I just moved an SBS 2008 installation from a physical server to a virtual machine. It’s a temporary thing until we rebuild the whole server in a couple of weeks, but it’s one of the steps. The physical SBS box had Microsoft Virtual Server installed on it running Blackberry software for Exchange (just for one user, but he’s the owner so it’s important that it keep working!). Once the virtual machine was up and running (hosted on VMware ESXi 5.0 free), everything seemed to be going fine until I took a look at the Blackberry server. I had to change the networking in Virtual Server to use the new virtual network card (instead of the old physical one). Then I booted the virtual-inside-virtual machine….and lost networking to the SBS VM!

I’ll save you the extended details of troubleshooting, which involved some reboots and reconfigurations and resets. The solution was go into the VMware vSphere Client, click on the host at the left, then on the Configuration tab, and then on Networking on the Hardware submenu. I clicked on Properties of vSwitch0, and then edited the vSwitch configuration. On the Security tab, I changed Promiscuous Mode from Reject to Accept, and OK’d my way out of all the settings screens. This is a great security feature but prevents the use of sub-virtualized machines that require promiscuous mode (now you see why I mentioned sleeping around?).

One thing I also did was add a second virtual network card to the SBS machine and unbind it from IPv4 and IPv6, but assign it as the physical card used by Microsoft Virtual Server for the Blackberry virtual machine. This gives me a little logical separation between the NIC used by the SBS system and the one used by Blackberry, though it doesn’t gain me much given the overall setup. It was more one of my troubleshooting changes I decided was worth keeping. You do still have to enable Promiscuous Mode for the Virtual Server to get network connectivity (a hint was that with the defaults, broadcast traffic worked because the NIC would get an IP via DHCP, but unicast traffic would fail; broadcast traffic was functioning even with Promiscuous Mode disabled!).

I’ve dealt with Promiscuous Mode before to get firewalls working in VMware, such as pfSense, which is why I though to check on the setting eventually. I’m happy that my past experience was able to help with my current one, and now I’ve shared with you and, hopefully, future Googlers looking for a solution to a similar problem!

Personally, my first attempt was my first name in Morse code, since it’s about all I remember from when I got my Amateur Radio license well over ten years ago (and I failed the code test, which I wasn’t planning on taking, and got my code-free Technician level license I was aiming for :-) Who knew that many years later I’d wish I’d learned Morse code better so I could more easily recognize callers by feeling my pocket vibrate? Definitely not me! (I did learn code decently well but visually and not audibly, and the translation was slow and painful, and difficult to un-learn and re-learn. Learn it the right way the first time!)

So I’ll probably not do too much with the custom vibrations, at least not ones containing secret Morse code (secret mostly from me). Glenn may far better with his luscious beats, which must mean he’s a better musician than I! But thanks, Glenn, for the custom vibrations tip. I also checked out the other “Accessibility” settings, which are pretty cool; I’ve heard of them before but hadn’t paid very much attention. Some options aren’t useful just for official “accessibility” reasons, so don’t be afraid to browse!

Subject: STOP CONTACTING THOSE PEOPLE.CONTACT MRS. JANICE ROWE FOR YOUR COMPENSATION

Good day

I am Mrs. Janice Rowe, I am a US citizen, 48 years Old. I reside here in New Braunfels Texas. My residential address is as follows.10854 Crockett Court. Apt 30, New Brunets Texas, United States, am thinking of relocating since I am now rich. I am one of those that took part in the Compensation in Nigeria many years ago and they refused to pay me, I had paid over $20,000 while in the US, trying to get my payment all to no avail.

So I decided to travel down to Nigeria with all my compensation documents, and I was directed to meet Mrs. Janice Rowe, who is the member of COMPENSATION AWARD COMMITTEE, and I contacted him and he explained everything to me. He said whoever is contacting us through emails are fake. He took me to the paying bank for the claim of my Compensation payment. Right now I am the most happiest woman on earth because I have received my compensation funds of $7.500, 000.00 Moreover, Mrs. Janice Rowe showed me the full information of those that are yet to receive their payments and I saw your name as one of the beneficiaries, and your email address, that is why I decided to email you to stop dealing with those people, they are not with your fund, they are only making money out of you. I will advise you to contact Mrs. Janice Rowe.

You have to contact him directly on this information below.

JOAKIN COMPENSATION HOUSE

Name: Mrs. Janice Rowe.
Email: kudafrancis@voila.fr
Phone: +234-7042481256

You really have to stop dealing with those people that are contacting you and telling you that your fund is with them, it is not in any way with them, they are only taking advantage of you and they will dry you up until you have nothing. The only money I paid after I met Mrs. Janice Rowe was just $420 for the paper works, take note of that.

As soon as you contact him he will send you the payment information which you are to use in sending the payment to him in order for him to obtain the document from the court of law there in Nigeria so that your fund can be transfer to you without any delay just the way mine was being transfer to me. Send him the following details if you know you are ready to make the payment so that as soon as he receive your information he will send to you the payment details for sending him the $420USD that is needed for him to get the document that is needed to make the transfer a successful one without any further payment.

Fill Out the information to him if you are ready to get your fund and also ready to make the payment.

Your Full Name:……………
Direct Phone:………………..
Country……………..
Occupation:…………………
Gender:………
Age:…………..

Once again stop contacting those people, I will advise you to contact Mrs. Janice Rowe
so that he can help you to deliver your fund instead of dealing with those liars that will be turning you around asking for different kind of money to complete your transaction.

Thank You and Be Blessed.

Mrs. Janice Rowe.
10854 Crockett Court. Apt 30,
New Brunets Texas.
United States of America

In his post, Nick says, “While at a conference last week it hit me that those who are not entrenched in IT (information technology) often don’t know there’s a difference between web development and IT.” What a true statement! I’m not sure why this confusion exists really, beyond people not paying attention (a common problem everywhere), although there are some similarities between the two and often one person does both (or some of both). And you must have IT infrastructure underneath a website for the hosting at least, so they are related, though IT for most websites isn’t even hosted on most organization’s internal infrastructure!

IT, by the way, is an initialism for Information Technology. This should be obvious, but we’re talking here about not knowing the difference between IT and website creation, so I’m not going to assume (which, as you may know, is not a good idea anyway)!.

Nick goes on to say that IT is an “applied science” and web development is an “applied art.” I think that’s good, using science/art terms; one (IT) is a creative position that happens to use a lot of technology (both in the creation and then in the hosting/setup of the result) and the other, while it involves creativity as far as creating solutions to problems with technology, consists much more of a defined process to find a solution to a problem or create and manage a technology platform for others to use for their own disciplines, and not creating content for public (or even captive audience) consumption.

Confusion happens because there are people who cross disciplines (sometimes well, often horribly) and because, as Nick mentions, systems set up in the IT world are then used to do web development/design as well a host it (though the hosting infrastructure is often outsourced, another confusion).

And hey, an issue I run into even more often is the difference between web design and web development. Again, because people cross disciplines (again, often poorly!) and don’t understand what is what. Design = visual layout and content creation, and human-computer interaction decisions. Development = creation of interactive websites by programming in various tools, including server-side scripting/programming, database interaction, and client-side programming such as JavaScript and HTML5, and even Flash.

A good designer is not automatically a good programmer (for web and other programming areas!) and vice versa. In fact I think one reason so many sites stink so horribly is the tendency for one person to do it all when they really are terrible at one of the two. I do know people who are excellent at both but they are uncommon, IMHO. And they often get bored with designing and programming websites themselves because they’re very smart and move on to more interesting and advanced things (one guy I know like this is getting his masters in Human-Computer Interaction Design here).

So, I would agree with Nick and argue that not only should IT and website creation be understood as separate functions done by (usually) separate people, or occasionally as two separate functions and activities done by the same person at different times (I’ve done this myself in the past!), but web design and web development should be thought of as separate, but symbiotic, functions that are best done by separate people in the best case, and by one talented person in rare circumstances. (Alternately, and commonly, a designer will use a previously developed tool, such as WordPress or another Content Management System, not having a separately commissioned developer for a specific project. However, these tools were created by web developers!)

There was a bit more, but he kept talking long enough I think that’s all I remember (not uncommon) :-) Looks like I’m rubbing off quite well onto my mini-me! Too bad his imaginary friends would pay with imaginary money if he billed them, or I might have him start paying rent.

The software is f.lux from Stereopsis, written by Michael Herf, the guy who wrote Picasa and sold it to Google. His wife is an artist and the process of lighting her studio and finding lots of information about light (probably more than you want to know) led to the creation of f.lux. What is it? A small program, available for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems, that runs in the background and adjusts the color temperature of your monitor so it matches daylight during the day, and incandescent light at night, so the monitor matches your surroundings (you can customize some of this for your light sources). All you have to do is tell it where you are, but it even makes a good educated guess at that (I assume with IP geolocation and/or the timezone setting in your computer, I haven’t checked).

The whole thing is straightforward. Just install and run; tweak if desired. You can click for a quick preview of how the monitor will change over a 24-hour period. This is my second night trying it. After sunset, my monitor has a warmer color tone. It’s a little odd, but it doesn’t have the same glaring brightness to my eyes, and when I look at the TV over my laptop screen the laptop’s backlight doesn’t scream at me out of the corner of my eyes as much, it blends in better with the room. It was annoying enough in the past that I would usually shut the laptop lid while watching TV, but it didn’t bother me nearly as much tonight (I reduced the screen brightness down significantly from full as I usually do, as well).

It’s still a bit odd to see the cast of my screen look slightly different at night, but it’s so much more comfortable I’m pretty sure f.lux is here to stay. It’s free, easy to turn off (or disable for an hour with a checkbox), is automatic and unobtrusive. No real reason not to try it. Oh, and you can open up the advanced settings and adjust the color temperatures in case you work in fluorescent lighting instead of daylight during the day, for example.

And you can’t help but like a guy who in 2001 was ranting about how credit card offers were terribly annoying when made to look like important, urgent bills. That must mean he writes good software :-)

The desktop side is great, and I have close to 2,000 links right now saved in my Delicious account. But what about when I want to visit one of those sites from my iPhone? Well, there’s the Delicious website, which I could use from Safari. But I’d like a native app. I was very happy when I saw the App called “Bookmarks” and saw the description!

My excitement was misplaced. The extent of the App is a Settings dialog box, where you enter your Delicious username and password and press Login. For a week or two, I’d tried this a few times and it didn’t do anything. No response, the Login button just didn’t “do” anything visible. Maybe it was a Delicious backend problem, maybe it was the number of tags I have (remember, about 2,000 bookmarks, and those are tagged with 2,300 different tags!). Regardless, no feedback. Then, almost as if by magic, I had a list of keywords. The entire actual program consist of an “All Tags” screen you can scroll through (but not search) like Contacts, only it’s a list of every tag you’ve ever used, alphabetically.

No offence, but scrolling through 2,300 tags is not my idea of the way to find something quickly! Definitely need some search. Supposing I do find the tag I want, tapping it shows a list of the links tagged with that tag, intuitively. But each entry is on one line, and it runs of the end of the screen giving merely an elipsis to indicate it was too long to fit. How about tapping a link for a description? Nope, that closes the app alogether and opens Safari, the iPhone’s web browser, taking me directly to the link without passing Go and without collecing $200! That would be OK if there were a smaller “details” button or some way to view additional details if I wanted to, including the full title. I would be even better if I could edit or delete links so I could fix erorrs as they pop up. But no, I’m stuck with a long list of hard-to-find tags that get me to a list of short, unreadable (in their entirety) link names with no URL, description, or other information. And I can’t browse sites tagged a particular tag by other people, one of the good ways to find meta-information that others have so graciously saved for you about websites! No way to even view links people who “subscribe” to your links save back for you!

So what does this app do for me? Nothing. I never use it. It’s small, and it sits on my iPhone for now, as I keep hoping an update will show up on the App Store that will make my dreams come true. For now, I’m snoring. Really, I will be in a few minutes. (Although it’s only due in small part to this App.) Give it a miss for now, unless you have very few tabs and meager bookmark access needs!

Even though there are free and cheaper RDP clients, the features and polish of this one win hands down and I won’t even try the others. And that was before the latest upgrade adding console support (oh yeah!), more resolutions (I think), and Vista/Server 2008 support! I have had issues connecting to Vista/Server 2008 but haven’t investigated further yet and it’s not a deal-breaker (so far it looks like it’s connecting but never shows the screen). Not hard to RDP to an XP/Server 2003 box and re-RDP out to the Vista/Server 2008 box, using mRemote for example (an excellent, free Windows RDP/VNC/SSH/HTTP/HTTPS/etc client!). This is the first release claiming Vista/Server 2008 support so issues are forgivable for now; like I said there are workarounds.

I’ve used this to fix server problems at both places I work already. Reviewers on the iTunes Store that say to use VNC obviously don’t administer Windows servers or have RDP experience. VNC has its place and I have an app to do that too (Mocha VNC Lite, haven’t needed the paid version yet), but in general RDP is faster, more reliable, and built-in to all Windows systems (XP home doesn’t count :-) Plus RDP is the way to get on a Terminal Server if you have the need.

WinAdmin works great through the iPhone’s VPN connection capabilities, which is how I usually use it if I’m not onsite. If you don’t know how to use Remote Desktop, figure that out first using desktop computers and then get this. If you’re a Mac user, you should look at alternates like VNC since RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) is a Microsoft-only thing (another uninformed complaint from iTunes Store reviewers). WinAdmin right now has four out of five stars and 222 reviews on the iTunes Store, even with the dumb complaints from users who can’t figure it out!

If you’re a network or systems administrator, this is worth well more than twice what it’s selling for. Thanks to Andrew Mitry in the #citrt IRC channel for first bringing it to my attention and endorsing it!

It looks like my reviews so far are only of the paid apps I have! Probably because they were useful enough to me to pay for. I won’t part with my money for junk apps! Plenty of free stuff I’ll get to reviewing though :-)

UPDATE: I forgot to link to the official WinAdmin support site, which has an FAQ and some tutorials. It’s available from the Help link in the program, but you can look at it now: WinAdmin Support. The FAQ has not been updated to reflect the newest version’s features such as Vista and Server 2008 support yet (but hey, what developer likes writing documentation, right? :-)

UPDATE on Sept. 3: I’ve seen a few people looking on search engines for something similar to WinAdmin on the Mac. Microsoft makes the only Remote Desktop client for Mac that I know of, to connect to Windows machines from a Mac workstation. It’s called Remote Deskto Connection Client for Mac 2, and it’s free. I’ve used it just a little bit, and it’s acutally pretty good, possibly better in some ways than the Windows Remote Deskop Client! (But not better than mRemote on Windows).

If you want to connect to your Mac from your iPhone remotely, a different scenario, you should look for a Macintosh VNC server for the Mac (use Google, I’m not familar with any I can recall but I have set it up once before) and use a program like Mocha VNC Lite or Mocha VNC (the paid version with more features). There may be others, I don’t use VNC very often. You can also install a free VNC Server like Ultr@VNC on your Windows machine to connect remotely, but I prefer Remote Desktop in most (but not all) circumstances for this.

The biggest issues with the Rooms app are that IRC commands, like “/me” to show an action, aren’t supported yet, and that the app drains the battery very quickly. The battery issue is not going to go away since using the internet costs battery (you can set the app to stay connected while the screen is off, which is great, or not go to sleep at all, which is nice but eats a lot more battery due to keeping the screen on). However, additional features including the “/me” command are planned for a future release according to the developer on his blog. Also coming is SSL and IRC server password support, as well as support for identifying your nickname with nickserv.

I have had Rooms crash occasionally, which is not surprising given that it’s a beta. One day I had it reboot my phone twice in a row (before I could use it), twice. It didn’t otherwise cause problems and since I’ve upgraded my iPhone to 2.0.2 firmware I don’t think I’ve had an issue (and in fact, my iPhone issues have mostly gone away entirely, which I may post about at some point). It’s hard to tell in many cases whether bugs are the fault of Apple or an App developer, since the platform and the apps are both so new and Apple is still rather close-mouthed (and limits what developers can talk about in some cases, too). But that’s a story for another day, and maybe another blog (there’s plenty of discussion out there!).

(Normally I’d link to the apps I’m mentioning online, but the only official place to link that I know of is a direct link to the Apple Store in iTunes. Rather than find and link those URLs for these quick posts, I will probably just give the name of the app, since it’s so easy to find with a search in the iTunes Store or even from the App Store on the iPhone itself, and you can purchase from either place! If I have the URL handy I may make some exceptions. You can probably find an iTunes link for most Apps with a simple Google search, but again, just search the iTunes Store, unless you’re searching for additional reviews!)