Monthly Archives: February 2012

VMware, vSphere 5

Unable to connect to the MKS: The remote host certificate has these problems

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I ran into this error when upgrading our hosts to ESXi 5.0 from 4.1u1. I used the option to format and re-install ESXi. Once the upgrade was complete, the host re-connected to vCenter successfully and all VM operations acted normal except for being able to launch the console of a VM.

MKS Error

Unable to connect to the MKS: The remote host certificate has these problems: *unable to get local issuer certificate * Host name does not match the DNS name in certificate.

The problem was the certificate chain and DNS name stored in the vCenter database was referencing the old ESXi installation rather than the new one. To solve the problem, I removed the hosts from the vCenter inventory and rejoined them to vCenter.

Microsoft, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2

Autologon Domain-Joined Windows 2008 R2 Server

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When a workstation/server is joined to a domain, it hides the checkbox for “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer” from the userpasswords2 control panel.

To get autologon working, you need to restore this functionality by running the following from a command prompt to add a registry key:

reg add “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon” /v AutoAdminLogon /t REG_SZ /d “1” /f

Once that is done, it is recommended to run the following from a command prompt to add a registry key to specify the default logon domain:

reg add “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon” /v DefaultDomainName /t REG_SZ /d “domain” /f

After both registry keys have been added, launch the userpasswords2 (Start->Run->control userpasswords2) and click “OK.” to set the username/password you want to autologon with.

Please note: This tip also works for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008.