Mar/100
Save 50% off vSphere essentials for the next 90 days
TechOps Guy: Nate
Came across this today, which mentions you can save about 50% when licensing vSphere essentials for the next ~90 days. As you may know Essentials is a really cheap way to get your vSphere stuff managed by vCenter. For your average dual socket 16-blade system as an example it is 91% cheaper(savings of ~$26,000) than going with vSphere Standard edition. Note that the vCenter included with Essentials needs to be thrown away if your managing more than three hosts with it. You’ll still need to buy vCenter standard (regardless of what version of vSphere you buy).
Nov/090
Reclaiming Quick Launch in Windows 7
TechOps Guy: Tycen
Maybe I’m the only one out there, but I am a big fan of Quick Launch in Windows. Any new system I got the first thing I would do is resize the task bar to double height, move the Quick Launch bar to the bottom and start populating it with shortcuts. I hardly ever needed to go to the Start Menu or the desktop to launch programs – in fact, I see using the Start Menu and desktop shortcuts as a complete waste of time.
I tried Windows 7 Beta when it first came out and was very disappointed to see that they eliminated Quick Launch (or I guess some drink-the-koolaid marketing person would say they created a new, better hybrid solution – but whatever, I call it a regression). My one hope was that it was just a feature missing in the beta version and would be back in the release version. Nope. I just upgraded to 7 last night and QL is gone. It really made me want to finally give up and use Ubuntu for my work laptop (already use it for my home laptop). But, since I mostly manage Windows servers at my current job it still is a bit of a pain.
So, what’s that old saying: when Microsoft wants you to drink the koolaid you make lemonade? Something like that.
Here’s what I did to get Quick Launch back:
- Create a folder somewhere and name it something (I went with Shortcuts in my Documents folder)
- Hover your mouse over the top of your taskbar until you get the double arrow and click and drag your taskbar to double height (this step is optional – also gives the added bonus of letting you see the day of the week)
- Right click on your task bar and select Toolbars > New Toolbar
- Navigate to the folder you created in step 1 and click Select Folder. Your new Toolbar now appears just to the left of your Notification Area (where the clock is)
- Click on the “boarder” of the tool bar and drag it all the way to the right and down towards the Windows button on the bottom left of the screen (this will only work if the taskbar isn’t locked)
- Right click in the new Quick Launch space and uncheck Show Text and Show Title
Done! Now you have a Quick Launch bar that is almost like you had in XP/Vista. Sure, you’re missing the “Add to Quick Launch” feature you used to have in Vista, but at least it’s close. You can quickly add items to your home brewed Quick Launch by doing a right-click-drag from the Start Menu and and choosing Copy here (if you don’t do a right-click-drag, you’ll move it which you might not want to do). You can also right-click and send a shortcut to the desktop, and then drag the shortcut down from there.
Update: After I installed Windows 7 Beta when it first came out I did some searching on this issue and came up with nothing. I haven’t touched 7 since. After posting this article, I did another search and see that others have come up with the same or a slightly different solution. Good! Don’t drink the koolaid!
Sep/090
transcode tips
TechOps Guy: Nate
I downloaded a show off my Tivo Series 3 last night, and wanted to convert it from it’s native MPEG-2 to MPEG-4. I’ve done it before, but didn’t want to spend time trying to find the scripts so I spent a bunch of time searching around for some quick tips on how best to do it. And despite some honest efforts I came up with nothing useful.
So a short time ago I dug up my scripts and thought to share some of them, not only will it make it easier for me since I can check this site for the syntax in the future but maybe it’ll help you too.
Of course I won’t cover installing transcode or it’s dependencies, I assume you have all of that done. I don’t recall what all of the options do but as you can see there are quite a few, not the easiest thing to remember. See the man page or transcode documentation for what the options mean.
Export audio portion of a video file to OGG Vorbis:
transcode -i input_filename -y raw,ogg -F mpeg4 -E44100 -b 128 -N 0×55 -w 120,300,2 -V -Z 176×120 -m filename.ogg -o /dev/null
Export audio portion of a file to MP3(using lame):
transcode -i input_file -y raw -F mpeg4 -E44100 -b 128 -N 0×55 -w 120,300,2 -V -Z 176×120 -m output.mp3 -o /dev/null
Convert video+audio from some format(e.g. MPEG-2) to MPEG-4:
transcode -i input.mpg y xvid4 -F mpeg4 -E22050 -b 64 -N 0×55 –w 250,200,3 -V -M 2 -o filename.avi
I wish transcode had some easy to use templates, such as convert with low, medium, or high compression type of deal. I mean if you don’t specify any options by default it seems to use maximum quality and in some cases despite going from say MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 I’ve seen the file size increase.
Sep/090
Fix hanging vmware tools on linux
TechOps Guy: Nate
I can’t be the only one who has come across this, back in early June I filed a support case with VMware around the fact that roughly 90% of the time when the latest version of vmware-tools that shipped with vSphere loaded on my CentOS 5 systems it would hang part way through, if I logged into the console I and just pressed <enter> it would continue loading. Naturally the Tier 1 support rep was fairly useless, wanting me to do some stupid things to get more debug information.
I went off on my own and traced down the problem to the vmware-config-tools.pl script towards the end of the script at around line 11,600, where it tries to make a symlink. If I disable the offending code the problem stops(the link it’s trying to create is in fact already there):
sub symlink_icudt38l {
my $libdir = db_get_answer('LIBDIR');
install_symlink($libdir . '/icu', $gRegistryDir . '/icu');
} |
If your interested in the strace output:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | [..]
[pid 7228] <... read resumed> "", 4096) = 0
[pid 7228] --- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---
[pid 7228] fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFIFO|0600, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
[pid 7228] close(4) = 0
[pid 7228] rt_sigaction(SIGHUP, {SIG_IGN}, {SIG_IGN}, 8) = 0
[pid 7228] rt_sigaction(SIGINT, {SIG_IGN}, {SIG_DFL}, 8) = 0
[pid 7228] rt_sigaction(SIGQUIT, {SIG_IGN}, {SIG_DFL}, 8) = 0
[pid 7228] wait4(7244, [{WIFEXITED(s) && WEXITSTATUS(s) == 0}], 0, NULL) = 7244
[pid 7228] rt_sigaction(SIGHUP, {SIG_IGN}, NULL, 8) = 0
[pid 7228] rt_sigaction(SIGINT, {SIG_DFL}, NULL, 8) = 0
[pid 7228] rt_sigaction(SIGQUIT, {SIG_DFL}, NULL, 8) = 0
[pid 7228] lstat("/etc/vmware-tools/icu", {st_mode=S_IFLNK|0777, st_size=25, ...}) = 0
[pid 7228] read(0, |
The last line there the system is waiting for input, when I hit <enter> it continues loading.
The support case sat..and sat..and sat. Then a couple of weeks ago some manager called me up and wanted to know how the case was doing. I guess they didn’t spend any time on it at all. I told him I already found a workaround, and he said because of that they were going to work up a KB entry on it then close the case. Then another week passes and I get an email saying OH! We see you found a workaround, we’ll forward that to engineering and get back to you. Yes the workaround I sent on JUNE 16.
So hope this helps someone, I’ll update this when/if they get a KB entry out on it. It’s certainly saved me a lot of time, it is very annoying to have to connect to each and every system to press enter to get it to continue to boot to workaround this bug.