Author Archives: Sebastian Storholm

VMware Remote Console Fails on Windows 10 – How to fix it!

In vSphere 6.5 and some simultaneous updates to earlier versions, VMware moved away from NPAPI (since Google is set on killing it) and instead introduced two new consoles, the HTML5 browser console which is quite frankly horrible (especially without VMTools), as well as a new “thick” console that installs on the client machine called VMware Remote Console. This is a welcome development, as moving away from NPAPI can’t come a day too soon, and anything that isn’t Flash based is always nice.

There’s only one problem, the install frequently fails on Windows 10.

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Setting Up a Virtual NTP Server on Debian

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Virtualizing NTP servers has been quite a hot topic for some time, but regardless of what some people say, you can actually virtualize NTP servers, as long as you know what you’re doing. If you examine some public NTP servers more closely, you’ll actually find that a lot of them are running on AWS, which should attest to virtualizing being a possible route to go down.

There’s some things though that you might want to consider before going down this route, and some special configurations you need to do to make sure everything works as intended.

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Configuring Debian to Patch Itself

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After a couple of years in the IT infrastructure world, you’ll be faced with the greatest task of all, updating servers every month or so. This has always been the most brain dead task imaginable, but now with virtualization, we also have 10 times more servers to update. And almost every single week there’s another critical bug in some core service that has to be patched in panic.

So, instead of doing all that, why don’t we just do what we always do when we have a task that humans don’t like to do? We get a computer to do it for us!

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The World’s Longest Console Cable – Smartflex Router Series

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As everybody knows, console cables and their corresponding interfaces are a scourge on a network administrators existence. They are always too short, COM-ports get renumbered, Baud-rates are unknown, etc. By their very nature, you also have to be physically present in the vicinity of the box you’re trying to configure. Today we’re going to change all that, by constructing a wireless console cable adaptor with almost infinite range.

I can almost here people shouting something about SSH and Telnet to their screens, as well as something about the Airconsole. First and foremost, telnet and SSH are both wonderful, after you’ve configured the device, but for initial setup, they sadly can’t be used. Airconsole is quite nice, and I use it almost daily, but it’s useful when you want to sit somewhere comfortable when configuring a device in the same room as you, not so much when you want to be comfortable on a beach half a world away from the offending device.

This we’re going to change today, with one device, the B+B SmartFlex router.

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