I have a number of virtual machines running on a very stable Hyper-V 2008 R2 machine. Yesterday’s reboot of my instances to accomodate Windows Update left only my 64-bit Windows 7 instance without a network connection. No amount of fiddling within the instance could restore it. After much frustration I finally removed the Network Adapter from the shut down instance in the Hyper-V Manager and added a new network interface. Upon booting the instance, it installed new drivers and successfully connected to the network.

Although not an avid Angry Birds player, my 3yo son is and has told me that the red bird does indeed do something when the screen is tapped. In fact, when he told me what happens, I had a difficult time believing it, even when trying it multiple times myself. But now, it is crystal clear to me.

Turns out my son has found something about Angry Birds that I have not seen anyone else find. Most (if not all) people think when you tap the screen while the red bird is airborne, nothing will happen. That is not entirely correct. The red bird makes a sound similar to “peee-kaaaaa!”

The moral is the obvious one – don’t dismiss an idea because of the messenger or because you think you may know better.

After struggling for quite some time to discover why the once-working OpenVPN setup on my DD-WRT router suddenly stopped working, I finally realized the configuration was corrupted. I had been issuing a number of iptables commands (inserts and deletes) at the command prompt via ssh prior to the failure, although I do not know if the two are connected.

After disabling the OpenVPN client and rebooting the router, I noticed the Public Client Cert was partially truncated. I pasted the certificates back in, applied changes and rebooted the router and it works again once more.

As a long time friend of linux’s itables command, I mistakenly assumed that trying to port forward on Windows Server 2008 R2 would be just as easy. After quite a long while of searching I was able to determine the correct command; through use of netsh on the command line, it is easy to map incoming TCP traffic from one port to another port.

In my scenario, I needed to have an SSL connection initiated on a port other than 443 on the same machine, but handled by a service listening on port 443. To do this, the following command is entered on the command line; in this example, port 12345 is used as the initiating port.

C:\Users\Administrator> netsh interface portproxy add v4tov4 listenport=12345 listenaddress=192.168.1.1 connectport=443 connectaddress=192.168.1.1

Port 12345 is mapped to port 443 on the same machine. To have the traffic transferred to another machine, change the ip address for the connect address to the desired ip address.

UPDATE: It appears Parallels changes the group to accessibility and this procedure does NOT work.

Parallels 6 had been running great for quite a while but at some point, restarting Parallels would prompt me to re-enter the activation key; the key in the dialog was from the previous version. For whatever reason, it would not stick.

I realized today that the group permissions on the preferences files for Parallels was different than the others; the files had a group of “accessibility.” To fix it, I changed the group back to what was on most of the other files; your group name most likely will be different.

$ cd /Users/rick/Library/Preferences
$ ls -l com.parallels.*
-rw-------  1 rick  accessibility  21059 Dec 26 19:59 com.parallels.Parallels Desktop Statistics.plist
-rw-------  1 rick  accessibility  23972 Dec 26 19:59 com.parallels.Parallels Desktop.plist
-rw-------  1 rick  accessibility   5430 Dec 26 19:59 com.parallels.Parallels.plist
-rw-------  1 rick  accessibility   1642 Dec  7 16:36 com.parallels.desktop.console.plist
-rw-------  1 rick  rick             905 Feb 11  2009 com.parallels.desktop.plist
-rw-------  1 rick  rick             505 Feb 11  2009 com.parallels.imagetool.plist
$ chgrp rick com.parallels.*