This week I built a brand new Mac for work. This meant I also needed to install VMWare Fusion and knock up a couple of virtual machines for development. Everything was working as expected until I tried using the same VMs at home, and discovered a complete lack of connectivity to—and within—the VMs, despite having active network and internet access on the host OS. After a little investigation, I discovered the issue:

When I’ve used VMWare Fusion in the past, my VMs have all been assigned IPv4 addresses in the range 172.16.0.0 through 172.31.255.255, via DHCP (the 20-bit block of RFC1918). This has always suited me fine, and has meant I’ve been able to assign host file mapping entries for those IP addresses with relative confidence since the addresses have never changed, even after reboots.

However, on the new Mac, I was surprised to find my VMWare VMs being assigned IPv4 addresses in the range 192.168.0.0 through 192.168.255.255 (the 16-bit block of RFC1918). As you can imagine, this could cause a certain degree of havoc if you’re LAN is also assigning DHCP IP addresses in that range. This is exactly what was happening in my case—and on both my work LAN and my home LAN—so VMWare was having to change the IPs each time I changed network.

To fix this issue, all I needed to do was tell VMWare to use a specific range of IP addresses when assigning DHCP. Unfortunately, VMWare doesn’t make this particularly easy (despite including a handy network configuration script). So here’s what you have to do…

Read more of “Controlling DHCP for VMWare Fusion VMs”…

In the interests of improving quality in production, of eliminating repetitive tasks, and of general development time saving, it’s often a good idea to automate some of the website build process. What do I mean by “website build process”? Put simply, the task of preparation and publication to production (your live, open-to-the-internet environment), from a development environment.

In many cases, this may only be a push from your local machine to your web server, via SCP (or worse, FTP). However, if you’re working with any level of intricacy—or if you’re working in a team environment—you will, no doubt, have experienced (amongst other things) the logistical nightmare of multiple CSS and JavaScript files: First building page specific style sheets, so you maintain a single HTTP request for each, and secondly compressing those files so that any unwanted elements are removed for production (e.g. comments, needless whitespace etc.). If you’re not sure why you’d want to do these things, I’d recommend having a look at Steve Souder’s “High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers”.

In this post, I’m going to look at how you can automate the CSS and JavaScript part of the build process using Make, a handy little program that is installed with the standard build tools on most *nix based systems.

Read more of “Website builds using Make”…

Last night I accidentally published a new post, “Website builds using Make” before it was complete. Apologies if you read it and wondered why it never reached a proper conclusion; I’m still finishing it off.

I really really need to move off of WordPress.

Needless to say, the completed version of that post should be published very soon!