After 132 hours and 934 deaths – roughly once every 8-9 minutes, DS2 is finally finished 🙂
How to use openssl to create a certificate (CER) and PFX file to connect to Azure using the App Controller
First create the certificate for upload to the Azure account via the Azure web page:
jonas@nyx:~$ openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout privateKey.key -out certificate.cer
It will ask for country, name, etc. Just enter something.
Next, create the pfx file required for the App Controller:
jonas@nyx:~$ openssl pkcs12 -export -in certificate.cer -inkey privateKey.key -out certificate.pfx
The App controller will also ask for Subscription ID This is listed under “settings” in your Azure account (far bottom on the left hand pane)
XenDesktop 7.5 mapped drive execute permission
By default it’s not possible to run executables (install software) from a client drive which has been mapped to a XenDesktop VM. A work around is to copy the files to a network share and run the installation from there, but it takes time and can be a fair bit of extra work.
Instead, it’s possible to enable execute permissions via a quick and simple registry modification on the VDA (the XenDesktop VM). No DDC or client PC changes are required.
- Start “regedit”
- Navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Citrix\GroupPolicy\Defaults\”
- Add the key “CDMSettings”
- Add the following DWORD value: “ExecuteFromMappedDrive”
- Set “ExecuteFromMappedDrive” to “1”
A restart of the VM is required for the changes to take effect.
Tested on XenServer 6.2 with XenDesktop 7.5 on a Dell R720 with NVIDIA K2 GPU card (K240Q and K260Q vGPUs assigned to the VMs).
Disabling Windows 2012 R2 firewall with netsh
VMware default user names / logins and passwords
Consistency in user names and passwords would be nice, but unfortunately that isn’t always the case. While setting up VMware’s vCenter, vCOPS and vShield recently I came across a few default logins / passwords worth jotting down for reference:
VMware vCenter Operations Manager: UI VM console login
Admin account: admin
Password: admin
root account: root
Password: vmware
VMware vCenter Operations Manager: Web GUI login
User: admin
Password: admin
VMware vCenter appliance login (same for both local console and Web GUI):
User: root
Password: vmware
vCenter appliance URL for initial access and configuration
https://[vCenter IP]:5480
vCenter appliance URL for normal web access (the web client: alternative to using the vSphere client)
https://[vCenter IP]:9443
vShield Manager console:
User: admin
Password: default