Virtually Jason

I was replacing some vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) self-signed certificates with signed certs from an Active Directory Certificate Authority and I came across a minor issue that I wanted to document here.  I was using the /usr/lib/vmware-vmca/bin/certificate-manager tool to generate the CSR, and then PSCP to download the CSR and hand it off to the security team. When I first tried to use pscp to get the file, I encountered an error that I hadn't seen before: Fatal: Received unexpected end-of-file from server Some quick googling didn't turn up any hits on this issue, but I thought of something as I was poking around.  When I connected to the VCSA via SSH, it didn't drop me to a BASH shell until I did the usual "shell.set --enabled True" "shell" operation that it prompts you with.  Since PSCP (and SCP in general) is just establishing an SSH connection to the host and then doing a copy command, I figured that my issue was probably that the default...

When working with VMware View (or any VDI solution for that matter), you’ll eventually have to deal with certificates.  Hopefully your organization has a skilled web or security team who can help you install the certificate onto the Connection Servers and Security Servers… but I find that that’s not usually the case.  Usually, someone either just downloads the certificate from GoDaddy (or whatever authority they use) or gives me the credentials so that I can download it myself. The problem is, what you download from GoDaddy isn’t going to work, at least not by itself.  There basically two parts of a certificate: the public key and the private key.  When you go to GoDaddy and launch their interface and download your certificate, you’re downloading the public key (and any intermediate certificates that are required to establish a chain of trust).  In order to install and use that certificate, you’ll need to provide the corresponding private key (which was used i...

We’re working on remote access for a View solution at one of my customers right now.  We’ve got a pair of external user Connection Brokers, each partnered with a Security Server.  We’ve also got an F5 Big-IP load balancer sitting in front of the Security Servers, giving them some protection from the big bad ‘net and, more importantly, providing load balancing services.  We found that the process was a bit more circumspect than I had expected, involving instructions from several documents, so I’m consolidating our process here.   At first, we followed the instructions from the F5 View Deployment Guide , which got us really close to what we needed.  It’s worth noting that the “External URL” and “PCoIP External URL” fields should be the public address of the F5, even though the document uses an internal address in its examples. We were able to connect to the system by our public name and it presented the list of desktops to our test account.  Howev...