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

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Archive for May, 2022

capitaltg/thea: Certificate Checker and https://certchecker.app site

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/05/03

[Wayback/Archive.is] capitaltg/thea: Certificate Checker

Certificate Checker provides an easy-to-use solution to check certificates, certificate chains, and TLS configurations. To run Certificate Checker for publicly-accessible web sites you can go to: https://certchecker.app and enter in there a URL to check.
Users can easily run Certificate Checker in an internal network to validate or troubleshoot their TLS configuration. To run it on a local network you can run the Docker image as described below. You can also build the application and deploy it on an existing server.

It runs on [Wayback/Archive.is] Certificate Checker.

I used it to check various certificates and chains, including those for my GitHub Pages explained last week in Setting up a GitHub project so it is served over https as a custom subdomain.

–jeroen

Posted in Communications Development, Development, Encryption, HTTPS/TLS security, Internet protocol suite, Let's Encrypt (letsencrypt/certbot), Power User, Security, Software Development, TCP, TLS, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Remotely controlling most Harman Kardon systems

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/05/03

There is a Harman Kardon Remote app on [Wayback/Archive.is] Android and [Wayback/Archive.is] iOS.

It can control Harman Kardon AVR and BDS devices, and the communication appears to be simple XML over HTTP according to [Wayback/Archive.is] H/K AVR 151 Remote Control API – Adam Parsons.

It got reverse engineered into two libraries, both based on string concatenating XML HTTP requests:

Note:

–jeroen

Posted in Development, PHP, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Converting an existing XP machine to a VMware ESXi  Virtual Machine and having boot issues?

Posted by jpluimers on 2022/05/02

A while ago I wrote about Stop 0x0000007B after converting an existing XP machine to a Virtual Machine (ESXi, Hyper-V, or other).

After this, the machine still had boot issues (a grey or black screen after boot, unless booted via Grub from a rescue CD).

The solution in retrospect was simple, but I only figured out after the fact what the solution had done.

Of course this gave me a facepalm moment, as back in the days, this was exactly the warning I gave everyone when installing Windows XP on ESXi anyway: use a SCSI buslogic based virtual disk, not an IDE or SATA virtual disk.

The reason is that Windows XP does not like the IDE/SATA disk that VMware provides. Windows Vista and up are less of a problem.

This is indeed what my practical solution did:

  • VMware Converter 4.x creates a VM with an IDE/SATA disk (as it cannot talk to the more recent ESXi versions at all because of API changes)
  • VMware Converter 6.x creates a VM with a buslogic SCSI base disk (and it can create it directly on your ESXi rig, though it will use a directory in the root of your data store, even if you prefer it somewhere deeper in the directory tree)

References:

–jeroen

Posted in ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, Hardware, Power User, SAS/SATA, SCSI, Virtualization, VMware, VMware Converter, VMware ESXi, Windows, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »