Default Host Application error

Last week I was called up by one of our Windows Admins. He had some issues with a VM running Windows and IIS. As we were talking he also casually mentioned another error he was seeing that was “caused by VMware”. I was a bit sceptic as you might imagine 🙂

He was seeing this error when he attempted to browse the IIS web page by clicking the link available in the IIS Manager:

Default Host Application ErrorNotice the VMware icon in the bottom. This is an error from VMware tools! What? As any sane person would do I consulted Google. And got a hit here – https://communities.vmware.com/message/2349884

The third reply post gave me the answer. Seems that when installing VMware Tools it might associate itself with HTTP and HTTPS links. This would then cause a click on the link in IIS Manager to call VMware Tools which is unable to service the request. The fix is pretty straight forward.

Go to Control Panel, then Default Programs and Set Associations. Scroll down to the Protocols section and locate HTTP and HTTPS. Make sure these are set to your browser of choice – in the image below I set them back to Internet Explorer (he was a Windows Sysadm after all 🙂 ). If the association is wrong it would be set to Default Host Application as shown for TELNET.

Fix

Working with Tags

The last couple of days I have been working with PowerCLI and vCenter Tags to see if I could automate my way out of some things regarding tracking which sys admins are responsible for a given VM.

Tagging and creating tags manually is not really my cup of tea (we have 1000+ vms and 40+ sys admins and even more people beyond that who could be tagged. So some automation would be required.

Next pre-creating all tags was not something I would enjoy either as maintaining the list would suck in my opinion. Also all tags are vCenter local so if you like us have more than 1 vCenter then propagating Tags to other vCenters is also something to keep in mind.

I added a bunch of small functions to my script collection to fix somethings. The first thing I ran into was “How to find which vCenter a given VM object came from?”. Luckily the “-Server” option on most commands accepts the vCenter server name as a string and not just the connection object so the following will get the vCenter of a given object by splitting the Uid attribute:

$object.Uid.Split("@")[1].Split(":")[0]

Splitting at “@” and taking the second part will remove the initial part of the string so it now starts with the FQDN followed by more information. Then splitting at the “:” just before port number and taking the first part will result in the FQDN of the vCenter. This may not work in all cases but it works for our purpose.

Now I needed this in my script because I was running into the problem of finding the correct Tag object to use with a given VM object in the “New-TagAssignment” Cmdlet. However it dawned on me that if I just make sure that the tag is present on all vCenter servers when I call “New-TagAssignment” I don’t need the Tag object just the name and PowerCLI/vCenter will do it’s magic. Thus the following works perfectly:

$VM | New-TagAssignment "<TAGNAME>"

But in any case I now have a way of finding the vCenter name of a given vSphere object in PowerCLI 🙂

 

ffmpeg oneliner(s)

Hello there. I expect this to be one of the first posts that I will continue to update. Mostly for my one reference. I have been in the process of converting some old video files for better support for Chromecast/DLNA and generally for my own streaming purposes.

Some of the first problems I found were combining old files without re-encoding them. So I looked at the old trusty ffmpeg to do the job. Below I will over time add lists of ffmpeg one-liners:

Combine two .avi files and copy codecs:

ffmpeg -i "concat:part1.avi|part2.avi" -c copy complete.avi