Accessing a public Internet connection from a virtual machine without getting charged twice

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last night, I stayed away on business in a hotel with broadband Internet access in my room (1.5Mbps according to a bandwidth speed test). Having paid almost as much for a 24 hour connection as I pay for a month at home, I decided to remain in my hotel room this morning and take advantage of a fast connection, rather than competing for a meagre amount of bandwidth in the office.

That sounds fair enough, but as I’m now working (rather than just surfing the ‘net and writing new blog posts) I also need to access corporate applications and data. My notebook PC is running Windows Vista but my corporate desktop runs in a Windows XP virtual machine using the VMware Player, so whereas last night I’d been using the host machine to access the Internet, this morning I need to use the virtual machine too.

The host PC is still working with the hotel ISP‘s systems but when I originally connected with the virtual machine (which is normally configured for bridged networking to logically separate the guest and host machines so it has it’s own IP address) I was presented with a welcome page which invited me to pay again for access.

Quickly changing the VMware Player’s Ethernet connection from a bridged connection to a NAT connection, disconnecting and reconnecting the Ethernet connection and then running ipconfig -release and ipconfig -renew in the virtual machine gave the Windows XP guest a new NATted IP address and me the ability to access the Internet from either the virtual guest or the physical host machine. Unfortunately I still can’t create a VPN connection to the company network (probably something to do with the NAT) but I can live with that for a few hours.

Apparently, my digital life starts here

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A few years ago, I bought one of the original Apple iMac G3s. I tried to love it, but I found the operating system too difficult to live with and eventually I sold it to my mate Stuart (after it had sat idle for a year or so).

iMac G3

Nowadays, Macs are based on standard PC hardware and BSD Unix, so I decided to get myself a Mac Mini for all my digital media work (the Intel Core Duo 1.66GHz model), although I do intend to dual boot OS X and Windows XP (mostly out of idle curiosity)… and one day I might manage to install Linux on it too.

Apple’s UK distribution centre is only about 25 miles away from my house and although there is no next day shipping option, the guys at the Apple Store told me that they would assign my order a priority for fast dispatch (hoping that it would arrive next day). Priority! Pah! No such thing; however was dispatched within 24 hours and the man from UPS delivered it yesterday afternoon (still a day before Apple’s official estimate, but I had really wanted to get my hands on it before the weekend). Unfortunately, work got in the way of me playing with my new toy and I couldn’t do anything with it until yesterday evening.

Once I’d opened the outer packaging, I just had to take a picture of it all still boxed up (when was the last time you saw any other PC arrive in such attractive packaging?) – according to the printing on the back of the box “your digital life starts here”.

My new Mac. Still in the box. Look at all that gorgeous packaging

Once unboxed, setting everything up was really simple – after just a few questions (language, country/region, keyboard layout and a few other options) I was up and running; however the OS X software update utility told me that there were 14 updates to apply.

It all looked simple enough, but the Mac kept losing its Ethernet connection each time I tried to download and install all of the available updates (not even caching them, so it had to start the entire list of downloads again each time). After various restarts (to kick the Ethernet connection back into life) and resorting to installing updates a few at a time I’ve nearly got it working. I’m trying hard to be objective about OS X (I will try and live with it for a while before I install Windows XP on the Mac) but this initial experience has soured things slightly.

Still, it is a very attractive PC, and once I’ve transferred the data from my old PC I will have liberated quite a lot of desk space. Just enough to fill with a nice widescreen LCD monitor I think…

Photoshop 7 crashes on startup

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Back at the end of 2003 I experienced a problem with Adobe Photoshop 7 crashing on a Windows XP machine. Since then, everything has been fine, but tonight the problem re-emerged so I dug out my old notes (which predate this blog) to try and find the answer.

Basically, when starting Photoshop, the splash screen displays as components are loaded and then nothing else appears (not even an error message).

Luckily, when this happened to me a few years back, I found a forum post with the answer to the problem – hold down the Ctrl, Alt and Shift keys whilst launching Photoshop (this will allow the settings file to be deleted and recreated). It’s worked twice for me now, hopefully blogging about it here will help someone else out too.

Configuring an HP MSA1000 using a serial cable

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Earlier today, I needed to configure an HP StorageWorks Modular Storage Array (MSA) 1000 which I’ll be using for SAN storage over the next few weeks. Nothing too difficult about that, except that I wanted to access the SAN via the command line interface (CLI) and that meant using a serial cable to connect to the MSA controller. Each controller has what looks like an RJ45 Ethernet connection on the front, but standard Ethernet cables don’t fit. Fortunately I found the console cable that had been delivered with the SAN and found that it uses a slightly unusual variation of an RJ45 connection, which further research indicates is called an RJ45Z. The only noticeable difference (apart from how the connector is wired internally), is an extra notch on one side, as shown in the picture below:

RJ45Z

Incidentally, once the connection is made from a standard RS232 serial port to the MSA (most modern notebook PCs don’t have a serial port – I had to use an IBM USB-serial/parallel adapter), accessing the CLI simply involves starting Windows HyperTerminal with the following connection settings:

  • Connect using: comportidentifier (e.g. COM1)
  • Bits per second: 19200
  • Data bits: 8
  • Parity: None
  • Stop bits: 1
  • Flow control: None

Once connected, it may be necessary to press the Enter key until the CLI> prompt is displayed, after which commands can be issued to configure the MSA.

Further details can be found in the HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array 1000/1500cs Command Line Interface manual (just in case, like me, you found this information using Google before you got around to reading the manual that came on a CD with the MSA!).

Running multiple versions of Internet Explorer side-by-side

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve written previously about using user agent spoofing to make Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 7 and Mozilla Firefox behave like legacy versions of IE but I just stumbled across this nifty method of running multiple versions of IE side-by-side. I haven’t tried it out yet and it’s unsupported by Microsoft but it sounds like an interesting idea for next time I’m doing some website development work.

Firefox needs to raise its game before IE 7 goes mainstream

Posted on By Mark Wilson

At the risk of offending almost 27% of the people who visited my website this month, I think Mozilla Firefox has lost its way. The last couple of times it has updated itself on my Windows XP SP2 machine, it’s crashed (taking with it all of the tabs that I have open – possibly representing a couple of days worth of work in progress or things to look at further when I get a few minutes).

Add to that the fact that too many developers are still producing badly-written websites that are not standards-compliant (not the fault of the Mozilla developers, but still hindering me as a Firefox user) and we have a very unhappy user who keeps on having to go back to using Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE). It’s not just people like me who write bad sites either – according to SiteMorse, the worst site belongs to Tesco (the biggest retailer in the UK, which now accounts for more than £1 in every £8 spent on the high street). If I have to use two browsers I might as well stick with the one that works with every site I go to, and unfortunately, that’s the one produced by everyone’s favourite monopolistic software company.

It doesn’t get better when you look at vulnerabilities either. James O’Neill (who, admittedly, works for Microsoft), highlighted a report by Bit9 that lists the top applications with critical vulnerabilities. Surprisingly for me (and for many others, I presume) IE is nowhere to be seen and Firefox (v1.0.7) tops the list (although v1.5.0.4 is the latest release as I write this).

Open source had its chance to take back the web. If the Firefox reliability doesn’t get better, then we’ll just see Internet Explorer 7 take it back (IE 7 seems very good, although despite Microsoft pledging a commitment to web standards it still seems to be lacking in the standards compliance department – the version in Windows Vista beta 2 fails the ACID 2 test, but so does Firefox v1.5.0.4 on Windows XP SP2).

Even if Windows Vista encounters further delays, IE 7+ (and IE 7 for Windows XP users) will hit the streets soon (beta 3 of Internet Explorer 7 was released yesterday).

Mozilla needs to raise its game and further increase its share of the market before Microsoft wins the latest battle in the browser wars (ownership of the ie7.com domain name is not going to be enough).

The end of Microsoft – or the end of the beginning?

Posted on By Mark Wilson

As a sort of self-appointed Microsoft technical evangelist and reasonably prolific blogger, some people might find it odd that I haven’t yet commented on Bill Gates’ decision to stand down as Microsoft’s top man in 2008 (actually, he will still be Chairman and adviser) or (less significantly) the decision by Robert Scoble (Scobleizer – Microsoft technical evangelist and of Channel 9 fame) to leave Microsoft.

The main reason for not writing about these events is that I was on holiday at the time; but one other reason is that a company is more than one person (or two people). Bill Gates didn’t start Microsoft alone – he may have helped to make it successful (in the way that Steve Jobs’ return to Apple is widely reckoned to have been the turning point in that company’s fortune but there were many thousands of people involved in making things happen) but the world’s largest software company is not about to implode because one of its founding members wants to retire.

I do think that the Microsoft’s dominance in the PC and PC server markets may be limited (partly due to dodgy anti-trust rulings) but that’s got nothing to do with whether or not Bill Gates is in charge and that’s why I’ve also made a point of learning a bit about Linux (oh yes, and I bought a Mac yesterday – but it’s okay – I’ll probably run Windows on it… although maybe not exclusively).

I don’t know much about Ray Ozzie (the new Microsoft Chief Software Architect) except that he is credited as the creator of Lotus Notes before he set up Groove Networks; however I am pleased to see is that Bill Gates’ replacement is a technology person who understands business – not a bland bean-counting senior management type (and not another Steve Ballmer either, whose energetic style I find to be a little too strange at times).

James O’Neill has an interesting blog post on the departure of Gates and Scoble – it may be a bit long (and remember it was written by someone who works at Microsoft) but I think he makes some good points. Channel 9 also has a short clip with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer discussing the management changes at Microsoft.

Initial experiences of running Windows Vista on my everyday PC

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve written a bit about Windows Vista previously, but haven’t really used it much until recently due to a lack of decent hardware (I did have it running on a 1.5GHz Pentium 4M notebook PC with 256MB of RAM, but the RAM was a severe bottleneck).

Since converting my corporate Windows XP SP2 build to a virtual machine, I’ve been able to rebuild my work notebook to run Vista (beta 2 – build 5384) and although the processor is only marginally faster (1.8GHz Pentium 4M) it has 1GB of RAM as well as Bluetooth and an Intel Centrino chipset, making it a decent test platform for all but the Aero “glass” and other 3D effects.

I’ve also installed Office 2007 beta 2 (about which I raved after having just seen a demonstration a few weeks ago) and overall, I’m very impressed with the whole Vista and Office experience (the notes in this blog post cover about a month’s worth of usage).

Firstly, installation – I didn’t time it but it seemed faster than XP (and was certainly faster than previous releases of Windows Vista). After a few preliminary questions and copying the files from the DVD, the actual configuration only seemed to take a few minutes. Installing Office 2007 also seemed faster than my experiences with Office 2003.

Although it was very fast, I’ve had to turn off hibernation (indeed any form of advanced power management) because I found that the machine was unable to resume from a sleep/hibernate mode – but that could be because I have an unknown component in Device Manager for which I cannot find appropriate drivers – I suspect that the Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S7010D is not on the Vista hardware list and whilst XP drivers will work for items such as the Bluetooth card, missing core chipset functionality is bound to affect stability (I’ve also just seen Steve Lamb’s blog post on how to restore the display on Windows Vista following hibernation which might be the answer to my problem).

Although I initially dismissed it as a gimmick, I’m finding the Windows Sidebar to be very useful. I’m also getting used to the size of the desktop icons but still don’t like the black/grey taskbar and menu, the colors for which doesn’t appear to be customisable but then again I could always go back to the Windows Standard theme (or dinosaur mode).

The new search feature on the main menu (is it still called the Start menu?) is very useful (it also doubles up as the run command) and I’ve not found user access control to be as intrusive as I expected – in fact, I run as an unprivileged user and the ability to run elevated when necessary (e.g. to add a printer) is working very well.

Using the Vista machine during my recent holiday, digital photo work seemed much faster than XP (rotating 33 6-megapixel images just a few seconds). I also saw a useful feature whereby hovering the mouse over a picture in gallery produced a larger thumbnail but I can’t find that option now. On the flip side, I’ve experienced a few Windows Explorer crashes whilst copying pictures from compact flash to disk – something which shouldn’t really be a problem.

Stacking content (e.g. photos by date taken) also seems a little hit and miss although this relies on having indexed the content and as I’ve only had the laptop on for a few minutes at a time over the last couple of weeks it might not have completed yet.

Some others have questioned the reliability of this Windows Vista build but I have to say its working pretty well for me – not quite production-ready yet, but it is still a beta. In any case, Microsoft has released another build (5456) to testers, although they do note that “while we believe this build to be generally better than beta 2, it is an interim build and has not been through a rigorous test pass”.

Stay patched or face the hoards of giant man-eating penguins

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A couple of days back I published links to some funny Microsoft videos and now, on a related but slightly different note, I thought I’d highlight the work that Microsoft UK’s Steve Horne has been doing on machinama – it’s an interesting idea, using games 3D graphics engines to produce short films but check out Steve’s first production. You can read more about machinima on Steve’s blog.

Making sense of public key infrastructure

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve written a bit on this blog previously in an attempt to demystify public key infrastructure (PKI) but a fellow contributor to the Microsoft Industry Insiders blog, Adrian Beasley, has written an extensive article entitled make sense of public key infrastructure, which could be very useful for anyone trying to get their head around the subject.

As Steve Lamb pointed out when introducing Adrian’s article, he has tried to “keep very distinct the technology – asymmetric cryptography – which makes the whole thing possible, and the administrative process – PKI and all the rest – which controls it.”