I tracked down a stolen laptop with LogMeIn Hamachi.

We install Hamachi and VNC on all of our laptops for remote support. A fairly new laptop was recently stolen. I started watching Hamachi and the laptop was online the next day. I don't know of a way to get the real IP address from Hamachi so I used VNC to watch the screen. The user just happened to be filling out a job application online so I saw the name, address, phone number... We passed the info along to the local PD, the laptop was returned and there was an arrest. Hamachi and VNC are great tools for business.

Note for next time:

I will use a screen recording app to make a video of the remote screen.

Adobe installers fail with a download timeout at 64%.

This has been an issue for a while. Windows XP, 7, and Windows server all fail to update. I did a some packet sniffing with no luck.

There is an option in my firewall to exempt a URL from monitoring. I have never had to do this but a couple of times in the past but it worked.

adobe.com - exempt

Now my firewalls no longer scan Adobe traffic for viruses and such but we can update Acrobat and Flash.

Moving virtual disks outside of vmware. The confusing flat files and descriptor files.

When using vSphere Datastore Browser, you will a see a large file like server1.vmdk. The file will be close to the size of the virtual machine. If you download the machine and move it to another vmware host, it will not work! There is a descriptor file that is hidden from the Datastore Browser.

This is my solution:

Enable SSH on the vmware host.

Use putty to connect to the host.

Find the location of the virtual machine.

cd /vmfs/volumes/my_datastore/server1

ls -l

Now I see two vmdk files.

server1.vmdk        (Small descriptor file. But this is the name of the large file earlier?)

server1-flat.vmdk  (Large flat file.)

mv server1.vmdk server1.temp

I renamed the descriptor file and now it is viewable in the Datastore Browser. Now I can download or backup my virtual machine. If you want to move to another host, rename the small file to the original name.

Note: There are other files you need to backup but they should work fine in the GUI.

How to add a second IP to a Linux based Wyse client.

I frequently have a remote office that has to change IP addresses. Later on I usually find out that a printer or other network device was not changed to the new IP subnet. Luckily we have some Linux based thin clients from Wyse.

I look at my DHCP server to find the IP of a thin client.

telnet 10.13.5.1
W182 login: root

The default setup has no root password. Great security.

ifconfig eth0:1 10.15.5.1 netmask 255.255.0.0

Now the thin client is my gateway to the old subnet. I can telnet from the Wyse to printers and other devices. I have used this to rescue many HP printers from old IP addresses.

I have also used a Windows PC as a gateway but that was more time consuming for me.

One domain, port 80 on one server, port 443 on a second server.

First of all, this will be a temporary setup. I need http on server1 and https on server2. The AnaolgX PortMapper did the trick. I installed it on server1 and mapped 443 to server2. The new server is a Citrix gateway and the other solutions I tried resulted in SSL errors. The proxy works so far with no issues.

http://server1 -> old server
https://server1 -> new server

Server1 will be the proxy so it should have plenty of resources to handle the load.

Your browser is too old to view our site. User agent problem?

Lately I have noticed more web sites that will block you if your browser is too old. Why not just give a warning and recommend a new browser. I had one PC with this problem and Internet Explorer 8. So I went to a few test pages like whatismybrowser.com and they show I am using IE6 compatibility mode. Compatibility mode is NOT on. If you have this problem, go to the registry and delete Pre and Post tokens. All the blocked sites work now.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE (or HKEY_CURRENT_USER)
   SOFTWARE
      Microsoft
         Windows
            CurrentVersion
               Internet Settings
                  User Agent
                     Pre Platform
                        Token = Value
                     Post Platform
                        Token = Value

Stuck screensaver on OSX.

I lock the screen and step away. When I return the screensaver will not stop. This has happened a couple of times on the Mac Mini running Lion. Sometimes it is just slow to respond but this time I waited about ten minutes.

I did an SSH from another computer and killed the screensaver process. This worked but is very annoying. You must have the SSH enabled ahead of time.

ps ax | grep -i screensaver 

83230   ??  U      3:09.28 /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine 

sudo kill  83230