Michael Ellerbeck

So I always find ways to make the ESX servers angry. They are always stupid in hindsight. So the first easy way is to attempt to snapshot a VM that has very little space. It will start the snapshot and then run out of space, pausing your VM. And then joy, your vm is not working anymore. It tends to stall out the virtual center and won’t let you shut down the VM either. If you are patient, you can restart the virtual center. Then eventually get the VM shutdown, and then you can remove the snapshot. If you are lucky it will let you start it up again.

Another really fun way to make ESX angry is to delete an iscsi volume that it is actively using (deleting it on the SAN side) if you are stupid enough to do this (like me) you will see BAD THINGS like this http://communities.vmware.com/thread/228586

Gah, what a week so far….

For what ever reason if I plug in the adapter into slot 6 or 7 (the hot swap ports) they never are detected. So instead I moved one of our Qlogic HBA’s to the hot swap port, and then put the NIC in the regular port and it works just fine. Go figure.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/10/when-will-the-world-make-fun-of-you.html

I have recently stumbled onto Seth Godins Blog here http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/ so far I have been delighted to read his little daily snippets and insights into marketing and general life philosophy. He sounds like he would be a really interesting person to talk to.

His post of today is on asking what do you need me to do

For an entrepreneur\consultant\freelancer etc… he states that this is a dangerous question. So he recommends the proactive approach of letting your clients know what you can do for them. I do think that there is a fine balance between finding out what they think they need (and helping them decide if they really need it, that’s tricky!) and offering solutions that you think they might be interested in.

And interesting side note is that most of the time you can find a consultant who will implement anything you want, I think a really good consultant will question whether you really need what you think you want. (I read somewhere that you can find a consultant to implement a peanut butter and jelly sandwhich if that’s what you want, but I can’t find that quote again… it really cracked me up!)

For example we had a real honest tree removal guy come out and tell us that our tree was just fine (just sun scorched) and didn’t think we needed to remove it. The previous guy had left his car running and given us a removal quote in about five minutes.

Another example could be the case of whether you really need a 100K website if you get maybe a couple of hundred hits on your website and don’t really sell to consumers. It would be insane for the web company to leave that money on the table, but in all honesty shouldn’t they at least mention that the ROI might not warrant the expense?

http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b31569e20120a5aa72b7970c

This is a methodology that I try to incorporate into my daily life. It’s just a small sliver of the Toyota Production System

But basically any time that I can I like to try to fix the root of the problem instead of the problem (symptom) itself. Chances are getting to the root will take more time upfront, but later down the road it will pay off.

My recent example was some conversion of XML to X12 code using Altova Mapforce. It sent out some code that was missing data since the item wasn’t in the DB yet. Of course the quick fix is to get the item into the DB. The more permanent fix was to get altova to throw an exception when the count of the incoming items didn’t match the outgoing count. Now I can take this logic and apply it elsewhere.

I wanted to download a virtual Appliance of racktables but couldn’t find one so this is how I quickly made one.

I downloaded this virtual appliance

http://virtualappliances.net/products/lamp.php

Then I imported it into our ESX environment.

Then I started making a few changes.
First installed wget using

ap-get install wget

then

apt-get update

then

apt-get install php5-gd

# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

To restart apache after the updates.
then to get the most current version

wget http://racktables.org/files/RackTables-0.17.4.tar.gz

after uncompressing it like in these instructions.

http://racktables.org/trac/wiki/RackTablesInstallHowto

mv RackTables-0.17.4 /var/www/html/racktables

Then install like documented above.

http://www.iphone-ipod.org/parasync-20-unit-dock-for-ipod-iphone/

My friend Mr.JMB put together this really neat camera system for monitoring remote work sites!

Here be the magic! http://jmbs.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/hello-world/

I have been on the lookout for an opensource webex\video confrencing tool and finally ran across DimDim. It is really slick! http://www.dimdim.com/

I did an import of the virtual machine into our ESX environment (it complained about an error but appears to work). Then using the instructions here

http://www.n2networksolutions.com/blog/?tag=dimdim

I was able to give it a static address and was off an running!

Here is a copy of the post for my history

#################

I’m trying to find something I can implement on my own servers.  Then I noticed they have a Vmware appliance version so I decided I would download it and give it a shot.

At first I can ping the vm from my laptop but not from another pc on my network .  So I need to troubleshoot the networking first by running ifconfig eth0 to see what the IP is.  I see it’s assigned 192.168.2.113.

Going to try and manually set the IP

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

DEVICE=eth0

ONBOOT=yes

BOOTPROTO=none

BROADCAST=192.168.2.255

IPADDR=192.168.2.3

NETMASK=255.255.255.0

NETWORK=192.168.2.0

now press esc and :wq to save changes and quit

going to edit the hostname now

vi /etc/resolv.conf

next edit the gateway

vi /etc/sysconfig/network

and restart the network service

service network restart

Have to push the IP address to all the settings within Dimdim

cd /usr/local/dimdim
./StopDimdim.sh
./Config-ipaddress.pl 192.168.2.3 80 192.168.2.3
./StartDimdim.sh

When I tried to login to http://192.168.2.3/dimdim all I’m getting is a little cherry icon in the top left hand corner.  After searching the blogs I found a fix

I had to edit this file

/usr/local/dimdim/ConferenceServer/apache-tomcat-5.5.17/conf/wrapper.conf

and add this to the end of it

# Added by Stephan for http://forums.dimdim.com/forum/showt…p?t=560&page=2
wrapper.cpu.timeout=maximum
wrapper.debug=true
wrapper.ping.timeout=1000

Just as a note here I had to change my port # to 8080 because my ISP at home blocks access to port 80. I also had to NAT port 8080 and 1935 on my firewall to allow it to work from the outside.