Remove duplicates in Outlook with ODIR

Mailbox corruption, synchronization errors or users that have messed up. Sometimes you just need an effective tool to find and delete duplicate emails, contacts and calendar appointments. ODIR(Outlook Duplicate Items Remover ) just does the trick and is unlike many others 100% free.

Download: http://www.vaita.com/ODIR.asp

Improve VMware Console Mouse Experience with Windows Server 2008

Did you notice that since Windows 2008, console mouse experience is really crap. Not a big deal because you need to get out of that console view ASAP anyway. But after working with some environments which I only had console access I got really frustrated and fired up Google to look for a way to improve it. Right away I found that changing the VGA driver would solve the problem, this is so simple that it makes me wonder why this alternate driver is not default?

Here how to do it:

1. Open the Device Manager and expand your Display adapters. Right click the display adapter and select Update driver software…
2. Click Browse my computer for driver software
3. Now select the driver shown in the image below. It is copied to that location upon installation of VMware tools, so they must be present. For best results ensure you are using the latest version of VMTools.
   
4. Finally, Windows will find and update the video adapters driver with the WDDM version as seen below. You will need to restart your server as is noted in the dialog box 

Source: http://vm-pro.com/improve-vmware-console-mouse-experience-with-windows-server-2008/

“Delete all” snapshot: A general system error occurred: concurrent access

When deleting multiple snapshots at the same time with the “Delete All” button I received the following error on many of my Virtual Machines: “A general system error occurred: concurrent access”

After verifying that there was no concurrent access I start googling this error but there was nothing related out there.

Just before calling VMware support I tried to delete de snapshots one by one and this didn’t generate the error and the snapshots were succesfully removed. Strange but I’m happy I could remove the snapshots.

Creating a limited and secure guest SSID on your DD-WRT router

After one of my friends connected to my private LAN with his phone and suddenly could access all my pictures, music and documents I realized I needed some kind of separate network for friends and family.

Our TP-LINK TL-WR1043ND is running DD-WRT so this should be a piece of cake.

What I wanted to archieve:

1. Block all access in between the private and public wlan
2. Give the public wlan the a lower QOS priority so it won’t slow down my private network
3. Only allow http and https on the public wlan

I followed this nice tutorial on youtube which got me started: DD-WRT Tutorial: Create a secure and separate public guest network

Unfortunately I soon discovered that my new separate public guest network was anything but secure and separate. Simon who made the video let some crucial parts out resulting in the private network to be wide open to the public network.

Googling the topic I found lots of information but not really a good guide to simply make it work. So I decided to write this post about it.

Here we go:

1. Follow Simon’s youtube instruction
2. Open your DD-WRT’s WEBGUI and fix the QOS mistake made in the video. On the “NAT/COS” -> “QOS” we need to change the added networks to 192.168.1.0/24 and 192.168.2.0/24.
3. Create some IPTABLES script to make it secure and separate. This can be added on the “Administration” -> “Commands” page. Just copy and paste the text below into the text box and click “Save firewall”.

#Allow br1 to access DHCP on the router
iptables -I INPUT -i br1 -p udp --dport 67 -j ACCEPT

#Allow br1 to access DNS on the router
iptables -I INPUT -i br1 -p udp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT
iptables -I INPUT -i br1 -p tcp --dport 53 -j ACCEPT

#Restrict br1 from accessing br0
iptables -I FORWARD 1 -i br1 -o br0 -m state --state NEW -j DROP

#Restrict br0 from accessing br1
iptables -I FORWARD 2 -i br0 -o br1 -m state --state NEW -j DROP

#Allow br1 to access http/https to internet
iptables -I FORWARD 3 -i br1 -p tcp -m multiport --dports 80,443 -j ACCEPT
iptables -I FORWARD 4 -i br1 -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

#Drop everything else on br1
iptables -I FORWARD 5 -i br1 -j DROP

That’s everything. Don’t forget to test your new setup:

1. Test that your primary and private network is still giving you the same access to your resources and the internet

2. Try to browse a random website on your public network; this should work

3. Try to download a torrent on your public network; this should not work

4. Try to “telnet <some random mailserver> 25″ on your public network; this should not work

“No guest OS heartbeats” when attempting vMotion

When attempting to vMotion a couple of my virtual machines I received the “No guest OS heartbeats” error with many of them. Googling resulted in a number of possible reasons like

• ensure that the VMware Tools are installed in the virtual machine before performing a migration
• ensure that the virtual machine has been running long enough for the operating system to be completely started before performing a migration
• if VMware Tools are already installed, reinstall the VMware Tools to ensure that you are on the latest version and that there is no corruption in the configuration

but I just could not beleave this was going on all my VMs.

Then I found out this was related to a recent reboot of my vCenter server and there are a number of fixes:

1. Just ignore the warning, vMotion will run just fine and the warning behavior will disappear at some point
2. Quickly open the console view of the virtual machine
3. Restart the vmware tools services process(could be scripted if you have many)

Earned the “Microsoft Certified IT Professional: Enterprise Messaging Administrator 2010″ status

How to: Copy and Paste in vSphere Client 4.1 and later

Do you want to copy and past from and to your VM consoles?

Here’s how to enable it per Virtual Machine:

1. Power down the VM
2. Right click the VM and choose Edit Settings.
3. Navigate to Options > Advanced > General and click Configuration Parameters.
4. Click Add Row.
5. Type these values in the Name and Value columns:
   • isolation.tools.copy.disable – false
   • isolation.tools.paste.disable – false

   Note: These options override any settings made in the VMware Tools control panel of the guest operating system.

6. Click OK to close the Configuration Parameters dialog, and click OK again to close the Virtual Machine Properties dialog.
7. Power on the virtual machine.

And per host:

1. Log in to the ESX/ESXi host as a root user and open the /etc/vmware/config file using a text editor.
2. Add these entries to the file:
   isolation.tools.copy.disable="FALSE"
isolation.tools.paste.disable="FALSE"
3. Save and close the file.
4. The setting will be activating when (re)starting the virtual machines running on the host.

Source: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1026437

Storage done cheap

While strugling with my home storage and in search of a good online backup solution I ran into a blog posts which I really like, and what I like I put on my own blog:

Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage

Basically what these people did is built their own storage. For a tiny fraction of the price of a “real” storage. Yes you don’t get the service, support and warranty. But built two to have a spare and you’ll still be paying nothing compared to all the big brands. Okay maybe you don’t really want to use this for your business critical data. But isn’t this ideal as a magnetic backup library(to temporary store you files before you write them to disk), for that archived data that is now sitting on your expensive Equallogic?  And maybe you’re just a storage hungry home user that needs lots of TBs but could not afford it yet?

HP G6 server with and without Smart Array Battery Kit ESXi i/o performance

No IO performance in ESXi on a high spec HP DL380 server was caused by not having the Smart Array battery kit installed. Installing the 512 cache module wasn’t enough, performance as expected came after adding the battery kit.

Read/write performance without battery kit:

Read/write performance with battery kit:

Tested on a brand new HP DL380(Quad Core Xeon, 8GB memory and 146GB 10K disks, P410i smart array(firmware v3.00)) running ESXi 4.1

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Looking for a simple, quick and free disk benchmark utility to test your new hard drive, SAN, NAS, Virtual Machine  read/write performce? Go for ATTO Disk Benchmark!

Visit the official website for the latest version.

Or click here for a direct download.