Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Server

Monetizing…

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Some of you have already noticed that I’ve added some Google Adsense blocks to my site. I’ve never been a huge fan of advertising blocks but with the amount of traffic these days it would be nice to be able to pay my hosting bill with Adsense blocks. I just had to upgrade my hosting account for the second time within a year, which is a good thing cause people are reading my website and visiting on a regular base.

Anyway, I will also be looking into changing my wordpress theme, so if anyone got some good tips or is missing something at the moment let me know and I’ll add it to my “under consideration” list.

revert your HAL!

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A couple of weeks ago I did a design review. During this review we discussed the process of reverting your “HAL”, on a Microsoft machine, from multi cpu to single cpu. The customer just emailed me a script that can automate this for you. After some googling I noticed that Mike Laverick already wrote an article on this well over two years ago, which also contains this script. (more or less the same) Still I would like to share this with you guys:

@echo off

:DRIVER_HAL_UPDATE
SET HAL=

IF %NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS%==1 (
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Multiprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=ACPIAPIC_UP
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Multiprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=MPS_UP
) ELSE (
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Uniprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=ACPIAPIC_MP
devcon.exe /find @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 | find /i “Uniprocessor” > NUL && SET HAL=MPS_MP
)

IF NOT “%HAL%”==”” (
ECHO.
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO Installing %HAL% HAL
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO.

devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 := !E_ISA_UP !ACPIPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_MP !MPS_UP !MPS_MP !SGI_MPS_MP !SYSPRO_MP !SGI_MPS_MP
devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 := !E_ISA_UP !ACPIPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_UP !ACPIAPIC_MP !MPS_UP !MPS_MP !SGI_MPS_MP !SYSPRO_MP !SGI_MPS_MP
devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\PCI_HAL\0000 := +%HAL%
devcon.exe sethwid @ROOT\ACPI_HAL\0000 := +%HAL%
devcon.exe update %windir%\inf\hal.inf %HAL%
devcon.exe ReScan

ECHO.
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO Rebooting
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO.
devcon.exe Reboot
) ELSE (
ECHO.
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO Correct HAL Detected
ECHO —————————————-
ECHO.
)
GOTO :EOF

There’s a topic on VMTN about this, read it. You need the Microsoft DevCon util, which is part of the support tools, for more info on devcon click here. Mike Laverick’s paper can be found here. Thanks for pointing this out Xing.

Common VMware issues

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VMware Wolf is generating some awesome blogposts lately:

All the blog posts contain a downloadable html file with a grid. The grid contains problems followed by possible resolutions.

Great blog posts and very useful information, visit VMware Wolfs blog and download the files! Great stuff for your troubleshooting toolkit!

Dell Recovery CD fails to recover ESXi version 3.5

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I just noticed this new KB article that deals about not being able to upgrade ESXi on a Dell box because of the fact that the virtual media is attached:

Upgrade to ESXi 3.5 Update 2.
If you cannot upgrade to ESXi 3.5 Update 2, use the following workaround:

  1. Connect to the DRAC through ILO, as follows:
    1. Open the Media tab.
    2. Open the Configuration tab.
    3. Deselect the Attach virtual media check box.
  2. Boot the ESXi system from the recovery CD.
To use DRAC virtual media to perform the recovery, follow these steps:
  1. Attach the virtual media
  2. Using the virtual media, boot the machine.
  3. When the recovery CD is fully loaded, disconnect the virtual media and proceed with the recovery.

Which reminded of the nice I/O errors this Dell DRAC virtual media produces when attached. So be sure to detach the virtual media before you actually run ESX(i). Same goes for Fujitsu blades by the way, when a virtual media has been present it also produces these nice I/O errors:

Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: SCSI device sdc: 2097151 512-byte hdwr sectors (1074 MB)
Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: sdc: I/O error: dev 08:20, sector 0
Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: I/O error: dev 08:20, sector 0
Feb 12 09:16:47 esx1 kernel: unable to read partition table

Which isn’t as bad as it seems, it’s just not able to read the partition. For Fujitsu blades the only workaround I’ve seen so far was to completely disable USB before booting.

VM Template best practices (Linux)

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I was just reading up on my Google Reader. A lot of information been dropped over the last couple of days and more and more people are getting active on the VMware blogoshere. One of the articles that really caught my attention was the “VM Template best practices (Linux)” by Leo Raikhman.

Leo did a great job in explaining how to build up a decent Template. Leo even included a way to regularly zero out the Linux Filesystem for the purpose of VCB image level dumps with small footprints.

And although Leo’s article talks about Linux only this also applies for Windows. If you will be doing VCB then remember to zero-out your filesystem every once in a while. Linux doesn’t scrub the sectors where the files resided and neither does Windows. I wrote an article on how to do this from within Windows. Yes you can do it by hand via the “shrink disk” option in VMware Tools, but as Leo already pointed out there’s no way of scheduling that one, as far I have discovered.

So most of the stuff written about in Leo’s article applies to Windows, yeah also the partition alignment! DO IT! But the zero-out procedure won’t work, I’ve wrote one a while back and here it is:

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Dim fso, d, dc
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set dc = fso.Drives
WshShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Sysinternals\", 0, "REG_SZ"
WshShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Sysinternals\SDelete\", 0, "REG_SZ"
WshShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Sysinternals\SDelete\EulaAccepted", 1, "REG_DWORD"
For Each d in dc
If d.DriveType = 2 Then
Return = WshShell.Run("defrag " & d & " -f", 1, TRUE)'
Return = WshShell.Run("sdelete -c " & d, 1, TRUE)
End If
Next
Set WshShell = Nothing

Be sure to download Sdelete before you start, and remember that this script also does a defrag. If you are running “thin” disks than doing a defrag might not be the smartest thing to do, if so just delete the following line from the vb script:

Return = WshShell.Run("defrag " & d & " -f", 1, TRUE)'