Sc@-tt3r-ed Thoughts

The question of calendar syncing has been quite a big one on the forums on the net. I was also one that has a problem figuring out how to sync all my calendars, and I kept doing more research and experimentation until I finally found perfect solution that seems to work across the board. That is what you’re here for right?

Alright, in this blog entry, I’m going to try to give as much detail as I can based on the scenario that I have in my calendars, as I think my situation covers in part or in all, most other people’s situations. From these different steps, you can take any part you want, and apply it to your particular setup to get what you need.

So let’s get started. I’m going to describe everything based on the setup that I currently have running. This involves: iCal, gCAL, Outlook, and 3rd party calendars, including shared Google calendars, and Tungle meeting organizer.  Now before we continue, let me put in a warning before starting:

The process you’re about to see requires performing major surgery on your calendars. There is no scripting, or crazy techy stuff involved, but you have to be methodical to make this whole thing work.

..Continue reading..

I’m in the process of trying to get rid of any thick clients that I currently work on to convert solely to Virtual Machines, and clear out my desk space.
Well, I thought the best way to do this was to move my Precision 690 to the lab, install ESXi on it, and have a my VM on there.

As I tried to add the VM that resides on this ESXi server (which is not part of vCenter), I could not add it as an individual desktop.  I then remembered that I needed to have the View agent installed for this to work. After installing the View Agent, I was hopeful, but alas, the VM still didn’t show up. On Step 3 of adding the machine, it would supposedly give a list of available VMs to add and a find option, but nothing could be found. ..Continue reading..

So, here I am sitting at my office trying to get VMWare View to work on an HP T5540 thin client. Had no idea where to get the client for. the 11Mb file that you get from VMWare is entirely too big to be intalled on that client. This is a Win CE operating system, which is so horrible to deal with anyway.

Google searches failed me left and right, everywhere I looked. People said that the T5540 can only be used in a remote desktop environment, which, of course, will lose out on the capability of VDI, dynamic provisioning, multiple desktop availability, Multimedia, and USB. Essentially, all the advantages of VDI would’ve gone down the drain. so that was not an option for me.

Some mentioned JRE version for Win CE, on which the VDI client will run. I had 2 problems with this one:

1. I couldn’t easily find a free JRE client for WinCE
2. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to get VDI Manager to use JRE.

So, I went ahead with my research, until I stumbled upon something called the VDI Broker Add-On for Microsoft Windows CE.  That can be found here: http://bit.ly/16M38p

If you look closely at the description of this download, however, you will find that it says this:

"This is an Altiris package that contains the VDM Broker Agent for the supported thin client models running a supported operating system.”

Hmm.. I thought I’d try it anyway. Downloading the file wasn’t a problem. Running the file, however, was. It just plain wouldn’t run from the T5540.

So poking around some more, I finally got the solution. Unzip the EXE that is supposedly designed for Altiris, and you will find a little file (145Kb)  called VDMClient.cab, which will do the trick. Now, copy this to your T5540, and run it, and you shall have your VDI client available.

This took me about an hour of research to figure out, since there is absolutely no documentation I could find about it anywhere!. 

Hopefully this will help someone that may be having the same problem.