All posts by Chris

Password Recovery

Technology, Work

Once again you find yourself in the familiar situation of having to access something but not having the authentication details to do so. In this case it’s the product documentation system. Everything had been going so well with your latest product release. Developers had signed off on it, testers were ok, and the only sticking point was updating the release notes in the documentation.

maybe it's admin?

The guy who normally updates the documentation is no longer working for the company. Your other colleague with his own login is travelling and is in a different timezone. While the person who was responsible for the original install is long gone. IT know nothing about this system and you have to update it today.

What to do. What to do.

Continue reading Password Recovery →

VMware ESXi on a white box

Technology

I’ve been researching server virtualization lately, and looking at several solutions. One of which is VMware’s vSphere hypervisor (previously known as ESXi server).

There’s a free version of vSphere available, that only requires you to register to download it along with a license. Installation on the other hand, proves to be extremely difficult when using hardware that isn’t on the official hardware compatibility list.

In computer hardware, a white box is a personal computer or server without a registered brand name – Wikipedia

Difficult… but not impossible.

As there turns out to be an unofficial whitebox list on vmware-help.com.

Additional drivers are available from here, then see instructions on how to use this automated script to populate an ISO/USB stick with a custom installation image.

Cisco 700-23918-01

Work

Step 1: Apply Cisco 700-23918-01 REV D0 to an appropriate surface

Step 2: Attach Cisco WS-C2960G-24TC-L to the Cisco 700-23918-01 REV D0 from step one

Congratulations! Your twenty four port switch is now attached to the side of your office cube

How cool is that? Cisco refer to it as a “Magnet Mount”, and ship them with their eight port switches.

I should also mention that labeling things “Santa Clara R&D” does not prevent them from growing legs, running off, taking long wild vacations, and eventually returning home slightly bruised and battered. Only a large metal box, surrounded in concrete, dumped at the bottom of the ocean can help to prevent that.