VMwareInfo.Com

How to add a Shortcut for all users in a VDI environment via Group Policy Preferences

2012-01-26T09:37:00.000-05:00

Jeff Miller was using VMware View 5 with Wyse p20’s and needed the ability for users to disconnect from their desktop rather than just locking their machine and turning off the monitor/device. He was running into issues specifically with View 5 and the P20s reconnecting back to sessions that were already in a connected state. (i.e. Users just left the session running and turned off the monitor and headed home hoping to reconnect remotely).

Typically the user would have to attempt several times before establishing a successful connection. Jeff noticed solid black screens after logging in and quick disconnects from the p20 if it couldn’t display the windows desktop properly.

As a workaround/fix he decided to deploy a disconnect icon to all of his users through Active Directory Group Policy Preferences. GPPs are pretty powerful and I’ve seen many clients not fully taking advantage of them. Many of things that were historically placed in a login script can be accomplished elegantly via the GPP interface.

Check out the steps Jeff took to deploy his shortcut via AD GPP.

1. First create a disconnect batch script in your netlogon share (or somewhere else all users can access)

a. The only line you need in the batch file is: %Systemroot%\system32\tsdiscon.exe

2. Create a group policy object in AD and apply to your target users OU.

3. Jeff selected icon 131 which was a red X, however feel free to select any icon of your choice. A full listing of icons and their associated number is found at here.

4. You can either run gpupdate /force to test or logoff and log back on. You should see your shiny new icon on the desktop. The Group Policy Preference also has the ability to place a shortcut on the Start Menu, Quick Launch or any number of other places.

5. Inform your users that this is the best option to use when finished for the day or finished with their remote connection. Also make them aware that this will not close anything on their desktop, it will keep all programs and documents open until they connect again.

Thanks go out to Jeff for the detailed instructions and the REDACTED screenshot!

2012 : Getting back on track– A peek behind the scenes.

2012-01-23T16:44:00.001-05:00

The last 2 months have been pretty quiet from a blog perspective. Only 2 posts for the past 2 months. Not good. WELL below my historic average and personal goals. Behind the scenes, some things have changed and will continue to change a bit. Mostly from an advertising perspective, I will be winding down my individual commitments to advertising vendors and will be showcasing IPM as the exclusive 2012 sponsor.

Expect to see the same independently written blog posts from actual people in the trenches with some new logos and maybe some new design elements.

Looking forward to a great 2012!

Database Permissions in XenDesktop 5–Use SQLCMD mode!

2011-12-27T09:01:00.000-05:00

The database requirements for Citrix XenDesktop 5.5 changed a bit from XenDesktop 4 and trying to explain all of these details to your security conscious DBA can be ~~exhausting~~ ~~fruitless~~ ~~aggravating~~ ~~time consuming~~ challenging occasionally. If you are using the Desktop Studio to initially configure your database, you will need to have the user running the install given Security Admin rights on the database. Apparently, this is not always as easy as it seems.

After some back and forth conversations with the DBA group, out of desperation, I decided to click the Generate… button. Problem solved.

Clicking Generate outputs a nice and easy SQLCMD script that you can give to your DBA that basically answers all of their questions (thanks to the great commenting in the script) and allows them to set up the database environment for XenDesktop using their God Mode privileges. Couldn’t be easier.

If you’ve been struggling coming up with the correct permission requirements for your DBA, give the Generate button a try.

Reverting iOS applications using Dropbox!

2011-12-06T09:15:00.000-05:00

Sometimes after upgrading an application on an iOS device, new ‘features’ turn into issues and you would like to revert back. The following instructions by Marcos Velez can be used to revert to a more stable version.

Make sure you still have a previous version (Citrix 4.2.3.ipa, Citrix 5.0.ipa or Citrix 5.0.1.ipa) on your local drive. [More on using Dropbox for that below]
If you can’t find it, look for it in the Recycle Bin (Windows), or Trash (Apple). As new, updated applications are downloaded from the iTunes App Store, previous versions are usually deleted and moved to the Recycle Bin, or Trash.
Now, delete the new/current version from iTunes (right click on it and choose Delete)
Delete the new/current version from your iPad (press on its icon for three seconds and then click on the red x)
Once you have deleted the new version from both iTunes and your iPad, drag and drop the old version application file onto iTunes.
Sync your device

To prevent relying on the recycle bin or trash, you can set up DropBox to keep all of your .IPAs and prior versions for you.

First, read my post on Dropbox Extensions
(http://www.vmwareinfo.com/2011/01/dropbox-extensions-to-make-your-life.html)

Then add a link for your Mobile Applications folder to Dropbox. This is usually in C:\Users\<UserName>\Music\iTunes\iTunes Media\Mobile Applications

At this point, all your IPAs will get sucked into Dropbox. When looking for an older IPA, just log into your Dropbox dashboard and toggle the ‘Show deleted files’ option. You can then download the IPA and follow Marcos’ helpful steps to restore your application version.

Always have your stuff when you need it with @Dropbox. A 2GB account is free!
Join here: http://db.tt/GEbA2dPr

PowerShell Tutorial – How to Keep Tabs on XenApp Printer Queues

2011-11-30T08:17:00.000-05:00

Sam Jacobs posted a great PowerShell script and tutorial on IPM’s corporate blog that I wanted to share with everyone.

A few weeks ago, a client of ours began noticing that printer queues on certain XenApp servers were experiencing errors, and jobs sent to those queues were left stranded and never printed. As it turned out, the problem was caused by an updated printer driver, and the issue only occurred when that printer driver was used.

Since there were quite a few servers involved, with 10-20 print queues per server, it seemed like a job for a WMI script. The first version (a .VBS script) looked something like this:

strServer = "."
strQuery = "SELECT * FROM Win32_PerfFormattedData_Spooler_PrintQueue "

Set objWMIService = GetObject (“winmgmts:\\” & strServer & “\root\CIMV2″)
Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery (strQuery)

Wscript.Echo “Printer” & vbTab & “Jobs” & vbTab & “JobErrors”
For Each objItem In colItems
WScript.Echo objItem.Name & vbTab & objItem.Jobs & vbTab & objItem.JobErrors
Next

Set objWMIService = Nothing
Set colItems = Nothing

While the above worked just fine, due to the varying length printer names, the resultant output was a bit difficult to read. Here’s what the output looked like when run on my local machine:

PowerShell to the rescue! In order to get the same output, only a single line is needed to get the same results in PowerShell (while wrapped here for readability, it may all be placed on a single line):

Get-WMIObject Win32_PerfFormattedData_Spooler_PrintQueue -computerName . | Select Name, Jobs, JobErrors | ft –auto

The command above uses the Get-WMIObject cmdlet to read the print queues of the current server, pipes the output to select the desired fields: Name (printer name), Jobs (Number of Pending Jobs), and JobErrors (Number of Errors), and pipes the output to the Format-Table cmdlet (alias: ft) to automatically give us a nicely formatted table:

Much easier to read!

Now let’s add two additional features. First of all, we need to be able to cycle through the print queues of all our XenApp servers. While this could be done by importing the Active Directory PowerShell module and using some AD cmdlets, it’s pretty easy to just create a file with the names of the XenApp servers. This way, we don’t need to add any additional software to the XA servers.

Since we’re only interested in printers that have errors, it would also be nice to highlight only those printers which have jobs pending (signaling a possible problem).

Here is the PowerShell script with the above features added:

$servers = Get-Content 'CitrixServerList.txt'  
    ForEach ($server in $servers) {  
       try {  
         write-host "Processing printers for: " $server " ..."  
         Get-WMIObject Win32_PerfFormattedData_Spooler_PrintQueue  
             -computerName $server  -ea stop |  
        ?{$_.jobs -gt 0} |  
        Select @{Expression={$_.Name};Label=$server+" printers"},  
                    Jobs, JobErrors |  
        ft -auto  
       } catch [System.Exception] {  
         write-host $server "...cannot retrieve printer names"  
       }  
    }

First, we retrieve the list of XenApp servers (with one server per line in the text file).

We then cycle through each server, wrapping the code in a try/catch block to handle errors (in case one of the servers is offline, for example).

The new parts of the script above:

-computerName  $server    the XenApp server name from the ForEach command
-ea stop		  set the ErrorAction (ea) to stop processing the command if an error occurs
?{$_.jobs -gt 0}	  only show printer queues with jobs pending

The term @{Expression={$_.Name};Label=$server+” printers”} shows how to rename column headings in the output.

Output of the final version above:

Registry String Redirection / IPM Utility: Get@String

2011-11-28T08:15:00.000-05:00

Jacques Bensimon sent over a great little registry utility and whole lot of education! Read on …

Have you noticed that, starting with Vista/2008, some previously descriptive Registry entries (such as the names and descriptions of most system services, the descriptions of some file types under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, etc) are no longer in plain English (or whatever the language of the Windows installation) bur rather look like the highlighted values in the following screenshot?

These entries of the form “@filepath,-###” are examples of what Microsoft calls Registry String Redirection (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd374120(v=vs.85).aspx) and are designed to keep the Registry “language-neutral” by replacing language-specific text with references to string resources somewhere in the file system. For example, the DisplayName entry in the above screenshot, “@%SystemRoot%\system32\bdesvc.dll,-100”, is to be interpreted as “the string resource with ID 100 in the appropriate MUI language resource file for bdesvc.dll”, such as %SystemRoot%\system32\en-US\bdesvc.dll.mui. This can be looked up for example with Resource Hacker, as in the following screenshot:

So now I know that BDESVC is the “BitLocker Drive Encryption Service” (that’s a relief: I feared it might be the return of the Borland Database Engine!)

While Resource Hacker can be used in this roundabout fashion to retrieve the contents of redirected Registry strings, I thought a more direct solution might be useful, so here’s Get@String (the archive contains both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the utility). It can take a redirected string specification on its command line or it can be run interactively as follows:

results in

and changing the string ID to 101 results in

Later,
JB

Happy Thanksgiving from vCloudInfo, HyperVInfo & VMwareInfo.com!

2011-11-24T14:08:00.001-05:00

Just a quick note to wish everyone and their families a great Thanksgiving this year! Hopefully, you are eating well, watching some football and getting ready for some Black Friday madness.

I appreciate your readership, comments and overall participation in the blogging community.

I also wanted to say thanks to our direct sponsors for their support and sponsorship of my blog. Be sure to check out their websites while shopping this extended holiday weekend!

How to Add a 3rd Party driver to a baseline in Update Manager

2011-11-21T14:12:00.001-05:00

Working with the Nutanix clusters, I had an opportunity to upgrade them to vSphere 5 via Update Manager. The process of upgrading an ESX host with Update Manager is pretty straight forward with the exception of 3rd party drivers. For Nutanix, they use a Mellanox 10GB card that is not part of the base ESXi build. This requires us to create an extension driver to support the additional 10GB card with ESXi 5.

The first part of this process is to import the OFFLINE BUNDLE ZIP that contains the VIB file and metadata for the driver. This can usually be downloaded from VMware or the 3rd party vendor. (Here is a link to the Mellanox driver.)

After successfully importing the driver, vCenter will connect and download any required bulletins or notifications associated with the driver.

Next, you will need to create an update baseline. From Update Manager, choose Create New Baseline …

I had previously created a v5.0 upgrade baseline for ESX5. You can create one by downloading the ESXi ISO from VMware and uploading it into VMware Update Manager.

Next, you will be prompted to create the Extension Base.

You should see the new driver just imported in the list. Move it into the extension to add box to create the Baseline Extension.

Once created, you will be returned to the New Baseline Wizard.

You now have an ESXi 5 baseline with a host extension that you can point at your ESX 4.1 servers to upgrade. In this case, I attached it at the Nutanix Cluster level and upgraded all 4 nodes successfully via VMware’s Update Manager.

RANT: Does Microsoft offer adequate SPAM protection for their Cloud Mail service?

2011-11-17T15:29:00.001-05:00

That fact that these types of emails and attachments are getting past Microsoft’s Forefront SPAM server is pretty inexcusable. It truly baffles me how the Microsoft Outlook JUNK Filter can flag these messages as harmful but the Hosted Server side product let’s them right through untouched.

I do not know how this level of service can be considered enterprise ready.
TIP: Be sure to evaluate the level of SPAM protection offered by a hosted mail service before migrating to the cloud.

Not enough room for vSphere 5 Upgrade? Free some up!

2011-11-14T08:48:00.000-05:00

While using VMware’s Update Manager to upgrade a 4.0 ESX host to vSphere 5, I ran into a space issue. Looking at the event tab on the ESX host in question, the error stated that at least 297 MB free space was required for the upgrade.

A quick putty session to verify the actual free space on the host and I noticed the following suspicious esx3 folders taking up a considerable amount of space. These folders were remnants left over from the ESX3 to 4 upgrade. The folders were there to allow for a roll back. They were never cleaned out and were preventing my upgrade now.

Fortunately, VMware has a nifty little command called cleanup-esx3 which when run will clear out these unnecessary files. Once removed, you can no longer roll back to ESX3. Most likely not an issue.

After a quick reboot, the folders and mount points are removed from the system.

You can also remove the folders manually. Once the necessary space was freed up, rerunning the Update Manager task did it’s thing.

My blogger blog was GONE.

2011-11-10T11:03:00.001-05:00

Yeah .. That freaked me out this morning! Not exactly sure what happened.. After logging out and then back into Google, my VMwareInfo.com blog seemed to have been restored. I am assuming this was a minor glitch on the blogger platform but it FREAKED ME OUT.

After some research, I found a pretty neat service called Backupify that backs up other online services. Facebook pages, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogger and a host of other services that contain things you might not want to lose. The service is a great idea. Not just for accidental deletions but also for whole company failures. I am sure you could use the data stored on the Backupify servers to migrate from one service to another. Especially useful as cloud services come and go.

Like most cloud services, they have a free plan and this one allows for up to 5 GB of backed up data. Once you either hand over some credentials or allow access via OAuth, Backupify connects over and begins to back up your data.

Once you have a successful backup, you can drill down into the backup archive and pick out individual items from the backup for export. The formats I have seen for exporting have only been JSON but I don’t know if they change based on the service you decide to backup.

Might not be the perfect safety net but for the price, it’s better than what I had before and it would have eased some of the panic I felt this morning.

Quest Discontinues vConverter.

2011-11-09T09:19:00.000-05:00

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone since the whole P2V space is really now just a niche tactical market anyway. I would imagine that MOST of the physical boxes that are candidates for virtualization have been either P2V’d already or will be taken care of by VMware’s free VMware Converter.

VMware put out a really great free product that made it very difficult for clients to justify paying for a third party solution like vConverter or PowerConvert. I would imagine you might see some of these products morph into or resurface as cloud migration tools helping Virtual Infrastructure administrators migrate VMs from on-premise to off-premise clouds.

vConverter has reached the end of its product life (EOL) and will be discontinued as a product offering by Quest Software according to the timeline listed below.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011: End of Sales

Wednesday, November 30, 2012: End of Support

New sales after the end of sales date on November 30, 2011 will not be allowed.
Renewals will only be allowed up to the end of the support date on November 30, 2012.

Effective immediately, please stop selling vConverter and remove the impacted part numbers from your price lists.

Quick Tip: Pin to the Start Menu or NOT…

2011-11-07T16:15:00.001-05:00

Here’s a quick tip I learned by sitting next to Jacques Bensimon today. If you want to control whether an application is ‘allowed’ to be pinned to the Start Menu or Taskbar, head into the registry and navigate over to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileAssociation
and check out the AddRemoveNames key. If an application has one of the words in this key, you will not be able to pin it. I ran a quick test using Revo Uninstaller (<-Great app BTW). The word install is listed in AddRemoveNames so I wasn't presented any Pin options.

You can see that there is no option for pinning on the right click menu.

Remove the word install from the key string, restart Explorer, and you’ve enabled the ability to Pin for that application.

Nice and easy way to restrict or enable a user’s ability to pin things in a Citrix XenApp or VDI image.

My Digital Graveyard

2011-10-31T09:13:00.000-04:00

With Halloween here, I figured I would rummage around the basement a bit and dig up some long dead gadgets. They are all headed for the trash bag so this is their last bit of stardom. I'd hand them out to trick or treaters but fear the retaliation on the house. ;)

First up are the drives. A three and a half inch floppy drive and two CDROM drives. You can tell the oldest one by its beige color. The RO in CDROM stands for Read Only and these drives kept to that specification. No burning, writing or copying to these CD readers. Strictly read only at a blazing speed of 12x.

The pager and Kodak camera were easy candidates for the graveyard. Kodak doesn't even produce or develop the film anymore. Good luck finding a beeper plan. ;)

I've never even actually used a BNC connector. If not for the 10MB Ethernet connection to its right, this Intel NetExpress printer thing would have been Dead On Arrival when I stumbled upon it way back when.

The Philips remote was a fully programmable mono-color TV remote control. I never really got used to the screen based keys. I couldn't quite give up the tactile feel of the remotes I had already. It's actually quite funny since I'm typing this blog post out on my iPhone right now. I prolly should have given the Philips more of a chance before dismissing it.

Last but not least is the Panasonic CF-01 handheld computer. That puppy ran Windows 95 with a touch interface (via stylus of course) and was pretty kick ass. It was a little smaller than the iPad and I had it throughout the 90s. Sometime during that period, I turned it into a live web server and picture frame. I kept that sucker running for a loong time before retiring it.

I'm sure everyone reading this has their own digital graveyard sitting in the basement as well. I say dig 'em up and hand 'em out or toss 'em away. :)
Either way, Happy Halloween.

Off-Topic: Evernote Tip: Remember house stuff.

2011-10-28T09:33:00.000-04:00

I haven’t blogged about Evernote yet but I love it! I’ve become a premium subscriber to the service and have been slowly digitizing EVERYTHING and uploading it to the Evernote cloud.

Disclaimer : This post is not about whether or not it is a good idea to upload all your information to the cloud. If you are fully against this idea, off to CNN.COM you go. BUT if you are interested in a cool application, then read on! ;)

The main reason I love Evernote is for it’s awesome OCR capabilities and cross platform support. I basically use my iPhone to take pictures of things (Whiteboards, labels, scribbling) and then am able to search against it on my computer or iPad thanks to Evernote’s OCR capabilities.

Their slogan is Remember Everything so here are some examples of uses I had this weekend.

Paint colors and formulas:
I decided to take pictures of the paint labels for rooms so down the line, if I needed a touch up quart, I’d have the formula on hand. (via Evernote’s iPhone Application).

I decided AFTER painting but you get the idea.

Inventory:
I also used Evernote and my iPhone to capture all the details about my boiler. I was curious to research the age of the boiler so I took a bunch of pictures, loaded them into Evernote and then researched the boiler later that day. (My boiler is over 50 years old BTW).

When you are roaming the hardware store looking for a part, I think it is pretty handy to have a lot of this information at your fingertips. (I also have lists of light bulb sizes for all the rooms handy since I always know when I need one but never the type!)

Although I’ve subscribed to Evernote, you can do all this and more with their free version. Your only limitation is the monthly limit of uploaded material. If you have Evernote and have some creative uses for it, let me know in the comments. I’m always looking for more ways to use it to help me.

-Carlo

VMware Purple Screen of Death KB alert.

2011-10-25T08:49:00.000-04:00

Just noticed this alert on the VMware support site.

If you are upgrading to vCenter 5, be sure to verify that ALL of your hosts are running at least 4.0 Update 3. Hosts running version 4.0 Update 2 can experience a purple screen.

It is important to note that even though you are only upgrading vCenter, you are still ‘touching’ ALL of your production hosts managed by that vCenter. Once you have upgraded vCenter to a newer release, it will immediately and without warning begin to update the vCenter Agents (vpxa) on all hosts registered to it. Normally, this is a painless non-disruptive process but it’s worth noting that there is at least some level of potential risk involved.

It would be nice to have the option of, prior to the vCenter Agent upgrade, having the system go into maintenance mode, clearing out any running VMs (leveraging vMotion) and preforming the upgrades in a rolling fashion to limit exposure to running workloads.

Removing the Citrix Access Gateway client.

2011-10-20T08:12:00.000-04:00

This might be a pretty niche tip but I was struggling today to figure it out. I had long been a fan of the VPN functionality of the Citrix Access Gateway and dutifully installed the client on my Windows 7 x64 bit machine. Everything had worked great for years. Today, I decided to switch up the VPN to leverage the pimped out Netscalers in our office and needed to install the new Netscaler VPN client. The new client complained about the old one being installed and refused to install until I removed the old one.

Uninstall. Seemed easy enough until I realized that my years old CAG client installation was not showing up in my Add/Remove programs. The shortcut entries in my Start menu also did not show an uninstall either.

After some searching around on my laptop, I found a setup cache folder that had the original setup executable.

A quick doubleclick and I was able to choose REMOVE and begin my uninstall of the old Citrix Access Gateway Plugin.

Hey Citrix programmers, next time, save me some aggravation and just programmatically uninstall the old version for me.

Cool Tool : Microsoft Mouse Without Borders.

2011-10-19T09:44:00.000-04:00

So Microsoft released this project a while ago and I was like *yawn*. I normally work from my laptop and either RDP into remote systems or sit in vCenter to do my work. So when I saw some announcements about Microsoft’s free little garage project that would let you control up to 3 other machines on your desk with your primary keyboard and mouse, I honestly just passed on it. I didn’t really see the need for it in my work environment.
Fast forward to today when I have 2 laptops on my desk while building out a portable demo lab (VMware Workstation 8 and a bunch of VMs on a laptop) and this program is SUPER USEFUL! So if you happen to find yourself with more than 1 windows keyboard on your desk, check out this great utility.

You basically install a quick little app on your primary machine and it will give you a Security key to use on your next installations on the other machines. All connections are done through the network so this won’t help you BUILD the other machines, but will allow you to seamlessly move your mouse across the screens/monitors as if in extended mode. Shared clipboards and drag and drop file moves are really useful tools.
I passed on it the first time around but glad I had a chance to try it out.

vSphere 5 Trust issues : Cannot synchronize host.

2011-10-17T09:03:00.000-04:00

While doing some seemingly straightforward patching via Update Manager on my Home Lab ESX servers, I got this strange message after a reboot.

Cannot synchronize host Carlo-esxi2. Cannot complete login due to an incorrect user name or password. vSphere HA agent on this host is disabled

Reading this error, you might think that your root password may have changed or been mistyped. In reality it is the backend account that vCenter uses to communicate with the ESX host. Somewhere along the patching/rebooting, it went out of sync with vCenter. The fix is pretty easy. Just Disconnect the ESX server from VC and reconnect it. This will prompt you for the root password and will reestablish a connection between vCenter and the Host. You will be prompted to reaccept the SSH fingerprint again. At that point, you should be home free.

Quick Takeaway from this: Communication between your vCenter and ESX hosts are NOT dependent on your root account or password BUT the Root account is used to ESTABLISH the communication. After that is complete, you can feel free to change the root password at will.

Enabling/Disabling SSH via vCenter

2011-10-13T09:16:00.000-04:00

Sometimes it is useful to have an SSH session to an ESXi server for troubleshooting. You can always enable it via the console (F2 –> Troubleshooting Options –> Enable Remote SSH) but you can also enable and disable it via the vCenter client.

More often than not, after enabling the SSH shell, I walk away from the console only to find out that I left SSH enabled. Left enabled, you get a configuration issue warning on the host in the vCenter client.

To clear the warning condition, you can navigate to the configuration tab of the ESXi host and select ‘Security Profile’. From there, you can start and stop the various services (daemons) available on the host.

Clicking Options for either service and you will have the ability to remotely shut them down clearing the configuration error on the host.
No more going back into that freezing datacenter.

Tracking your IP with a Spreadsheet?

2011-10-11T08:29:00.000-04:00

Maybe you have a small network, home or lab, but still have enough devices on the network that keeping track of IP addresses is necessary. Too small to justify actually paying for something but big enough that a solution is needed. Most people I know use a spreadsheet.
Today, I ditched the spreadsheet for the FREE SolarWinds IP Address Tracker.

Quick Download and run. I decided to install mine on my Domain Controller since that is where I end up when looking for an available IP. (DNS, DHCP Consoles) The IP tracker seemed like a logical fit to that process.

Typical Next, Next, Next install. Super Straightforward.

After the install, launch the program and add your Subnet to start the scan.

After a quick scan, you are presented with all the IP addresses in USE. You can added custom comments to any of the IP addresses as well. I did notice that some Devices that did not respond to pings (Windows 2008 Servers with their Firewalls on) did get missed but I just added them in. [Kind of like a spreadsheet with a little something extra]
It’s actually pretty straightforward and pretty useful. I do wish the free version did automated scans (background scans). You can only capture IP addresses of machines that are ON at the time of the SCAN. I’d rather see a limit of 1 class C Subnet that is fully featured. I would think that would still leave plenty of functionality to ‘sell’ to the larger installations. Either way, I’m very happy with this free tool. Thanks Solar Winds!

Taming Chameleon Applications

2011-10-06T09:08:00.000-04:00

Another super in-depth write up by Jacques Bensimon. Thanks JB!

As the great migration to 64-bit Windows continues, most of us have by now had ample opportunity to confirm the statement made in a previous post to the effect that, with few exceptions, a run-of-the-mill 32-bit program that neither knows about nor cares about 64-bit environments is automatically presented a “32-bit view” of a 64-bit environment and should install and operate without issues. But there are those pesky exceptions, and one particularly strange category of potential exceptions I ran across I initially dubbed “Chameleon Applications” before figuring out what they were, why some of them had issues, and how to get around the issues.
I’ll first describe the observed behavior of just two such problematic applications before explaining the reason for the “chameleon” moniker – in both cases, these were neither particularly new nor particularly old 32-bit applications that had installed without issues or complaints on a 64-bit platform (Windows Server 2008 R2):

· App A: This app had, during its setup, also successfully installed a 32-bit Crystal Reports runtime component but, when launched, inexplicably complained that it needed the 64-bit Crystal Reports runtime and would refuse to continue without it.

· App B: This app consists of (1) a system service that occasionally updates a machine Registry key with a list of web addresses downloaded from a backend system (yes, even 32-bit services can run on 64-bit Windows) and of (2) an Internet Explorer plug-in which accesses that list of web addresses from the Registry as part of its job (don’t ask). This cooperation wasn’t working as expected because, as it turned out, the system service was writing the web addresses to a key somewhere under HKLM\SOFTWARE\CompanyName\... (i.e. unexpected 64-bit behavior) whereas the plug-in was trying to read them from HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\CompanyName\... (i.e. normal 32-bit behavior).

In both cases, since 64-bit behavior was observed, my first thought was that the setup of these applications unexpectedly contained and had installed some 64-bit executables. Yet, upon verification, both the main executable of App A and the system service executable of App B were confirmed to be 32-bit executables (here’s a new IPM utility called TSFlag that, besides displaying and optionally changing any executable’s “Terminal Server Aware Flag”, also displays whether the executable is 32-bit, AMD 64-bit or IA64 – see sample screenshots below. The archive contains both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the utility). However, and this is where the “chameleon” behavior comes in, when viewed in Task Manager while running, both the executables in questions were displayed as 64-bit processes! Understand, we’re not talking here about programs like SysInternals’ “Process Explorer” and “Process Monitor” for example which consist of 32-bit executables that *contain* and extract a separate 64-bit version when launched on a 64-bit platform – these were 32-bit executables that somehow *became* 64-bit once loaded into memory and executed, an impossibility as far as I was aware.
The answer: Upon further examination (looking at the executables’ loaded modules in “Process Explorer”), it became clear that these magic executables were in fact .NET assemblies and that, against the implicit intent of their authors (who clearly had not considered or been aware of the possibility that they might someday be run on a 64-bit platform), they were executing under a 64-bit .NET Framework. This is apparently the default behavior on a 64-bit platform when an assembly isn’t explicitly coded or registered for execution under a 32-bit Framework, and I neither know how to change this default behavior (if it can be changed) nor do I think it would be a good idea to do so – the ramifications could be very ugly. There is however a Microsoft tool called CorFlags (found in the Windows SDK) that can modify a specific .NET assembly in such a way that it is compelled to run under a 32-bit Framework (the modification consists of flipping a single bit in the executable, as will be seen in a screenshot below). The syntax for performing this modification with CorFlags is as follows:
CorFlags.exe assembly /32BIT+ /Force
Since this command actually modifies the target executable, it would be well to create a backup copy of the original executable before applying it. Also, be aware that if the executable is strong-name signed, which is not frequently the case because strong-signing is not recommended for EXE assemblies, CorFlags warns that it needs to be resigned – I have not found this to be necessary in practice. Both App A and App B, along with other misbehaving “chameleons” I’ve come across, have been functioning just fine since getting the CorFlags treatment.
NOTE: There is no statement being made here that a 32-bit .NET assembly that winds up executing under a 64-bit Framework (i.e. a chameleon) will necessarily misbehave. I’m sure if we look around our systems we’ll all find any number of 32-bit .NET apps and utilities that have been working just fine despite running under a 64-bit Framework, whether or not that was their authors’ intention. The above workaround should therefore be reserved for those that do misbehave and for which their authors have not (yet) provided 64-bit-compliant versions.
For the purpose of illustrating the above concepts with a real example, I looked for a chameleon executable to which we all have relatively easy access, and came upon the executable vmconnect.exe installed as part of the Hyper-V Tools component of RSAT (Remote Server Administration Tools) on Windows 7 64-bit. Without further comments, the following screenshots demonstrate that vmconnect.exe is a 32-bit executable that Task Manager lists as a 64-bit process whereas a copy of the executable (vmconnect2.exe) to which CorFlags has been applied as explained above is listed as a 32-bit process. (Note that this was done only for illustration purposes as vmconnect.exe is not a misbehaving chameleon).

Upgrade to the iPhone 4s or Wait for the iPhone 5?

2011-10-05T09:39:00.000-04:00

Consider this :
iPhone released June 29, 2007
iPhone 3G released July 11, 2008
iPhone 3GS released June 19, 2009
iPhone 4 released June 24, 2010
iPhone 4S released October 4, 2011

Seems to me like an iPhone 5 release around Summertime 2012.
If I’m eligible for the upgrade price from AT&T, I’m probably gonna upgrade to the 4S. The new camera seems great. Who bout you?

AppSpeed 1.5 left behind if you upgrade to vSphere 5.

2011-10-04T08:43:00.000-04:00

I dig AppSpeed! I know I might be in the minority here in the sense that most people don’t even know what the product is but trust me, if you NEED IT, it’s GREAT!
AppSpeed is a result of a VMware acquisition a couple years ago and is a great way to gain insight into your Web/Database applications running in your Virtual Environment. When someone complains that the website is slow because it’s been virtualized, AppSpeed can help you determine that it is slow because of a SELECT * statement hitting a particular database that is taking minutes to return [as an example. ;)]. The product is an OVF based appliance that passively sits on the ESX hosts and sniffs and inspects the traffic reading all the way down to the transactions within the packets. All self learning and all self discovering. Very cool!
Unfortunately, it seems that with the latest release of vSphere 5, the current version of AppSpeed (1.5) will not work. I was hoping it was just a ‘support’ thing but in my lab testing, it just would not register correctly with vCenter 5. Hopefully there will be a future release to bring this great tool into vSphere 5.

* http://partnerweb.vmware.com/comp_guide/sim/interop_matrix.php

Virtual Machine Discrimination; Shame on you Google!

2011-09-30T09:08:00.000-04:00

It still burns me up when I see programs discriminating against Virtual Machines. Today’s offender, which I feel obligated to ‘out’, is Google Music. After trying to load up the Google Music Manager in a Virtual Machine, in hopes of pouring my music library into their cloud infrastructure, I kept receiving startup failures from the manager complaining that it could not identify my computer. A quick jump to their knowledge base and that was the end of that.

For some reason, they decided to specifically deny support for Virtual Machines.

Hey Google Music! VM discrimination is so last decade.