Kieran Reid

This is a "oh, how did you do that" question that pops up occasionally, so thought I may as well share it.
I use vmware regularly to speed up the building, testing and re-testing of support issues. Looking back now,
I don't know how I managed as long as I did without it.

I sometimes want to give access to other people to use my servers but without giving up the host machine
to them entirely. Most of the time, it's to let them hit an LDAP server for a quick test or to access my Sametime
or Connections builds.

Using vmware workstation 5 or 6, but not sure if it will apply to other vmware types, this is how I open and
forward ports from the outside world into my vmware servers. For example, to open my Connections server
for access by browsers on workstations other than the host machine I need to let ports 80 and 443 in.

EDIT -- Virtual Network settings -- NAT tab -- Edit -- Port Forwarding -- Click 'Add' in the TCP section.
In the next dialog enter the IP address of your virtual machine (not the host) and the port number you are mapping.
Do this for both ports. Once you have done this, restart the NAT service and you should now see that the
vmnat.exe service on your host machine is listening on these ports.

On the external workstation which you plan on using to access the virtual machine, create a hosts file entry
for the hostname of the virtual machine and the IP address of the host machine and your done.

Now when you point the browser to http://vm.test.com/profiles you will access the virtual machine via the host
and be able to work as normal. Hope that helps someone.

I recently had to set up an environment to use the Notes 8.0.2 Client and embedded Sametime with the
Lotus Connections 2.0 plugin available here from the Connections catalog site. I wanted to pull the business
cards from the profiles feature into Sametime.

The problem? After installing it, no business card at all and just an error dialog telling me that the bizcard.html
file could not be found, even though I could browse to find the exact file in the path shown.



The telling error in the Notes trace log was this one "HTMLBusinessCard invoking external browser with :"
Without an internal browser to show the card, we're stuck.

The solution? I took the XULRunner browser from the Sametime Advanced plugins package and installed it first on the Notes 8 client. Once this was in
place, I had a lovely new business card direct from Profiles.

My turn to join the community! I'm a blogging virgin so be gentle 

For those of you who may not have worked with me before, my name is Kieran Reid and I've been working in the EMEA level 2 Lotus customer support center now for over 4 years. I currently cover Lotus Connections and Sametime but have also previously worked on Domino messaging and directories for almost 3 years.

I'll try keep this updated with useful bits and pieces.