How To: Add Certificate To Windows 7 RDP

This was more something that was bothering me than anything absolutely necessary, but I wanted to get a properly signed certificate installed on my remote Windows 7 machine that’s hosted in a datacenter as a VM. Every time I connected to it, the RDP client would display an error that the RDP server wasn’t providing a proper security certificate:

More annoying than anything, really. However, since I do have several certificates that are signed this was a problem I could remedy.

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Linux Network Interface Channel Bonding and DHCP

While configuring a few servers I noticed some strange behavior with mode 4 channel bonding (LACP / 802.3ad) and DHCP. You might get the following error message, no matter what you do:

Determining IP information for bond0… failed; no link present. Check cable?

The problem appears to exist in how the interface responds to link status on LACP / 802.3ad ports. The computer is trying to send DHCP packets when the interface itself isn’t ready, causing Linux to think the interface isn’t configured or has no network cable plugged in. This appears to only happen when you use mode 4 channel bonding. Mode 6 works fine. The (band-aid) solution appears to be to trick the system into thinking the interface is already configured. This enables Linux to continue sending DHCP packets until the interface is configured and negotiated successfully with 802.3ad, at which point everything works as planned. Simply insert this at the end of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0 – I should note this particular example is for CentOS and RHEL so I haven’t confirmed if this workaround works for Debian based distributions.

check_link_down () { return 1; }

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Feeding the sharks

In hopes that a spam spider will grab these websites and spam them up (for a little interwebnets experiment), i’m going to post these links here. Pay no attention to them if you’re human. 

http://forums.code86.com

http://www.uberboxen.com

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My love\hate relationship with coffee mugs

Coffee mugs. Really, why is it so hard to make a decent coffee mug? All I want is a clean looking simple design that has a handle firmly attached, and a nice quality thermal construction. Well, I’m an engineer, an unemployed one at that so I’ve come up with an idea to get my ideal “dream mug”, if you will.

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Working with old servers

So I thought the simple installation of HandBrake would go smoothly on a Linux server I was working on. All I needed to do was download the pre-compiled binary and it would work since it was compiled for Intel and the server was a quad core Intel right? Not so, since the server was running an old version of Red Hate Enterprise Server, version 4 to be exact, there were library issues all over the place. Simply put, there was no way to get HandBrake on there unless I was compiling it from source.

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