Slashzerø
Random and Useless Thoughts on Everything
ESXi… EPIC FAIL!!!
0“This product has expired, Be sure that your host machine’s date and time are set correctly.”
Way to go, I had to set the clock back to last week on my ESXi console. There goes my VMWare consolidation proposal at work.
I wouldn’t want to be the poor developer that forgot to take out the “if date = august 12 2008 then fail” line of code.
How I was told about the 1986 World Series, a year later.
01276 days
by abx21
in I like stories
Having lived in the Greater Boston area most of my life, I’ve been a Boston Red Sox fan for as long as I can remember. I was much too young to remember the successful teams of the early 70′s, the Red Sox of my youth were a mediocre team that never made a World Series. Just the thought of the Sox winning it all was laugable.
In 1984 my family moved to Italy. There we lived in a pretty rural area, and unlike today where cell phones and the internet provide constant access to everything, things were a bit different. In our little village of about 3-4 families (depending on the season), my Aunt and Uncle were the only ones who had a phone. As you can immagine, along with many other cultural differences, no more baseball. For a few months another Aunt of ours in Boston would send me the Sunday Boston Globe, but as the weeks went by I suddenly began to think less and less about the Red Sox, Bruins, and Celtics. The Pats were a joke then so no big loss.
In the summer of 1987, American relatives from New York came to visit one of our neighbors, one was a boy about my age. Along with a chance to speak English and catch up on things in general, eventually we started talking about baseball. As clearly as I can remember what I had for breakfast 5 minutes ago, I remember asking “Hey how have the Red Sox been doing?”
He suddenly looked at me with a huge grin and a look of stupor at the same time. “How can this idiot have not yet known?” must have been his first thought. So he began to tell the story.
The Red Sox had been in the World Series! And against his favorite Mets! He tells me that the Sox are about to win Game 6, then proceeds to mime playing first base and re-enacts the famous gaffe seen and talked about by every baseball fan for probably a year until that point. I was speechless. I decided not to ask about the Bruins.
VMWare ESXi: First Thoughts
0Having just left a position working on a massive VMWare ESX rollout, I have had a lot of experience with ESX and the whole VI ecosystem. I am also acutely aware of the large amounts of money involved with VMWare. For that reason I have been a big fan of KVM and VirtualBox. But at my new job I see lots of opportunities where having a full blown VI setup would help, but am hesitant to introduce this.
Naturally when ESXi was released for free ;I decided to look into it. The installation was straight forward and withing 30 minutes I had things up and running. VMware offers a Remote CLI appliance which I quickly downloaded and installed, with thei RCLI you can do most of the basic things you could do with Virtual Center, as in cloning and svmotion, albeit obviously by using perl scripts instead of a GUI. Other than the DR and SRS features this can work as a low cost visualization platform. ESXi also has support for HBA, nfs and iScsi storage. Using the VMware converter I was able to clone my windows laptop, albeit it took a few tries. Once I was the cause of problems, here is a hint, don’t change your password on the ESX console while you are doing a P2V. I’ll update this with new experiences, but so far, yeah, its fun to be playing with VMware again.
Yet another useful Linux Command
0Ever had to run a command on 30 servers at once and are too lazy to write a for loop at the command prompt? Try Cluster SSH. What this tool does is open up an xterm to each server specified on the command line and sends what you type to all screens. It can be a lifesaver sometimes, even if it is no replacement to Cfengine or Puppet or another configuration management solution.
Linux commands I never knew existed: Pipe Viewer
14I have been using linux since about 1995, and it still surprises me how creative the people who contribute code and work on projects are. The other day I had to image a bunch of machines, they all needed to be 100% identical, so I figured I would just use “dd” and send to output over to each slave machine using netcat. For anyone who has ever done this before, it can be a bit hard to figure out how fast data is being sent over to the system being imaged. This is where Pipe Viewer came in handy. Quite simply this app reports the bitrate that the data is sent over a unix pipe. Brilliant.
It is not installed by default in debian, so the following will install the app.
user@slashzero-desktop:~$ sudo aptitude install pv
Once installed, passing the “–help” parameter will list the basic options.
user@slashzero-desktop:~$ pv --help
Usage: pv [OPTION] [FILE]...
Concatenate FILE(s), or standard input, to standard output,
with monitoring.
-p, --progress show progress bar
-t, --timer show elapsed time
-e, --eta show estimated time of arrival (completion)
-r, --rate show data transfer rate counter
-b, --bytes show number of bytes transferred
-f, --force output even if standard error is not a terminal
-n, --numeric output percentages, not visual information
-q, --quiet do not output any transfer information at all
-c, --cursor use cursor positioning escape sequences
-W, --wait display nothing until first byte transferred
-s, --size SIZE set estimated data size to SIZE bytes
-l, --line-mode count lines instead of bytes
-i, --interval SEC update every SEC seconds
-w, --width WIDTH assume terminal is WIDTH characters wide
-H, --height HEIGHT assume terminal is HEIGHT rows high
-N, --name NAME prefix visual information with NAME
-L, --rate-limit RATE limit transfer to RATE bytes per second
-B, --buffer-size BYTES use a buffer size of BYTES
-R, --remote PID update settings of process PID
-h, --help show this help and exit
-V, --version show version information and exit
Please report any bugs to Andrew Wood .
And here is a quick example, this command tar’s up a directory and send the output to gzip, showing a rate of 223MB/s:
user@slashzero-desktop:/home$ tar zcf - user | pv /bin/gzip > /tmp/backup.tar.gz
59.7kB 0:00:00 [ 223MB/s] [===========================================>] 100%
Incredibly useful stuff.
IPhone WordPress App
0This is my first entry using the new WordPress app for the iphone. It is a free app, with a pretty standard interface. In addition to creating new blog entries you can view old entries and keep local drafts on your phone. I had a minor issue at first, XML over rpc was not enabled on my wordpress install, but the app recognized this and told me how to resolve it. Now if only I were more proficient with the iPhone keyboard… Things sure have come a long way since the days we used to run phpnuke on this site.
Malden Approves Pay-as-you-throw Program for Trash
21292 days
by abx21
in I like stories
For those of you living in Malden MA., be prepared to start paying to throw out your trash. This is in addition to real estate taxes.
Wow.
Why not just raise taxes? We are now going to have to go to the store to buy special bags at $2 each. I think it will turn the already dirty city into a dumping ground. I currently have to pick up one 5 gallon trash bag full of trash people kindly throw in my front yard every week, now I will have to pay to throw away other people’s trash.
You learn something new everyday
0I recently was in a situation where I wanted to copy a file from one server to another. The problem was that these two servers could not directly connect to each other, the one server that could talk to both endpoints did not have enough diskspace, and the only port open was ssh. A collegue dropped a bit of knowledge on me. Both endpoints of an scp command can be remote. Who knew so this command from server B:
serverB:/ scp user@serverA:/file user@serverC:/file
Actually works. I love linux. It’s awesome
Contour Surface Sound Compact Car Kit Review
2My birthday was a few months ago, and my lovely wife, knowing I am a bit of an Apple fanboy, decided to get me the Apple Bluetooth Earpiece for the shiny firstgen IPhone she had gotten for me last Christmas. I was grateful, but am not a big fan of bluetooth earpieces and after reading the negative reviews decided that I would return it to the Apple Store and exchange it. Nice Husband huh.
I wasn’t quite sure what to get, so I went to the online apple store and look for things that cost about the same as the bluetooth headset, and I came accoss the Contour SSC Car Kit; and decided I would get it.
In all its glory
On paper it seemed interesting. Lets just say I was pleasantly suprised.
What this is is basically a flat panel speakerphone. It fits neatly on my visor, took 5 seconds to pair to my Iphone and just works. The sound quality is great, people sound clear and even when driving around with my window down no one has problems hearing me. I have had this thing since mid-May, and granted I don’t speak on the phone a lot (maybe a few minutes every day) I have yet to have to recharge it, I just take for granted that when I flip down the mic boom its just going to work.
Its simple to use, you flip down the mic boom and the device will connect to the paired phone. There are 2 buttons, a toggle switch for the volume and a pick-up/hang-up button. The device uses beeps and a female voice to let you know things such as “Handset Connected” and the like. In fact the device pairs so quickly I leave it in power off mode and when I get a call I turn it on and it picks up right away.
So yeah, not a real technical review, but in you were looking to spend about $100 or if your state now mandates hands-free devices for phones in vehicles this thing gets my vote.
UPDATE:
It is now November 17, and I still yet to have to charge this thing. I really must say it was a good investment!!!
