Month: May 2016

Updating the Mac Pro VM Host

Updating the Mac Pro VM Host

Since the Mac Pros in my current production environment need to last until the end of the year, I need to get them up to speed before I fall off Apple’s support train. I skipped Yosemite in production because of stories of worse stability and performance than Mavericks. Justified or not, that’s where they’ve stayed since and without issue thus far. However, since a new MacOS is going to be announced shortly, Mavericks is probably getting close to end of life. With El Capitan, Apple seems to have sorted out most of it’s issues so it’s time to get my production environment up to speed.

I have a test server at home with the same setup as production. As always, it’s prudent to test the upgrade paths for both the OS and VMware just so no nasty surprises crop up during the real thing.

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Something about VMs

Something about VMs

I recently got inspired by one of my instructors to build a better way to host my VMs. He mentioned he built an ESXi cluster using six i7 Mac Minis which sounded totally cool to me. After some initial research, the hardware bug bit me and I decided I gotta try building one.

Then I remembered my other instructor’s advice — Information Security is a small industry and members should contribute in some way to the overall body of knowledge.

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Fixing ODBC issues with Excel 2016

So appears that’s the ODBC drivers in the click-to-run Office 2016 doesn’t install properly or it’s possible it’s incorrectly setup by default. I haven’t figured that part out yet but it was causing one of my clients trouble.

They were getting the following error when refreshing the data in some of their spreadsheets after their Click-to-Run O365 installs updated to Office 2016 from Office 2013.

Error1

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