Vmware Fusion already includes a basic preboot execution environment (pxe) firmware. It is however possible to load other pxe firmwares into Fusion just like flashing ROMs into real network adapters. Two examples of pxe compliant boot loaders are gpxe and ipxe. Ipxe seems to be based on gpxe but they have generally similar features sets. These features include DNS, HTTP, iSCSI chainloading and more. To access these extra features we need to get hold of the ROM files which can be downloaded from here (right click and choose save as):

You should use something like logrotate to manage you log files however sometimes you are not interested in the log content and just want to clear them. Especially if you have multi GB files due to excessive errors. In this situation use: > /var/log/logfile-name This will clear the file but not remove it. It is possible that a process has locked the file, in which case track it down with:

You have a few options for doing this especially if you are using something like WSUS. However if you aren’t, then a registry change via group policy or logon script is probably the best option. Here is a a registry file that will block automatic upgrade to internet explorer 8 and 9: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup\8.0] "DoNotAllowIE80"=dword:00000001 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Setup\9.0] "DoNotAllowIE90"=dword:00000001 If you are only interested in blocking one version of internet explorer then just remove the appropriate lines.

Alternate Data Streams (ADS) are used by Windows to add an identifier describing the ‘internet explorer zone’ the file was downloaded from. If the zone was not trusted you may have to unblock the file. Certain file types are more at risky and therefore are automatically blocked (see here). To manually unblock the file go to explorer and right click the file, select properties and click unblock. This is somewhat cumbersome for large numbers of files.

This is a catchy title, but if you are interested in playing with Hyper-V 3 then add the following to your virtual machine vmx file: vhv.enable = TRUE hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE mce.enable = TRUE Once you have added these lines you are good to install the Beta and add the Hyper-V 3 Role. If you miss out the ‘mce.enable’ line, when you reboot after adding the Hyper-V role you get a blue screen with an error complaining about hal_initialization_failed, so make sure you include it.

To begin, make sure you have removed any previous versions of Growl. Instructions here. You will need to install Mercurial, which can be found here. Once installed input the following from a terminal: mkdir ~/Desktop/tmp cd ~/Desktop/tmp hg clone https://code.google.com/p/growl/ cd growl At this point you need to open Keychain Access as we have to self sign a certificate for xcode to use in building Growl. In Keychain Access, go to the application menu and choose: Keychain Access < Certificate Assistant < Create a certificate In the box that appears, change the name to: 3rd Party Mac Developer Application: The Growl Project, LLC Select the Certificate Type ‘Code Signing’ and click create accepting the trust warnings.

This can be a little tricky to find in different versions of Microsoft Outlook. In Outlook 2010 you have to open the email you are interested in, then on the ribbon tool bar select: File > Info > Properties This is long winded and if you often have to do it, rather time consuming. The best way around this is to customise the ribbon tool bar. To do this, select the ‘Home’ tab of the ribbon tool bar.

If you get the following error when generating a pacman keychain master key: pacman-key –init gpg: Generating pacman keychain master key… Not enough random bytes available. Please do some other work to give the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 288 more bytes) It can be quite tricky to introduce entropy into this low powered headless system. I tried various methods all of which failed. You can monitor the available system entropy here:

I can’t seem to remember this: sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-uname -r Which is strange considering how often I use it.

To get the vSphere Management Assistant appliance to run under VMware Fusion use the ovftool. You will need to download the VMA appliance from VMware, extract it and then cd to that directory. You will have to include the full path to the ovftool or include it in your classpath. Then: ovftool vMA-5.0.0.0-472630_OVF10.ovf folder_name/ Where folder_name is a subdirectory in your extracted directory. When you run that command you will will have to accept the license agreement first.