A friend of mine sent me this MSN Money article last night, A Tech Stock To Own Now. It discusses the rise, fall, and steady growth of EMC stock. He knew I was into virtualization and that I might be of some help. He wanted to know if EMC would be a smart investment for his stock portfolio. At a previous employer, I was a Network/VMware/SAN administrator for an EMC NS40 and NS352, so I have a little bit of experiance playing with EMC products. It's no V-Max, that's for sure, but here was my response.

Take in mind, he doesn't know anything related to virtualization or SAN technology and that I know nothing about the stock market or investments. I'm also not an EMC guru, so I don't know the ins and outs of EMC, this is just my own opinion.

"EMC is the largest SAN (storage area network) player in the game. Back in the 90s they were one of the ONLY players in the game, and they did it the best. They gained a huge market share and once you go with EMC, it's hard to turn back. The whole IT world is headed towards virtualization. Currently, Data Centers are being virtualized so servers are more robust and have greater efficiency. It is already common  that organizations have adopted virtualization, or they are messing with it. Up next is going to be desktop virtualization, which might only be 2-4 years away from hitting mainstream because its almost ready for wide-scale deployment. VMware is software that enables virtualization, while EMC is the storage behind all of that. The fact that EMC owns VMware, lets them see a profit from that, even though you can buy VMware stock.

I feel honored to have made the list that @ericsiebert created. He has put together the Top 100 VMware/Virtualization List to Follow on twitter.  There are alot of noteworthy folks on this list and I'm grateful to have been part of it. Thanks again Eric for creating the list, it's a great way to help build our VMware community. If you are connected to virtualization in any form, follow everyone on this list so you can stay up to date on the newest trends in virtualization.

I can't take any credit for this. My manager Paul wrote this up, but I felt the information was necessary to share because we probably aren't the first team to run into this. The Cisco ASA WebVPN might not be that important, but that is how our users access their email outside of the Lotus Notes client on their desktop. So this really applies to anything using Lotus Web Notes and IE8

We ran across an issue with using Lotus Notes (web, not the client) from a home or hotel PC if it is running the newest version of Internet Explorer version 8.   You should not experience this issue if you are not upgrading to IE8 at this time.

The issue is that the full version of Web Notes does not work under IE8 because the Active-X plug-in that loads Notes is not working with this version.  You will get an error that says something like iNotes Plug is not authorized or another general error message and Lotus Notes will not open the inbox.

Last month, with the help of a few people, the creation of our "Run it with VMware" video made its online debut. Starting today, the voting has begun for all the submitted videos. We would kindly appreciate your vote. Since @gabvirtualworld isn't in this competition, I might have a chance of winning =)

To vote, Create a VMworld account (you don't have to be at VMworld to create an account) then sign in, go to the Run it With VMware contest page, scroll down towards the bottom and vote for "Email's Down"

THANKS!!

*Updated 8/27/2009* Partially Solved

I've searched the web and can't get an explanation as to why this isn't working. Currently everything (switch IP addresses, users, servers, etc) are all on the defualt Vlan (That's the way it was setup before I got here and I don't like messing with 3Com switches so I haven't had time to take them off the default Vlan). My goal is to setup Vlan 2 as the management Vlan for all network equipment and eventually get everything off the default vlan.

I am trying to get a trunk setup between a Cisco 3750G and 3Com 4500 SuperStack3. This is just a test for right now because the 3Com that is in production is a 3Com 4200G.

 Here is the setup. For easy reference I've made:

• A = PC on Vlan 2
• B = 3Com 4500 Layer 2 switch
• C = Cisco 3750G Layer 3 switch
• D = PC on Vlan 1
  

VMware is running a video contest. The video needs to demonstrate things such as performance, cost savings, support, quality of service, etc. With the creative help of my fiance (@VideoEditorGirl) we developed a "24" type of scenario using HA with Microsoft Exchange. The point of the video was to demonstrate "real world" experience. Not so real that the IT guy plays Halo all day and the executive has access to the server room, but the fact that running your environment on VMware vSphere gives you the ability to be dynamic and unscheduled downtime goes from hours or even days to just a few minutes.

Enable SSH and remove Telnet on a 3COM 4200G Switch Script

As any security nut knows, telnet is bad, I mean really bad. Why would you want to send unencrpyted clear text passwords over your network? This is now my 2nd post of how to enable SSH on switches. You might remember an older post when I showed how to enable SSH on Nortel 5520 switches. I haven't blogged on how to enable SSH on Cisco because it's pretty easy and googleable (<~ new word?). 3COM isn't near as difficult as Nortel, but here is a script on how to enable SSH on 3COM 4200G series switches while at the same time disabling telnet. The only good thing I have to say about 3COM switches is that you don't have to load a new IOS or Image that supports SSH, it's all inclusive.

A Simple Way To Crack Passwords Across Your Domain for Compliance

Every quarter or more, you may have to figure out if everyone in your enterprise is being compliant with passwords. Sometimes Active Directory's password policy doesn't take into account some things you feel are more secure, such as not being able to use any words from the dictionary in your password. Password security is always a thing to worry about in any organization

So here is a simple guide to cracking passwords across the domain with pwdump3 and ophcrack.

In my example I am using a virtual Win7 machine with no anti-virus installed and running the dumps against the Active Directory server