I’m With Coco

12Jan10

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AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile Do Not Care About Identity Theft

05Jan10

Over the weekend I received two text messages from Cattleman’s National Bank informing me that there is a discrepancy with my account:

I promptly alerted AT&T to the problem, but the person I spoke to over the phone said that there is not anything AT&T can do about these messages. They are automatically generated by some system that they have no control over. This morning (Tuesday, January 5th, 2010) I notified Cattleman’s National Bank, and they said that they are aware of these messages going out on Sprint’s, T-Mobile’s, and AT&T’s networks. When I suggested that they work with the phone companies to prevent these obvious phishing attempts from reaching and perhaps duping less aware cell phone users, the bank’s representative said that they have tried, but the different phone companies also told them that there was nothing they could do.

I recognize that I am not fully aware of how the text messaging system works, but is it so open that these companies that legally rob us each month with our data and text messaging plans cannot prevent spam? If all I’m paying them for is a dumb pipe then great, let me have my pipe! But, they’ve acknowledged that our connections aren’t just data pipes, we’re paying for the privilege to be on their networks. Their networks. They control them.

The message from these phone companies is clear: We don’t care about protecting our customers from identity theft.

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Tags: at&t, cattleman's national bank, identity theft, sprint, t-mobile

GuessMyOSToo Open Sourced

28Dec09

In an effort to encourage more VMware community developers to create useful and interesting plug-ins for the VI/vSphere Client, Hyper9 has decided to open source the GuessMyOSToo plug-in for the VI and vSphere clients.

GuessMyOSToo is now hosted on SourceForge.net where you can do things like browse the source code and submit bug reports or suggest feature requests.

GuessMyOSToo binaries will still be available on the Hyper9 website.

Hope this helps!

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Tags: vi3, vmware, vsphere4

Getting an ESX host’s version from the host

22Dec09

A co-worker asked me the other day how to get the version of an ESX host from the host itself (the service console). I told him to look at /etc/vmware-release, but he said that that wasn’t enough information. The next day another co-worker asked if it is possible to tell the difference between a vCenter server and an ESX host without authenticating to either. I said, sure, the RetrieveServiceContent method does not require authentication. Then it occurred to me you can use the same thing locally on an ESX host to determine the exact version of the host.

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Tags: esx, perl, vmware

KVM rocks. Its support sucks.

09Dec09

I’ve been using KVM for a few days on my home server, and I really like it. However, if there is any hope of it succeeding, there needs to be some serious improvement with its support structure. Especially in IRC. I think John Gabriel’s Greater Internet ****wad theory applies to the type of people who monitor the #kvm channel on Freenode. Of course, that’s generally the greater problem with Linux in general. It’s a community made up of people who would fit right in at the music store in High Fidelity.

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Installing vSphere SDK for Perl on OS X 10.6.2 (Snow Leopard)

20Nov09

This evening I decided I was going to install the latest version of the vSphere SDK for Perl on my system. My system happens to be OS X 10.6.2, and VMware only provides the vSphere SDK for Perl for Windows and Linux distributions. Luckily I have been able to make the Linux version work for OS X before (albeit that was on 10.5), so I thought I would try again.

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Tags: os x, perl, vmware, vsphere

Introducing GuessMyOSToo!

15Sep09

GuessMyOSToo is the world’s first third-party plug-in that works with both VMware Infrastructure 3 and vSphere 4 clients! Following on the success of GuessMyOS, the sequel replaces generic VM icons in the VI3 and vSphere inventory trees with OS-specific icons. Created by Andrew Kutz at Hyper9 GuessMyOSToo is free and available for download today!

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Tags: guessmyos, guessmyostoo, vi3, vmware, vsphere4

The OVM^2 Initiative

30Aug09

Some of you have been e-mailing me recently, asking why I’ve been so uncharacteristically silent these past few months. Well, I’m finally ready to do the big reveal, to pull the covers off what I’ve been working on all this time. I’m pleased to announce the Open Virtualization Management and Monitoring (OVM^2) Initiative.

An ambitious project by Hyper9, OVM^2 aims to provide a completely free and open software stack for managing and monitoring leading virtualization platforms such as:

• VMware ESX 3.x
• VMware VirtualCenter 2.x
• VMware ESX 4.x
• VMware vCenter4
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• Citrix XenServer 5.x
• *Amazon EC2
• *KVM

Overview

The OVM^2 Initiative is supported by a series of open source software projects that Hyper9 is announcing and making available today under the BSD license:

• Vangaea – Provides an open, RESTful interface and single sign-on access for communicating with leading hypervisors.
• UVAPI – A Java library that provides a universal model and API for accessing different virtualization platforms.
• JWbem – An on-going Java implementation of Microsoft’s Scripting Web-Based Enterprise Management (SWbem) API. JWbem allows Java developers to easily monitor and manage Microsoft Windows via Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).
• Hyper9-Common – Binds together all the other modules; a set of utilities providing common support.

When combined with supporting hypervisor SDKs, these projects fit together to form the basis of the OVM^2 Initiative.

OVM^2 Overview

Availability

I’ve been putting the finishing touches on the different parts of OVM^2 for a weeks now, and I’m finally satisfied enough with the various bits and pieces to approve the first public release of OVM^2, just in time for VMworld 2009.

In conjunction with the release, I recorded a quick demonstration highlighting some of the features of Vangaea, the RESTful API component of OVM^2. Take a look!

Support

Hyper9 needs your support! If you are interested in working on any component of OVM^2 please e-mail me at akutz at hyper9 dot com, and let me know for which project you think you can be a positive contributor.

*Coming Soon

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Tags: akutz, citrix, hyper-v, jwbem, microsoft, ovm^2, uvapi, vangaea, virtualization, vmware, xen

Building a Better OS X Firewall (or How I solved the NAT problem for VirtualBox)

20Aug09

My Macbook Pro’s hard drive died. Ugh. Since I was forced to rebuild my system I decided to do a clean install and not copy over any preferences from my backups, just the data that I needed (documents, secure shell (SSH) keys, music, etc.). Another decision I made was to forgo VMware Fusion for a more light-weight desktop hypervisor. Fusion has a nice feature set, but I have never known a program to be more of a resource hog, or to be so annoying (always grabbing my input, yanking me into another space) as VMware Fusion for OS X.

Filed under: apple, security, software development   |  16 Comments
Tags: diy, firewall, nat, os x, virtualbox

VIJMark

05Aug09

I benchmarked the performance of three Java toolkits for working with VMware Infrastructure and vSphere: VI (vSphere) Java, the VI SDK for Java, and the vSphere SDK. You can read more at http://vijmark.sourceforge.net/.

(Hint – VI (vSphere) Java wins)

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Tags: vijava, vmware