The F5 BIG-IP hardware line is fairly amazing so needless to say I was really excited to find out that there was a VMware image and VirtualBox image available to trial. This allows people not only to check out the BIG-IP software, which is built on top of CentOS Linux, but also the ability to easily test configurations. Below I describe the process all the way from downloading the actual VMware image and launching the image in VMware Player to logging into the BIG-IP LTM VE instance and enabling the trial license.

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I needed to test a Exim mail server from my Windows 7 laptop a little while ago and was surprised when I typed telnet I received an error. The error indicated that the telnet client was not installed on my laptop which seemed odd since I have Windows 7 Ultimate. I assume that telnet in general is being phased out of most operating systems in general however it is a great tool for troubleshooting. After a little digging around in the Windows Programs Control Panel I was able to easily install telnet. Follow the directions below to install telnet on your Windows 7 computer.

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A client of mine purchased a new computer that had Windows 7 Home Premium on it however they needed some of the features available with Windows 7 Professional. By purchasing a Windows 7 Professional key you can upgrade Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional in a very short amount of time. At first I thought it would require the disk to upgrade however you can follow the simple instructions below to upgrade Windows 7 using Windows Anytime Upgrade.

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I have been using a Windows 7 laptop for quite awhile as my daily driver and recently wanted to install Backtrack 4 in a virtual machine so I wasn’t required to dual boot or use a different laptop for BT4. I thought about using VMware as Martin wrote an article a couple months ago about installing Backtrack in a VM on Windows 7 but a couple months ago I discovered Windows Virtual PC during a Windows XP VM install. So far I have been really happy with Windows Virtual PC and decided to try installing Backtrack 4 in a Windows Virtual PC virtual machine. Below are the details on how to setup the Windows Virtual PC virtual machine and then information on how to install Backtrack 4 in that VM.

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I had a client come in the other day and she had just purchased some big huge bloated anti virus software solution and was having trouble with Windows Defender interfering with the software. I went ahead and disabled it completely for her and thought I would make a quick post on how to do it.

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