Can you trust a man in a van with your virtual plan?

Once upon a time this was a legitimate ad. Tad from VM-limted.com. Sadly the domain has all but lapsed and finding any reference to this ad is pretty much impossible to search for. You’d think with the ‘glamp’ of vanlife and living in a van that people would love to take notes from the Microsoft VM-limited 70’s style conference van.

Nissan NV350

Instead I was getting crap like this Nissan NV350 which looks so 1960’s SciFi that it’s just unlivable and unusable. Compare that pod living thing to this incredible 1970’s themed van from VM-limited!

So comfortable!

From leather chairs, rolodexes, tube televisions to the mandatory ashtrays, wood paneling and shag carpet how could this not be a ‘work from the road’ thing today? While looking at other solutions for working on the road they seem to be so boring and unlived in that they feel about as legit as that new starwars hotel that looks like a telephone game of ‘space conflict’.

As far as I can tell it started as a print campaign in 2011 to be launched the same time as the big VMware convention (vmworld?!) back then.

2011 print ad

I do have to admire the very Atari-esque look of it. Apparently it was good enough to get some videos shot in the van:

And along with that was a TADTalk. I mirrored it on my site, and with a bit more searching I found some more and put them on archive.org.

It’s too bad the domain lapsed, and Microsoft didn’t hop onto the van-life trend with their future thinking retro 70’s conference van.

Anyways to help me google/bing it in the future Microsoft man in van selling virtualization.

Anyone else living the nomadic life? I guess with wife + kids it’s hard, but I’m sure someone is doing it.

How to fix weird mouse issues with VM’s migrated from MS Virtual PC/Virtual Server/Hyper-V

I had this issue with one VM where the mouse would either play dead, or it’d just hide in a corner.  While I did have RDP access, it was.. quite annoying.

So some googling around I found this.

1. Do it all over again, but make sure to uninstall the Virtual Machine Additions before you convert the machine.
2. Install VMWare tools without the mouse driver (choose custom installation)
3. Open regedit, and use your mad keyboarding skillz to navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96F-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
..then remove the value msvmmou and any adjacent spaces from the Regvalue UpperFilters, leaving whatever else is there, then reboot.

And it actually worked!

Security update for Virtual PC/Virtual Server

The articles from Microsoft are available here and here.  It sounds like some good fun….

FTA:

This security update resolves a privately reported vulnerability in Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could execute arbitrary code and take complete control of an affected guest operating system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.

I know I’ll be updating all my machines…!

Standalone Virtual Server annoyances

Ok, Ive been out of the country for a while… lots of fun!

At anyrate, I’ve installed Virtual Server 2005 R2SP1 on my parents computer to give it a good shake down. The good part is that it support’s DVD iso images! Woohoo!

The bad part is that for the most part you’ll get access errors when trying to use it. The only way I’ve figured out how to setup the thing, is to first configure IIS to not allow anonymous users, use the ‘built in security’. Next you’ll have to tell IE that on ‘trusted’ or ‘local’ zones you should have it pass the security automatically. That’ll get you to the configuration page. The next hurdle is that it wont let you start a remote console..

You’ll have to go into the virtual server security setup, and explicity add your user in there with full rights. The administrators group isn’t enough.

With all that out of the way you should be good to go now!