You care about being compliant with various regulatory regimes that say you can’t ever remember private 172.16.x.x IP addresses and say them out loud (or write them down); and yet they will happily use Winzip to password protect a zip file with an easy to remember password (sometimes to maintain “compatibility” they use encryption that can be extracted by earlier versions).
If you’re like me then perhaps you often don’t want your network interfaces to be enabled all the time. You might not have a hardware switch to turn off your wireless and going to Network and Sharing -> Change Adapter Settings right click enable / disable seems like such a chore especially when my default group policy means that you’re prompted for your password each time.
Well, the windows scripting host is your friend; here’s how to toggle your network interfaces
Making VMPlayer Network interfaces part of the private network
One of the things that you’ll find with VMPlayer is that the network interfaces aren’t registered properly with Windows (Vista or 7) which means that you’re always in the Public zone, so your firewall is always turned on (that’s right, you have a firewall don’t you).
Setting up apache with mercurial with password authentication
Generally speaking, we host our mercurial repositories using SSH; sometimes of course, we need to do it via HTTP because we don’t want to give external contractors SSH access because who knows what damage they can do with a terminal (anyone who’s seen someone do rm -rf * in /etc knows what I’m talking about). It’s bad enough they damage the contents of the repository with their inability to read a good primer site like http://hginit.com (you know who you are).
Rebuilding integration services on Centos 5 for a kernel that isn’t running
A quick update this week; I updated the kernel on one of my CentOS 5.6 images and rebooted; it wouldn’t boot as it couldn’t find any LVM volumes. At least you can always reboot into a previous kernel.
If I’m being honest, just blithely running yum -y update, reboot was a trifle silly. Still, if you can’t do that with virtual machines when can you do it (that’s what snapshots are for). The affected machine itself doesn’t really do much other than run a couple of JMS Brokers/MySQL/Postfix/IMAP/FTP/SSH so my unit tests have things to work against (my life is more interesting that this, honest).