daemon.child

Last weekend I went to Curry's. I handed over a not-inconsiderable amount of cash and vouchers and left with a brown box. Quite a heavy brown box for it's size. When I got home, the kids were fascinated. "What's in the box?", "Is it a present for me?". No, my dear children, it's a present for ME.

In this article, we're going to look configuring access to an iSCSI server from Mac OS X. In particular, this will be useful for Time Machine backups; this is what I do at home for my macs.

This will be a quick post. I was searching for a way of implementing linked clones in Fusion, when I happened upon this posting. The crux of the post was "Does anybody know if something easier has been found for cloning VMW *Fusion*?"

I'm using a locked down desktop at a client site at the moment. They have done a good job. I can't change any of the properties of the system, I can only see limited views in Windows Explorer. I can't even run cmd.exe. But they have forgotten one dangerous thing: command.com. It's the 16bit version of cmd.exe and lives in the system32 folder. This shell isn't tied down by group policy because it just doesn't understand these restrictions. From this shell, I can run telnet, tftp and all sorts of other useful tools. History - it's always there in the background.

I'm getting an iPad. There is no doubt about this. I may be a self-confessed Mac zealot, but that does not mean I love all things Apple by default. I'm also fairly sceptical of new toys for the sake of it. I reckon you'll be surprised that I don't have an iPhone. In this case it's simply because my last and current employers have given me Blackberry's; why pay for something I don't need then?

I've got a pile of work to do with RSA coming up over the next six weeks. I'll be pretty much living and breathing the product in a project that will probably take me to Berlin, New York and London. It's an upgrade project so I thought I'd set up a sample environment and work through the process (yet again) as a bit of a practice. Any regular readers would know that I have fought with RSA 7.1 before. And I'm fighting it again today.

I signed an NDA, so I'm not telling you what's in the VCP 4 exam. Here are some quick hints though: read the blueprint. It's a great guide to the content of the exam (funnily enough!). And get this document bundle - most of the questions can be answered by knowing this documentation intimately.

Twitter is over capacity again as I write. This is no big problem in itself. I can live without the constant stream of witty and insightful interruptions to my day. Hey, I might actually get some work done. But the problem is indicative of Twitter's failure to scale its infrastructure to meet demand. The service is free, so who am I to complain? They might do better if we were paying for the service.

The OVF Tool is included as part of the 'Full' sized Fusion 3.1 installer. I've recently written a brief article on how to make sure that it is installed for you when you first install Fusion. This article shows how to convert a virtual machine into an OVF template using this command line tool.

I have a template virtual machine created in Fusion that I'd like to share with a colleague. If this was an ESX virtual machine, I'd probably export it as an OVF file. In Fusion, it has been a tricky thing to do. Until now. Version 3.1 includes the OVF Tool if you know now to install it.