For those that have never used crontab, it can be a daunting task to schedule a simple script. As with all things, I highly recommend that you learn the meanings of CLI programs and their usage etcetera. With that said, I wanted to check my crontab job against a generator of sorts just to be sure I had it right. If you want a simple click and go on crontab generator, I recommend using the one provided by HTML Basix. Enjoy!
–Himuraken
Of course the first thing that I did tonight after receiving my 3ware 9650se was to install it in my ESXi 4.0 server and get it going. There are a few caveats that I expected and a few that I didn’t. Hopefully this post will help a few of you out there.
Here are the steps that I performed:
1. Physically installed card and drives.
2. Built the logical unit / volume on the card.
3. Booted ESXi and noticed the card / array not showing up.
I expected #3 from my pre-sales madness research, yeah I’m that bad about pre-sales. There is a driver for ESX 4 that enables the hypervisor to be installed onto the array. For the rest of us with ESXi 4.0 however, the array can only be used as a datastore. This isn’t an issue anyways since the critical files are on the array not the single disk or USB device that we install the ESXi OS onto.
This led me to 3ware’s support site to find the exact article regarding this. You can find the article titled “I need support for VMware ESX/ESXi 4.0 and ESX/ESXi 4.0 update 1 for 9650SE and 9690SA. Is a certified driver available?” here. Basically, the top half of the document applies to ESX while the lower portion is dedicated to ESXi.
First off, the fact that 3ware has this and other great articles is excellent, they seem like the “get it”. On the other hand I found something difficult to do, and not for technical reasons. They instruct you to find the file “offline-bundle.zip” on the included driver CD. I searched all over the provided driver CD and had no luck locating it; I couldn’t help but think that there ought to have been a download link as well***. After locating the file I proceeded down the list of the well written how-to. Unfortunately for me, after running the perl vihostupdate.pl -server x.x.x.x -username root -password "" -b c:\offline-bundle.zip -i command I received zero feedback from the CLI. I restarted the ESXi server per the documents recommendations and upon reboot, no RAID array. Hrmm, I didn’t get any errors or feedback. After shorting the name of the original file to offline-bundle.zip and re-running the command, I did get positive feedback in the form of this message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective. Delicious! Now were are working the way we ought to. Restart the ESXi server and enjoy.
*** – Clarification and special note: At the bottom of the page you will see a download link for a file named: vmware-esx-drivers-scsi-3w-9xxx_400.2.26.08.035vm40-1.0.4.00000.179560.iso.. This ISO image contains the offline-bundle folder. The file that you need for the upgrade/upload is named: AMCC_2.26.08.035vm40-offline_bundle-179560.zip. The process would not succeed until I renamed AMCC_2.26.08.035vm40-offline_bundle-179560.zip to offline-bundle.zip.
Happy virtualizing!
–Himuraken
This one is from a while ago. I originally used this back in May of 2009 and just realized that I hadn’t posted the link and info. Basically, shortly after migrating to Microsoft Exchange 2007 in-house, we purchased an SSL certificate for various reasons. Long story short, Outlook 2007 clients starting throwing certificate errors upon opening. So, our outside clients now trust the Exchange box, but the inside clients do not. I went round and round trying to resolve this on my own before searching the internet for a solution. Finding the solution was not easy at all, but I eventually located this link. After following the instructions, everything was up and running as one would expect.
I didn’t really think that this would have been such a PITA, but maybe thats what I get for naming a mail server Newman.
–Himuraken
I have been playing around with ESXi and needed to upload some files via SCP and discovered that SSH is not enabled by default. There are many sources out there for accomplishing this but I found the following information to be the easiest to follow.
1) At the console of the ESXi host, press ALT-F1 to access the console window.
2) Enter unsupported in the console and then press Enter. You will not see the text you type in.
3) If you typed in unsupported correctly, you will see the Tech Support Mode warning and a password prompt. Enter the password for the root login.
4) You should then see the prompt of ~ #. Edit the file inetd.conf (enter the command *vi /etc/inetd.conf*).
5) Find the line that begins with #ssh and remove the #. Then save the file. If you’re new to using vi, then move the cursor down to #ssh line and then press the Insert key. Move the cursor over one space and then hit backspace to delete the #. Then press ESC and type in :wq to save the file and exit vi. If you make a mistake, you can press the ESC key and then type it :q! to quit vi without saving the file.
6) Restart host or try kill -HUP `ps | grep inetd`
The original blog posting can be found here.
–Himuraken
After a clean install/upgrade of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) you may be unable to get gdesklets to run. I have noticed several threads out there with no resolution so I thought I would post a fix. Most users will get the app installed successfully but when they run the gdesklets shell, the app begins to load, goes gray, and then has to be closed using force quit. Also, running gdesklets start from a console shows that the daemon is starting but it never does. By default Gutsy Gibbon uses Python 2.5 while gdesklets is looking for 2.4. This is pretty straight forward to resolve using these steps. Install python2.4 by running sudo apt-get install python2.4 from a console. After that is complete we need to tell gdesklets to use Python2.4. From the console we need to add a few entries to the gdesklets config files. Locate the line that says “#! /usr/bin/env python” and append it with a 2.4. So each line should now look like “#! /usr/bin/env python2.4″. This line needs to be updated at the top of each of the files listed below.
/usr/lib/gdesklets/gdesklets
/usr/lib/gdesklets/gdesklets-shell
/usr/lib/gdesklets/gdesklets-daemon
/usr/lib/gdesklets/gdesklets-migration-tool
After updating the files with your favorite text editor, start the app by running gdesklets start from a console. This should have you up and running in no time.
–himuraken