AdmiNirvana

Hey all.  Sorry, I haven’t been posting much lately–much going on in business as well as our empty houses in Michigan.   Hopefully we’ll be able be free of those soon.

Anyway, the big event is set to happen on this Friday, January 30th.   After much hard work, a little under a year, and about 45 hours in airplanes, I’m scheduled for the FAA Practical Test–or “checkride”–at 9:00AM with Del Schulte at Benton Airpark.  There are two parts: an oral exam which goes over “should know” stuff and the actual flight, which involves going through different maneuvers and navigation procedures.

Tex, my instructor, says I’ll do fine but it hasn’t helped me quell the nerves–it’s only Tuesday and I’m already shaking like a leaf and reviewing all the materials.

However nothing would be more awesome than passing on Friday; it’d be a lifelong dream come true.   If I do somehow calm down and pass it, the plan is to take up someone for a ride (mom, dad, or Phaedrah and Ethan, or all!) this upcoming weekend to exercise my newfound privileges.

This is one of those “no way, that can’t be true” type of events.

Using Solaris’ Dtrace functionality a systems engineer determines that noise is responsible for his intermittent disk latency problems.   Just wait for the last part of the video, it’s worth it.

http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/unusual_disk_latency

Thanks to Greg for pointing that one out to me.

…depression setting in.   The only good news is that it won’t last very long.

I usually don’t like to cross-post between blogs, but this problem seems prevalent enough that it needs more exposure.   We’ve solved it at TLF, and here’s how:

http://www.thelinuxfix.com/blog/2008/10/24/trixbox-vpns-and-the-20-second-issue/

So, I finally had a chance to play with VMware ESXi.   It’s pretty much what I expected, a straight-up version of ESX.  Very, very nice… I’ll start moving more servers over from VMware Server 1.x and report back on my progress.

One of the things that annoyed me out of the gate is the lack of SSH support.   It’s there in the underlying operating system, just not enabled.   Here’s how to turn it on:

1. Get on the console of the ESXi server.
2. Press ALT-F1 to get to the OS system console
3. Type “unsupported”
4. Enter the root password at the password prompt.
5. Edit /etc/inetd.conf with vi, and uncomment the SSH line
6. Run:  kill -1 $(cat /var/run/inetd.pid)

And viola!  SSH to your ESX box.   Enjoy!