I’ve been trying to make a self-hosted cloud computing environment in my house for a long time and OnLive has given me new hope that it will some day be possible.  I’m hoping for the day when the streaming desktop quality that they use becomes available as a self-hosting service.

The goal is to connect all of my PC’s, laptops, iPads, iPhones, and any other device that my family owns so that they can share pictures, documents, music, and movies anywhere in the world with only a few clicks or taps. I don’t want any of my data to be hosted outside of my own equipment but I want it available everywhere we go.

I’ve played with Pogoplug for a self-hosted cloud storage solution for about a year with mixed success.  Their service features are almost exactly what I have always wanted in a cloud storage service if they can just make it reliable.  I purchased their $29 ”premium” feature set but for some reason it refuses to honor my product key every three months or so.  Their support is very slow to respond so it can get frustrating to say the least.

Pogoplug allows me to share folders that are stored on my home cloud server with my iPhones and iPads using an IOS app and with my desktops using a website and optional drive letter access using their client software.  I can even share them with random people and on Facebook one picture at a time using their direct link and permission structure. 

I also have a VPN solution at my network gateway that all of my devices can use to connect home securely.  The VPN service is a part of the Microsoft Forefront TMG server.  It is hosted on my home network parameter and safeguards our network from outside threats.  When my laptop connects, it authenticated with my Bostedor.me Active Directory domain controller and then has full access to every corner of my private cloud.

For remote desktop, I am using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop services for Windows 2008 R2.  The performance is sufficient for office work but video streaming is nowhere near the quality that OnLive has been able to deliver.  It doesn’t help that it’s only running as one of 8 servers on a single quad core XEON server with no GPU to speak of. 

For email and calendaring, I am using Microsoft Exchange 2010 with ActiveSync and OWA enabled.  That allows me to get my bostedor.me email, appointments, and contacts from any computer or smart device.

The entire environment is running on VMWare ESX 4.1 and is being backed up nightly using Veeam Enterprise Backup.  This means that if a server were to die, I can bring it up again very quickly from snapshot.  The big flaw in this plan right now is that I don’t have a second ESX host to migrate to should the actual hardware fail.  I suppose that I could sacrifice my office computer for that as it has more power and RAM than the server but that’s my gaming PC!  How would I survive? 

Now, if I can just get a way to glue all of these self hosted solutions neatly into one package, I would truly be living on Cloud Mine.

The VNCScan product has been doing excellent and I’m still excited after all of these years to make contact with so many customers all over the world.  It seems that everyone who uses my product has grown to rely upon it so heavily that they feel that they can’t function as an IT admin without it.  It’s extremely humbling to hear their stories and know that I’ve done something that has changed the lives of so many all over the world.

I have something in mind for the “next big thing” to come out of my Bozteck company and I’m preheating the oven as we speak.  This new product will make just as big of an impact on the consumer market as VNCScan has made over the past 10 years in the IT field.  In fact, it will be equally desirable to both industries!

I’m going to join a DotNet developer group in Ann Arbor (yes, there are still user groups in existence) so that I can network with other software developers.  I wrote VNCScan entirely by myself but this time, I’d like to find a programming and business partner because when it’s done, it’s going to be bigger than something that I can handle on my own.

So, I say all of this to say … I will still be in the background and not very web visible for a while besides this blog.  I need to commit to this new venture so that I can be first to market.

I have a pretty powerful server in my basement.  It is powered by a quad core XEON with 16GB of RAM.  I decided to install Windows 2008 r2 Datacenter on it so that I can play with Hyper-V.  At work, we use almost exclusively VMWare ESX servers.  Due to their greedy tampering with their already overly taxing pricing structure, I am seriously considering switching to Microsoft’s Hyper-V solution.

My first Virtual Machine on the server was a Windows 2008 R2 domain controller.  I also added the roles of DHCP and DNS for reasons obvious to anyone who has read this far and is still with me. 

I’ve added every computer and laptop to the new BOSTEDOR.NET domain but I left them logging in as local user accounts until I either have time to migrate their settings manually to a domain user profile or find a good tool that will do it for me.

My next bit of bringing the Enterprise into the home is to play with various Internet security gateway products to see which one delivers the speed, accuracy, and security that works best for home users at an affordable cost.

From: http://www.msi.com/product/mb/890FXA-GD65.html

I started out broadcasting on the classic airwaves with a former employer and long time friend, Tom Diroff.  After doing a couple of shows in “old media”, I decided to focus on the new podcasting world instead.

There is so much more creative freedom with your own podcast … you are free to make the mistakes required in order to get it right.  While doing The App Show and in the early days of The iPad Show, I’ve made (and learned from) plenty of those mistakes.  I’m sure that I’ll make more as time goes on and I hope that each of them lead to new insight that makes the IT Unwrapped show the best show ever.

Dean is a super bright guy (I’m not just saying that because we’re cousins) – he truly does have the brain for this industry and the ability to grasp new technologies extremely fast.  We do a lot of work together, share similar humor styles, and differ on opinion in just the right way to make a show like IT Unwrapped something that will really fun to do – and we hope that you have fun with it, too.

VNCScan is a powerful tool that can you can use to administer most aspects of computer management.  The vast majority of our feedback says that we’ve done a great job so far of making the tool as intuitive and easy to use as possible for a program with this large of a feature set.  We’ve looked at how competing products have bloated their options to almost usability and have been trying hard not to let that happen to VNCScan. 

With that being said, there are some common pitfalls that you can run into with any application that needs to access remote computers in an administrative role and this article series is here to help you though some of the most common of them.

If you have a suggestion for this series on VNCScan Network Troubleshooting, please leave a comment.  I read them every day.

Access Denied

This is probably one of the most common support requests that we see here.  There are a lot of causes for getting an “Access Denied” error when deploying VNCScan, running scripts, or performing the many other remote Windows management tasks.  Some of these may seem like a no-brainer to you while others may be unexpected.

Set your Administrative account in VNCScan.

Let’s start by making sure that you have supplied Administrative credentials to VNCScan for it to use when connecting to remote computers.  Even if you are currently logged into your computer as a Domain Admin, it’s still a good idea to tell VNCScan what username and password to use when running scripts because it needs to pass those credentials to commands that don’t necessarily run under the context of the currently logged in user.

If you would like to use your domain admin username/password, the best place to put this into VNCScan would be the main program preferences. 

You can fine tune this by overriding this username and password in the group properties as well as the individual computer properties.

Multiple Connections Error 1219

This problem may be affecting your ability to log in even if you don’t see the actual error message.  You may simply get something that says “Access Denied” when in reality, it’s happening because you’ve already logged into the remote workstation with an account that doesn’t have administrative access. 

Here’s how to test that:

• Open a Command Prompt window on your computer
• Type:
      NET USE \\ComputerName\c$ /user:administrativeaccount password
      Replace ComputerName with the name of the remote computer
      Replace administrativeaccount with your administrator username
      Replace password with your actual password
• Hit Enter and make note of the result

If you get an Access Denied, then the username that you are using is not administrative on the remote system.   You’ll need to stop there and resolve that problem before moving forward.

Other tricks around this include assigning multiple DNS names to a computer on your DNS Server or simply using the /DELETE switch for NET USE to delete the preexisting connection.  NET USE /? will give full details on how to use this command.

Conclusion

Well, that’s it for this article.  In the next article, we will discuss firewall ports and other network related connectivity issues that may come into play.

I look forward to reading all of your comments and suggestions for this topic.

More information about this can be found at the Bozteck VNCScan Blog

While they are working feverishly to fix the bug, we’ve decided to release an update to VNCScan to deploys and uses the previous stable release of UltraVNC. 

If you have already deployed the UltraVNC 1.0.9 and are experiencing problems, you can fix them by installing this 2011.3.15 update of VNCScan Console, then re-deploy UltraVNC to those desktops.

Download: VNCScan 2011.3.15.exe