Author: Anton Khitrenovich

How to Download Eclipse Update Site for Offline Use

~ Anton Khitrenovich ~ Leave a comment

Unlike the early Eclipse days, now most of Eclipse plugins are distributed via Update Manager. Installation of new software is only a few clicks away – unless your development environment is not connected to the internet! Some vendors publish update site archives for offline use, but most of them are not. Eclipse tries to provide a solution for that with site mirroring, but is not as easy as it could be and forces you to install full-fledged Eclipse on a machine connected to the internet. So, what can you do about it?

Let’s take run-jetty-run – excellent plugin that allows you to run Jetty in Eclipse with a single click, including source attachment for debugging, – and prepare an offline update site for it. Continue reading “How to Download Eclipse Update Site for Offline Use” →

Acrobat Reader: How to disable “Adobe ID” prompt

~ Anton Khitrenovich ~ 17 Comments

Adobe ID Sign In PromptFor many years I’m using Adobe Acrobat Reader to read PDF documents. Recently I started getting an annoying popup prompt for my Adobe ID while opening PDFs. I don’t have one and don’t plan to get one – it is just useless to me at this point.

[ Disclaimer: This worked for me with Adobe Acrobat Reader 11. Now I’m using Reader DC, but I’ve never got Adobe ID login prompt here and I don’t know why. ]

Here is the way to get rid of this prompt:

  1. Open Registry Editor (and be extra careful there!)
  2. Go to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\11.0\Workflows” (if you don’t have “Workflows” key, just create one)
  3. Create new “DWORD (32-bit)” Value with name “bEnableAcrobatHS” and value “0”

That’s all – short and simple!

Continue reading “Acrobat Reader: How to disable “Adobe ID” prompt” →

How to Install PFX Certificate on NetScaler

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OpenSSL From time to time I have to create a new virtual server on my NetScaler box, along with a new SSL certificate. Recent NetScaler versions provide you an easy option to create a test certificate with one click, but at some point you will need a real certificate there. In may cases the certificate you have is in FPX (aka PKCS#12) format, while NetScaler requires certificate and key pair in PEM or DES format. Solving this puzzle may not be so easy.

Fortunately, NetScaler itself comes with embedded OpenSSL support, and the following steps will help you handle certificate installation task even without deep OpenSSL knowledge. 

root@ns1#
root@ns1# pwd
/nsconfig/ssl
root@ns1# ls my-test*
my-test.pfx
root@ns1# openssl pkcs12 -nokeys -in my-test.pfx -out my-test.cert
Enter Import Password:
MAC verified OK
root@ns1# openssl pkcs12 -nocerts -nodes -in my-test.pfx -out my-test.key
Enter Import Password:
MAC verified OK
root@ns1# ls my-test*
my-test.cert    my-test.key     my-test.pfx
root@ns1#
root@ns1#

Pay attention to the highlighted lines above – those are the commands that create certificate and keys files respectively. Continue reading “How to Install PFX Certificate on NetScaler” →

Static Internal IP Address for Windows Azure VMs

~ Anton Khitrenovich ~ 1 Comment

WinAzureOn the same day I published my Azure Newbie Notes post, which mentioned, among other things, the inability to set static IP address for VMs, things changed a bit. Then-new v0.7.3 of Windows Azure PowerShell added several cmdlets that allow handling of static internal IP addresses. This came without any official announcements, but was covered in several blog posts on TechNet. No doubt this is a must-have feature – many services just won’t operate correctly without constant IP address, with DNS server is probably the most notable among them. Unfortunately, configuring static IP address via web-based Azure Management Console is not available yet.

[ Here you can find brief explanation on how to install and configure Azure PowerShell, along with the some related links. ]

Several posts and articles with useful samples related to static IP addresses:

Here and in the samples below “MyVM” is the name of the virtual machine we want to update and “MyCloudService” is the name of the cloud service this VM belongs to.

Probably the most useful sample nowadays is one that shows how to take existing VM and set it to have a static IP address. Although most of the articles say you have to use an available (that is, free) IP address, you can use the same IP address that is already assigned to the specific VM. Also, pay attention that Update-AzureVM cmdlet reboots the VM. Note that in the sample run below I’m configuring MyVM to the same IP address it already has. Of course, it makes sense to run the first part of the command alone first to make sure you are going to update the right VM.

Get-AzureVM -ServiceName MyCloudService -Name MyVM | Set-AzureStaticVNetIP -IPAddress 10.0.0.100 | Update-AzureVM

Another useful command is to check whether a VM already has a static IP address configured or not. For VMs with static IP address configured, this IP will be displayed, otherwise only the diagnostic output of the first part will be shown.

Get-AzureVM -ServiceName MyCloudService -Name MyVM | Get-AzureStaticVNetIP

Continue reading “Static Internal IP Address for Windows Azure VMs” →

Windows Azure PowerShell

~ Anton Khitrenovich ~ 1 Comment

Windows Azure PowerShellWindows Azure PowerShell is a module that provides cmdlets to manage Azure through Windows PowerShell.

Here you can find an official documentation on how to install and configure Azure PowerShell. But in a nutshell, there are two simple steps.

Step 1:
Download and run Microsoft Web Platform installer, which will guide you through the Windows Azure PowerShell installation. The process is a bit lengthy and includes some heavy Microsoft components, such as IIS Express and SQL Server Express. Note that a system restart may (will?) be required during the installation, so prepare accordingly.

Step 2:
Open Azure PowerShell and configure it to use your Azure account, as explained in the documentation.
Two methods are available – via your Azure credentials (with session available for the next 12 hours) and certificate-based. The former did not work in my case, resulting in some strange error, so I had no choice but to go with certificates option. Surprisingly, the setup went extremely easy. First, download your settings file with Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile cmdlet. Second, import the resulting file with Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile cmdlet and delete the file from the local system.

The sources for Microsoft Azure PowerShell cmdlets are available on GitHub, as well as the changelog.