July, 2009

Skype could potentially be shut down

Check this out:

 http://www.theage.com.au/technology/biz-…

Huge news here, Skype is used by a lot of people. If this were shut down it would leave a huge hole in the market for another company to come in and swoop up this business. If competitor’s were wise they would already be planning for this possibility ….

What is the C:\windows\csc folder?

This question came up from a coworker of mine who was working on a machine where the above folder was 20 GB’s in size. I had never heard of it and I didn’t have on myself which caused us to think spyware or virus right off the bat.

After further research we found that CSC stands for Client Side Caching, and those files are created when you enable the “Offline Files” setting in windows.

Windows 7 - Cracked product key

Check this out:

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/29/…

You know, its stuff like this that forces legitimate users to have to put up with crap like high licensing costs and stuff like Windows Genuine Advantage. On the flip side it’s  high licensing costs and stuff like Windows genuine advantage that causes people to pirate in the first place so I guess its a pretty vicious cycle all around.

CCA for Xendesktop 3.0, exam 1Y0-A14

I am writing this exam on Tuesday. Has anyone written it already? What were your impressions of this exam? Any advice on area’s to focus on?

Microsoft potshot: Oracle raising it’s pricing structure

Take a look:

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/27/…

So Microsoft reminds us that SQL server is still available at the same cost while Oracle is raising it’s prices. Now if only SQL server was any good …. they might just have something there.

Microsoft GPL violation hits memory hole

nbsp;http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/23/…

Interesting article. What is more interesting here is the concept of Microsoft supporting anything open source. Times perhaps are a changing.

The one problem here, if Microsoft ever did embrace open source, who would the elitest linux teenage fan boys hate next?

Windows server 2003: DHCP server rant

I am not sure if this has been fixed in Server 2008, maybe it has, but here is something i encountered in server 2003 that really made me mad. I was migrating a companies DHCP scope to a new server and this company had about 50 or so address reservations. So I was hoping there was a quick way to migrate this. I right clicked on reservations and noticed there was an option to export to comma delimited text file and I got all excited on the possiblity that I wouldn’t have to do this manually. THen I notice, while you can export the list there is no way that I could locate to import it.

Seriously Microsoft?!? You put in the functionality to export but not to import it back? Would it really have been so hard to input the maybe two lines of code to do this? I am curious about the rationale here of your developers, was this laziness or just plain stupidity?

Unable to power on a VM: Corrupt Redo log

Here is a sample of the error that you will see.

Error message: msg.hbacommon.corruptredo:The redolog of dmz-obs-000002.vmdk has been detected to be corrupt. The virtual machine needs to be powered on. If the problem still persists, you need to discard the redolog.

You will not be able to power off or reset the VM. You need to kill it manually.

Here is how you do that:

Instructions on how to foracbly terminate a VM if it is unresponsive to the VI client.

In this you will be terminating the Master World and User Worlds for the VM which in turn will terminate the VM’s processes.

1. First list the running VMs to determine the VM ID for the affected VM:
#cat /proc/vmware/vm/*/names

vmid=1076 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/50823edc-d9110dd9-8994-9ee0ad055a68/vc using sql/vc using sql.vmx” uuid=”50 28 4e 99 3d 2b 8d a0-a4 c0 87 c9 8a 60 d2 31″ displayName=”vc using sql-192.168.1.10″

vmid=1093 pid=-1 cfgFile=”/vmfs/volumes/50823edc-d9110dd9-8994-9ee0ad055a68/esx_template/esx_template.vmx” uuid=”50 11 7a fc bd ec 0f f4-cb 30 32 a5 c0 3a 01 09″ displayName=”esx_template”

The displayname will be the name of your VM as it appears in the GUI

For this example we will terminate the VM at vmid=’1605′

2. We need to find the Master World ID, do this type:
# less -S /proc/vmware/vm/1605/cpu/status

Replace the number in this command with your vmid from above.

Expand the terminal or scroll until you can see the right-most column. This is labelled ‘group’. Unterneath the column you will find: vm.1604

In this example ‘1604′ is the ID of the Master World.

3. Run this command to terminate the Master World and the VM running in it:

/usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmkload_app –kill 9 1604

4. This should kill all the VM’s User Worlds and also the VM’s processes.

If Successful you will see similar:

Warning: Jul 12 07:24:06.303: Sending signal ‘9′ to world 1604.

You should then be able to work with your VM again

Setting up DHCP relay on a Cisco router

This came up for me recently. Here are the commands to setup DHCP relay on a Cisco router, it’s super easy if you know what to do.

The interface you are configuring is the interface where the DHCP clients are located. The helper-address is the IP address of your DHCP server, in this case 10.10.0.5. Please note you will need to make this configuration change on EVERY interface that has clients that will need to access the DHCP server.

router2# conf t
router2(config)# int e0
router2(config-if)# ip helper-address 10.10.0.5

Upgrade to ESX 4 (vSphere) on a standalone Host

This article was really helpful

 http://vm-help.com/esx40i/ESXi40_upgrade…

If highly recommend following it if you need to an in place upgrade on a stand alone ESX box.