The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for 2010

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Endian –  Register EFW Community: watch your email addresses

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/08

Endian is a nice *nix based open source firewall appliance which has a free Community Edition (which always is a virtual appliance) and paid (either virtual or physical) edition.

It does a lot of things, including spam filtering, http caching, proxying, VPN, DHCP, routing, et cetera.
Those things are done very well, in a reasonably small footprint:

Registering for their community edition is meant to enable the on-line update mechanism for it.
It is supposed to work like this:

  1. You enter your email address
  2. They dispatch a mail to you with a verification link
  3. Clicking the verification link confirms that email address, and flags it in their database as valid for Endian Community updates
  4. You enter the same email on your Endian appliance to get updates

But using that registration is hard: their registration mechanism has at least two flaws: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, Endian, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Performed an VMware ESXi 4.0 to 4.1 Update: 5 minutes of work

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/06

Thanks to an excellent post by Peter Sebastian from Jargon Technology, it was a breeze to upgrade.

I did the upgrade using Using the vMA virtual appliance, the statements are these:

After bringing the ESXi 4.0 box into maintenance mode, I performed these steps on an SSH connection to the vMA virtual appliance: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, ESXi4, Power User, VMware, VMware ESXi, wget | Leave a Comment »

VS2010: “ASP.NET Web Service Application” (and other) projects gone

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/05

In Visual Studio 2010, the empty “ASP.NET Web Service Application” projects are gone.

This is probably because Microsoft rather has you use WCF, so a few of those “older” templates are now gone:

To simplify things a bit in 2010, we’ve removed a few of the older templates.  You can get the same thing by creating an empty website and adding a web service to it.

Funny though, as the “old” templates are still mentioned, of course in their ASP.NET 3.5 web service documentation, but also in their Visual Studio 2010 ASP.NET Web services documentation :-)

–jeroen

via: Visual Web Developer Express 2010 – WebService Template – ASP.NET Forums.

Posted in .NET, ASP.NET, Development, SOAP/WebServices, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

RDP: Using Remote Desktop with Dual Monitors | SplitView

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/04

Remote Desktop Protocol (aka RDP) introduced span support in version 6.1, and multimon support in vesion 7.

RDP consists of a server part called Remote Desktop Services, and a client part (MSTSC.EXE, currently called Remote Desktop Connection, previously caled Terminal Services Client).

Because of the server/client split, not all feature combinations are possible.
Hence below a table listing what is possible, and a short explanation of a few features.
From those, I use often: ‘span’, ‘multimon’ and  ‘admin’ (previously called ‘console’).

My intention is to make this info as complete as possible; please comment on things that are wrong or incomplete. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User | 5 Comments »

AdBlock – great Google Chrome extension

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/10/01

Depending on UMTS and GPRS for my on-the-road internet access, ads take up a lot of my bandwidth and data limit so I decided to try to get rid of them.

My main browser is Chrome, so I did a quick search and found the AdBlock Google Chrome extension.

I have worked with that for at least a week now, and I’m happy: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User | Leave a Comment »

TFS: using tf to move files

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/09/30

Recently, I had a “server binding” “status=invalid” in TFS when moving quite a bit of files from CVS to TFS.
The most problematic where getting the solution, and a webservice project correctly.

The FAQ on solution binding indicated I should fix my workspace (which is simple: just a root directory), so that was not of much help.

I tried various other things, but in the end, the easiest fix was to:

  1. rename the directories of the bad solution and project,
  2. create an empty solution
  3. create an empty ASP.NET web site project
  4. then move all of the old files to the new directory structure

Moving files around from within Visual Studio is a tedious process: you can only move one file at a time.

TF to the rescue: it allows you to call perform TFS tasks from the commandline.

Time to automate that with a little batch file. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in CommandLine, Development, Source Code Management, TFS (Team Foundation System) | Leave a Comment »

co-worker question: what is better, extension methods or helper classes?

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/09/29

Recently, a co-worker at a client asked me “What is better: extension methods of helper classses?”.

This question is relevant not only in the .NET and Delphi worlds.

My answer was simple, consisting of these 3 points: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, C#, C# 4.0, Delphi, Development, Opinions, Software Development | 5 Comments »

VMware ESXi 4.0 / ESXi 4.1: enable SSH login for non-root users (and only them)

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/09/28

VMware ESXi has SSH disabled by default.

In ESX / ESXi 3 and 3.5, it took a while for people to recognize the ‘unsupported’ trick and enable SSH.
In ESXi 4.0, /sbin/services.sh was fixed, so SSH was easier to enable (note: only delete the # in front of the first ssh).
Since ESXi version 4.1, SSH is called “Remote Tech Support (SSH)”, and it very easy to enable from the console.
Thomas Maurer described how easy it is to activate SSH in ESXi 4.1. He provides clear screen shots, whereas the VMware knowledge base article just lists the textual steps.

But contrary to ESX/ESXi 3.5 and lower, and *nix habits, enabling SSH on ESXi 4.x will enable this for the root user.
This has to do with the switch between ESX/ESXi 3.5 and 4.0 from to the dropbear ssh daemon (in the /sbin/dropbearmulti binary).
Dropbear is a very lightweight implementation of the SSH 2 protocol; ideal for ESXi which – as a hypervisor – needs to have a really low footprint.

In addition to the dropbear change, SSH is disabled for non-root users (which has nothing to do with dropbear, see below).

This post is about how to fix not only the SSH (as above) but also how to allow specific users to use SSH. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in ESXi4, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User, VMware | 9 Comments »

HTTPS Everywhere | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/09/27

Currently this is FireFox-only.
I hope someone ports this to a Chrome extension and Internet Explorer plugin: HTTPS Everywhere | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

–jeroen

Posted in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, LifeHacker, Power User, Web Browsers | 1 Comment »

tempalias – Temporary Email Aliases

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/09/24

For me to not forget: tempalias – Temporary Email Aliases.

Posted in Power User | Leave a Comment »

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