Last week, I had a user come by the tech office who needed to open and print a document created with OpenOffice.org. While we’re a pretty open environment at Payton, we are somewhat Microsoft, and oddly enough we didn’t have OpenOffice installed anywhere, since the only machines that run Linux are servers and we have Microsoft Office on all the workstations. I downloaded and installed it to my personal machine and converted his documents and he was on his way. However, this got me thinking. There had to be way to open OpenDocument files in Microsoft Office. This is what I came up with: The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office (http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/). It’s free and it works, so it fits the bill for me. My only real complaint is that you need a Sun account to download the plugin (although you probably already have one).
Conveniently ESXi includes a way to increase the size of a virtual hard disk. However, like everything else in ESXi it is neither easy to find nor easy to make work. To save you the effort, here’s how to do it. First, you need to delete any and all snapshots. It won’t work if you have any snapshots. (Don’t worry, deleting them just merges them into the flat disk and deletes the deltas. You won’t lose any information.)
If you have snapshots on the virtual drive you can tell ESXi to make the change. ESXi tells you it resized the disk but it never actually does it. (It doesn’t give an error message, it just doesn’t work). I’d recommend shutting down your VM just in case, though you’re supposed to be able to do it to a live VM the thought is a bit scary for me.
Go to your VM’s Getting Started page in Infrastructure Client and click on “Edit virtual machine settings”. On the left side, there’s an option that says “Hard Disk” and a number. Click that. That brings up this menu:
VMWare ESXi Properties Menu. VHD Settings
On the right, you’ll notice that you can adjust the disk capacity. You can make the drive larger (or smaller) as needed by adjusting the New Size tab. It’s not recommended that you mess with any of the other settings as changing them can confuse your operating system and prevent it from booting. That’s it. You’re done, now you just need to resize the partition so that your OS can make use of the new space.
(While it may seem like I’ve been bashing ESXi, it really is a great product. Once you get it running and figure out its quirks it’s one of the best virtualization solutions around. And it’s free. For what more can you ask?)
So, in the middle of December, I wrote a posting praising Microsoft for the way TS 2008 turned out. This was based on my theoretical knowledge of the software. However, I’ve actually gotten around to setting it up. My opinion of the service has really been confirmed. It’s great stuff once you manage to get it setup. That’s where there’s a bit of a problem. Getting it setup isn’t hard, it’s just not easy. The main point, on which I was stuck for a while, is that you absolutely must have an SSL Certificate signed by a Microsoft Approved CA (or jump through some hoops, more on that later). It’s not like a regular website where you can just ignore an invalid certificate. RDC requires that the certificate come from a trusted CA. There are hundreds of these; more get added every month or so through Windows Update. You can, however, trust yourself as a CA. Then you can get around having an SSL Certificate, however, that’s cumbersome for IT people and borderline impossible for normal people. (Note: This is a way to check to see if the setup is working before you buy that certificate. Plug to GoDaddy for the $29.99/yr certificate that is MS trusted.)
I’m going to document a complete setup in the coming days.