One of the biggest complaints I’ve had with VMWare vSphere and VMWare ESX/ESXi over the last few years is that managing my virtual machines from my Mac computer was a hassle. The VMWare management utilities are all Windows-only, and even the few web-based tools either do not work or are extremely limited from a Mac. While it isn’t perfect yet, VMWare vSphere 5 has made it so you can actually do just about anything you need to using a Macintosh computer; you just need to go through a few hurdles. To enable the administration of your various virtual machines, storage, clusters, datacenters, and the like, you can now use the vSphere 5 Web Client. Before it can be used, it must[…]
I am currently experimenting with my smartphone, to see if its Mobile Access Point Functionality allows it to function as a wireless router independent of Internet connection. In theory, it should – it is capable of providing internet access to four attached devices, and that suggests that it should have router functionality, meaning that the attached devices should be able to talk with each other, rather than simply to the Internet. In practice, I know that sometimes seemingly important parts of networking implementations are, well, not implemented. The most egregious example, in my experience, was a commercial-grade firewall which was unable to pass UDP traffic under certain circumstances. The lesson I learned then was that just because the hardware and[…]
There’s a new GPGMail app – installed with GPGTools – that works on Lion: http://www.gpgtools.org/installer/index.html Unless you’ve got S/MIME set up. If you do have S/MIME set up, the bundle won’t display the settings, nor will it “work”. You’ll have a GPGMail preferences pane in Mail.app, but the only options you get are enabling OpenPGP under Composing and Reading. You’re supposed to have the choice of keys, etc. The previous GPGMail (a *long* time ago), allowed both S/MIME and OpenPGP, so this is a bit disappointing. Their bug tracker has that functionality scheduled for (possibly) version 2.1, and I’ll be trying it again at that point. There are definitely challenges to having S/MIME and OpenPGP running the same mail client.[…]
I recently acquired a new iMac at work to replace the 4yr old one I was using. The new iMac came with Lion on it, and since I had upgraded to Lion on my work machine, I went ahead and upgraded all of my home machines as well. My Macbook Air is my primary “workstation away from work”, and keeps client data. Because it does, I use FileVault on it. Under Snow Leopard, that only encrypted my home directory. Under Lion, FileVault now encrypts the entire drive, not just $HOME. However, if you upgrade, you have to explicitly convert your machine to use the new FileVault. And you need a lot of disk space to do it… I have a[…]
A few years ago, a friend of mine served in Afghanistan. It was, as he described it, a long and mostly dull duty. When not busy with soldierly duties, he wrote on his blog and took pictures, often of the rather picturesque – to those who didn’t have to traverse it – scenery. At one point, however, he was informed that these landscape pictures were, in fact, an operational security violation. Not the ones taken in-camp, but the gorgeous panoramas of Afghani mountains and valleys. The theory was that, using those pictures, insurgents could find their position. My friend’s response was succinct: “I think they already know about the mountains, sir.” In a previous job, I was charged with creating[…]
When it comes to giving advice about picking strong passwords, experts are quick to point out some of the good password generators and managers available, or recite best-practices for making up your own. And although we do so with the best of intentions, it’s still easy for people’s eyes to gloss over when presented with matter-of-fact information, especially if it comes in the form of a lecture or a wall of text. For the people who are way more responsive to information communicated graphically, this short video from Mozilla explains some basic concepts of choosing easy-to-remember passwords that are still complex and robust: Passwords look like they’ll be sticking around for a little while longer as a key component in[…]