Why blog? Lack of ego is not a serious problem for me, but who wants to hear what I have to say? My family, friends and User Group cohorts assure me they do. Maybe that's one of the good things about the web, a small audience is still an audience.
A little research confirmed things like “rules“ and “structure“ are not paramount in the blog community. Since there’s no way I would ever do a daily post, it was nice to see that nobody cares. In fact with syndication, anyone who really wants to keep up with your musings can do so quite conveniently.
Then I found a reason. To help those who follow avoid the pain I've just gone through figuring out how to set up a Virtual Network that will let my Virtual Server Machine get out to the web. Since I suffer other pain points in my development career almost weekly, maybe sharing “is a good thing”.
Virtual Machine/Virtual Server Web Access: I was doing fine with what my son the UNIX bigot refers to as “the pointy-clicky approach to installations”, until I tried to get the VM out to the web so Win2K3 Server could activate and update. (Activations are a whole ‘nother issue!)
Two secrets, one is to get the NIC card connected to VM Network Services. The other is to let the Win2K3 wizard on the VM find the network, the web and set up an Application Server.
Right click on Network Connections and bring up properties. Right click on the Local Area Connection and bring up properties there also. Click the Install button. Select "Service" from the component list and then click the Add button. That should get you to a list where you can select and add "Virtual Machine Network Services". (Ain't these pointy-clicky installs just great when you finally figure out what to click?)
Now, create a virtual network using the device associated with the connection you just updated and link it to the desired VM. These steps are all well documented, but I had to go spelunking into the newsgroup to stumble across a vague reference to the "Virtual Machine Network Services".
Hope this saves someone the hours I burned getting here. Go forth and prosper, even if it's virtual.
Bill J
Charlotte NC