Recently I was creating a c# windows service which interacted with VMware machines.

When trying to start up a VM by calling VMrun.exe  i got the message

"Unable to connect to host"

I found this by piping the response to a text file.

To get around this I changed the command i was using to no t use the GUI (nogui) option.

The only thing you need to consider is that running VMs will not be controllable by your manual login/UI as they are running as a different process.

Full command line details are available here:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vix162_vmrun_command.pdf

Primary purpose of robots.txt file on your website is to tell search engines and crawlers what NOT to index.

One common mistake is to not fill it in correctly, this for one can cause google to think the file is invalid.

This usually happens if you think 'i dont want to block this site' so i wont put anything in it.

My advice when creating a robots file is to create a rule to block an imaginary folder or file.

eg:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /mynonexistantdirectory/
Disallow: /myloginpage.ashx
Sitemap: http://mywebsiteURL/sitemap.xml

(replacing mywebsiteURL with whatever your site is)

If you have things you actually need to block , then use them instead, just dont leave it blank.

Ever had a virtual machine revert to an earlier snapshop by it's self or for no apparent reason?

It happened to us today, and it was partly due to a poorly designed popup message.

In VMware there is an option to tell workstation what to do when you shut down a virtual machine.

The options are:

• Just power off
• Revert to snapshot
• Take a new snapshot
• Ask me

(see attached image)

If you have this on 'ask me' then you will get a popup message when you shut down the virtual machine.

The problem is , that the options on this pop-up have a very wide area that's sensitive to mouse clicks. The clickable area extends right over to the OK button, which if you're not careful, means that if you miss the Okay button, you select the 'revert to snapshot' option.

To prevent this from happening (and it will, usually when things are slow and not working well) set the 'Just power off' option in the settigns for each VM.

Hope that helps!

Today there was a problem,

The site stopped working, no one could log into the interface, remote desktop onto the server failed / didnt work.....

The problem was someone doing a backup of the database server. They had  remote desktopped into the system and started a backup, half way through an error message popped up and the system halted while SQL server waited for the response.

Every now and then something you do on MS SQL server throws up an erorr message. I'd advise to always act on it in a timely manner, as sometimes it keeps tables in the database locked whilst waiting fro a reply.

Keep focussed and dont do backups during critical times of the day

If anyone knows why this happens, i'd love to know so do leave a comment.

Cheers!

A few weeks ago , i came across a glitch which may catch out you developers who use Firefox a lot for testing your code.

I recently added a ASp.net control to display youtube videos. The links came from a database and the customer hadn't got much content. As a result there were several entries that didnt have links. This worked fine in firefox, but Internet explorer hung whilst trying to download the non-existant video file. 

Remember , always test things in both browsers and use default URLS when linking to video or just display something else like a comming soon message.

I came across an annoying glitch in an instance SQL Management studio express today.

The install was with SQL2005 Express, and windows 2003 server. 

When i expand some child nodes eg: list of databases, i got a persistent error that would require a second retry to expand the nodes.

 The error was :

TITLE: Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio
------------------------------
Unable to cast COM object of type 'System.__ComObject'
to interface type
'Microsoft.VisualStudio.OLE.Interop.IServiceProvider'.
This operation failed because the QueryInterface call
on the COM component for the interface with IID
'{6D5140C1-7436-11CE-8034-00AA006009FA}'
failed due to the following error: No such interface
supported (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004002
(E_NOINTERFACE)). (Microsoft.VisualStudio.OLE.Interop)

To solve this  i found registering a dll worked for me...

try entering this at a command prompt

----------------------------

regsvr32 actxprxy.dll

----------------------------

...wish i tried this days ago now it cut my click count in half :)