mattfahrner.com

Author: Matt Fahrner

  • Dell PERC 5i/R or H200 VMware Performance Fix

    I had an old Dell PERC 5i/R RAID card laying around and wanted to use it for a home lab ESXi box (note: also works on Dell PERC H200). The card isn’t amazingly high performance, but it it’s good enough for simple RAID. Well, that is, it’s good enough performance if you change the settings. By […]

  • Fix VMware Web Client Integration Plugin for Chrome on Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11)

    The latest vCenter Server 6.0 VMware Web Client Integration Plugin does not work on OS X El Capitan. The installer finishes, but silently fails due to missing libraries, libraries that probably existed in earlier OS X versions. Because the libraries don’t exist, necessary certificates don’t get generated, and even re-running the installer from the application […]

  • Get RPM install date

    Sometimes you don’t know when an RPM was installed – maybe it was updated, maybe it came with the system. In any case, it can be handy when debugging or even for auditing purposes. This gives an example of getting the install time for the “filesystem” package: somehost%  rpm -q filesystem –queryformat ‘%{name} %{installtime:date}\n’ filesystem […]

  • Windows 10 under Fusion sluggish

    If you made the mistake of upgrading your virtual copy of Windows under Mac OS X using VMware Fusion (version 8 here), you may find Windows 10 runs painfully sluggish. The answer? Disable 3D graphics acceleration. Shut down the virtual machine. Bring up the virtual machine settings (⌘E). Select “Display”: Deselect (remove the checkbox for) “Accelerate 3D Graphics”: Close […]

  • ASA Firewall Rules of Thumb

    Some important Cisco ASA firewall details I and others have learned and shared over the years: Don’t use “security-level” as your method of security. In the long term at best “security-level” will cause you to block traffic you didn’t expect, at worst, it will allow traffic you didn’t want. Why? Well… If you add an ACL […]

  • Dell Service Tag the easy way under Linux

    Sometimes you need the service tag or model off a Dell server that isn’t in your possession. You can either find some feet on the street to do it or as it turns out, with Linux, you can use “dmidecode”: [crayon-6484b3c4b2e5c957456635/] Thanks to Brandon Checketts’ website for this tidbit.

  • IC3 Alert on Microchip-Enabled (EMV) Credit Cards

    Unfortunately quite accurate and what a number of us have been saying all along: http://www.ic3.gov/media/2015/151008.aspx The gist can be found in a single paragraph: Although EMV cards will provide greater security than traditional magnetic strip cards, they are still vulnerable to fraud. EMV cards can be counterfeited using stolen card data obtained from the black market. […]

  • Swift to C++

    So having just watched a great webcast from O’Reilly on Swift (and certainly having plenty more to learn): Protocols == Pure Virtuals Generics == Templates Extensions == Class Derivation/Extension/Overloading on steroids Operator Overloading == Operator Overloading, again on steroids. Closures == well, nothing innate, but pretty much same thing as Python Closures Curiously, and I […]

  • If you needed one reason…

    To watch the “IT Crowd“, this alone would be it:

  • Get rid of annoying “People Pane” in Outlook

    I wouldn’t mind the “People Pane”, except that in our organization is shows nothing useful. Moreover for a reason I cannot fathom, it always gets opened up, taking enormous reading real estate. So from this (Outlook 2010 at least): Click the “View” tab: Select “People Pane” and set it to “Off”: Voila! UPDATE: Same two steps work […]