Security - We will get there

I have one virtual host which I need to use VMware Server for some business reason so I downloaded the latest version and get it installed pretty easily as what I did before for quite a lot of VMware Server installations. It used to be quite stable but for some reason this version keeps crashing one of my vmware instances. The vmware logs did not give me any useful hint so I can not figure out how to fix the crashing yet.

Have you ever experienced that your remote desktop client could not connect to some of your windows servers? And most of the time the traffic was going through VPN tunnel. You have tried all kinds of troubleshooting tools such as ping, telnet etc and they all worked well. And your sniffer told you the tcp session on port 3389 was established too. But wait a second, some of the packets could not be seen from the other side. What is that?

One of my customers is paying vmware tons of money to run vSphere. It's really nice to work with the vCenter tools and I was definitely enjoying this product until I found it doesn't allow me to add virtual disk on the fly while the virtual instance was running. It says "License not available to perform the operation, Feature hotplug not licensed, requires need have have".

There are so many buzz words out there for cloud computing and google type infrastructure etc. It's my first time yesterday I saw the real thing yesterday when I came across in one of the largest data center in Toronto.

1. Switched Gigabit Ethernet network : Connect arrays and hosts to a switched network and ensure that all network connections between hosts and arrays are Gigabit Ethernet. An array can operate at 10 and 100 Mbits, but performance will be significantly degraded.

I have my servers send out log analysis reports to my web application hosted by a hosting provider. This had been working fine for several years until last month. All my reports were not received after Jan 28. Here is how I get it figured out. It could be the backend database is full. This was my first thought as I haven't backup and clean the db for a while. But it's not the case when I logged into the hosting server and found there was enought space.

It's been a while that I got part of my calendar and contact synced between my desktops and mobile device through online services. I lost some calender today so I decided to clean it up and make sure they all work together nicely.

I know it's not pretty or even a little bit complicated but it works. :-)

I consolidated my trixbox server recently into a vmware server, this time I also upgraded the trixbox to the latest version. To verify my system document, I didn't do backup/restore type of upgrade, instead I recreated the new trixbox configuration plus some modification according to the new requirement.

After installed nedi 1.0.w, I got the following error msg when viewed the graph for subinterface from web gui.

I have a client running a Linux box with OpenVPN for a while. It passes through my enterprise firewall to get into their own isolated environment. After the upgrade of the firewall last week, the client started to complain they lost the vpn access and my colleague started to look into it.

It took a while for my colleague to go through whole bunch of tests but could not find out why the traffic was broken after established by the firewall. I mentioned the app layer inspection factor of the firewall could be the cause and soon it was resolved.

The client is using port 80 for the SSL VPN traffic which they should not. It tends out to be the firewall is evaluating the traffic more deeply than before after the upgrade as firewall thought it's clear text http traffic. It uses a technology called protocol agent to associate the protocol with evaluation service. By took away the protocol agent, my client's SSL VPN worked again.

In this case, both sides should not be blamed actually. But as a precautions thought, do not run SSL VPN through port 80. Especially more and more firewalls are trying to do more high layer inspection nowadays.