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I am gearing up for a large consulting engagement, and I needed to move two virtual machines created with VMware Fusion on my MacBook Pro to VMware Server on my Lenovo Thinkpad. When I did this, and tried to start them, I crashed vmware-hostd.exe.

To fix the situation, you will need to edit the *.vmx file with a text editor and remove the following line:

serial0.fileType = “thinprint”

VMware Server does not support this feature, and crashes when you try to import the virtual machine. Before your virtual machine can be started, you will need to go into the Services and restart the VMware Host Service.

Long time between posts, and I wanted to provide some info for a common issue. Say you are an IT admin and a user calls the helpdesk, but they cannot remember their login name. You also want to see their group memberships as well in Active Directory. You can even reset that user’s password.

There are a set of tools from Microsoft called DSTOOLS that can help you with performing the following tips if you are not on a Windows Server. You can run these from Windows XP.

You could ask them to hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE and look there, but instead of having them feel stupid, you could also run the following command on your Directory Server (you can query by their last name). All of these commands are run without quotes. The quotes are there to identiy areas where YOU need to supply your own information on the command line.

DSQUERY USER -name “last_name” | DSGET USER -samid -display

If you also want to get their full name, you can run the following (once you get their login_name from above:

DSQUERY USER -samid “login_name” | DSGET USER -samid -display

Also, if you have the login_name, you can then see all of their group memberships by running:

DSQUERY USER -samid “login_name” | DSGET USER -memberof -expand

Finally, if you want to reset their password, you can even do that by running:

DSQUERY USER -samid “login_name” | DSMOD USER -pwd “type_a_new_password”