOMAIN\User" - Any user will do, since by default Windows allows any user to query active directory for auth. I suggest making a separate user for just this.
AuthLDAPBindPassword Password
AuthLDAPGroupAttributeIsDN on
AuthLDAPGroupAttribute member
Require ldap-group cn=svn,ou=securitygroups,ou=IT,dc=domain,dc=com - This is optional, but allows you to limit SVN access to a specific group.

Once you're done, it's time to create your first repository:

svncreate /data/svn firstrepository

Now you need to change the owner to www-data so apache2 can read/write it:

chown -R www-data svn
chgrp -R www-data svn
chmod -R g+rws svn

And voila! You should be able to go to http://yourIPorHostname/svn and view your first repository!

The original version only does it for one value (65536) - this one does it for both 65536 and 32768.

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$myCol = @()
$vms = get-vm | where {$_.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn" -and `
$_.Guest.OSFullName -match "Microsoft Windows*" } | Sort Name
foreach($vm in $vms){
$wmi = get-wmiobject -class "Win32_DiskPartition" `
-namespace "root\CIMV2" -ComputerName $vm            
    foreach ($objItem in $wmi){
        $Details = "" | Select-Object VMName, Partition, Status
            if ($objItem.StartingOffset -eq "65536"){
                $Details.VMName = $objItem.SystemName
                   $Details.Partition = $objItem.Name
                $Details.Status = "Partition aligned"
            }
            elseif ($objItem.StartingOffset -eq "32768"){
                $Details.VMName = $objItem.SystemName
                   $Details.Partition = $objItem.Name
                $Details.Status = "Partition aligned"
			}
            else{
                $Details.VMName = $objItem.SystemName
                   $Details.Partition = $objItem.Name
                $Details.Status = "Partition NOT aligned"
            }
    $myCol += $Details
    }
}
$myCol | Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation "C:\Temp\PartitionAlignment.csv"

There are several things you will need to know about this script prior to running it:

This requires PowerCLI (from vmware.com).

Because this script uses WMI, it will use the credentials of the user you are logged in as. You can use something like this if you need to specify credentials.

If you want to add additional offsets, simply copy the elseif statement and paste it below the } for 32768.

Hope it helps!

Last Friday I wrote a blog post about how netflow was making my users happy. This week I'm going to talk about how netflow is still making my users happy - except for one.

After a few days of watching CPU usage on my routers, I added a second site to my netflow collector and started investigating.

The first thing I noticed was more users backing up to the wrong location (we're now performing an audit). The second thing I noticed was someone transferring a lot of data from Akamai - and I started looking into what it was.

The IP in question didn't have a DNS entry, so I got curious. I used nmap to find out more information and lo and behold:

Running: Apple iPhone OS 3.X
OS details: Apple iPhone mobile phone (iPhone OS 3.0 - 3.0.1)

An iPhone?!

After realizing it was an iphone, and not even a user's computer - I decided to take action against the offending device. After all, we're having bandwidth issues! Because we're using DHCP, I took a look at our DHCP leases to find out the MAC address of the iPhone:

Now that I had the MAC address, I could send it to the /dev/null blackhole. I logged into my wireless access point and went to work. I would outline the CLI commands, but I must confess to using the web interface. As you can tell from these instructions, it's much easier (on the surface) to do it that way. Also, as it turns out Cisco WAP's don't play nice if you configure through both the GUI and CLI.

Essentially what I did was create a filter for the particular offending MAC address. If you are doing this yourself, be careful! By default it will set the Default Action to "Block All," meaning you will knock everyone off.

This is how I set it up:

Yeah, I know - I'm a terrible person - the poor user can't get on our ultra fast (not really) wireless network! Well, the way I see it is there isn't a single business use case where a user would need to transfer 120+ MB worth of data to their phone. That's what the cell phone carrier network is for! Let AT&T handle it says I!

I knew that SFTP was more on the Linux side of things, so I decided at first to use linux for this. Even though I'm primarily a Windows shop, I firmly believe in the right tool for the job. I even got a bit of budget to buy RHEL for it. Unfortunately, as I came to find out after trying to set it up, there is a limitation that had me running to another solution. The limitation was part of a requirement handed to me - I couldn't allow our clients to traverse directories and get a list of our other clients. The way openssh implements chroot allows for this to happen and there's no way around it. Your SFTP users will end up in their own directory, but a simple "cd ../ls" will show them a list of your clients (or root directory). I later read that proftpd may not do that, but by then I had opted for a Windows solution.

There are a number of products out there that will do SFTP on Windows - some free, some not. Because this would be something I would be running in a production environment that is client facing, the solution had to include a support option. This narrowed my choices to Serv-U and WS_FTP. I've used both in the past and I always had a pretty decent impression of Serv-U so I installed a demo and started to run it through its paces.

Part of my requirements was that it had to play nice with my large prosumer NAS that I use for cheap disk space. Serv-U was working beautifully up to that point, but from what I could tell it wouldn't do impersonation and it relied upon the service credentials to work properly. This wouldn't normally be an issue if the space was located on a Windows server that was on my domain, but the NAS device has never played nicely with active directory and user credentials. So I decided to give Serv-U support a call to see if they had a quick answer.

I placed the call, and in short order was connected to customer service (funny enough, I was talking to the same guy that did the phone tree!). I informed him that I had a quick 30 second presales question and I was ready to purchase his product immediately if I could get a quick answer.

I was shocked when the gentleman told me that they wouldn't take my question because they didn't do presales support via phone and I had to send in an email and would get a response within a couple of days. When I told him (politely, seriously) that I had my credit card in hand and was ready to purchase the product if I could get an answer to my question he balked and told me again that I could only send an email. He actually managed to sound annoyed that I had even called to begin with.

I know, some of you readers may be asking, "Why not just send in an email? He gave you an option! Stop being so unreasonable" Well, a few reasons - for one, I had to get a solution in that day. The second reason, and something more important to me personally - the guy was just plain rude about it. Here I am, a potential customer ready to purchase his product for $1000 - no small sum - and he was annoyed I was calling for a presales question!

Serv-U being out of the running, I installed the WS_FTP demo and it worked beautifully and I purchased it later that day. It was more expensive - in fact, almost $500 more, but I was willing to pay for it if it worked.

And that my friends, is how you lose $1,000 in 30 seconds.