Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

MS Patches

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I’ve read a whole lot of articles about why MS was going to beat VMware and the other way around. I guess the only thing we can do is wait and see what happens. Of all the articles I’ve read there’s one that hit the nail right on the head.

Microsoft Patch 955020

This patch will ensure that Friendster and Obama are added to your dictonary on Vista and 2008 Server. No big deal right? This brings up a few questions for me:

  1. Why does my server have a GUI?
  2. Why does this patch require a reboot?
  3. Who is typing the words Friendster or Obama on their 2008 Server?

At the root of the issue is that I will never deploy Hyper-V for enviroments I admin. I understand patching for core issues and security but this is stupid. If this server was in fact running my virtual server farm I would now be rebooting for Friendster and Obama. Yikes!

source

I’m honored

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Just noticed that Eric Siebert created a new, one of his famous, top 10 lists which deals about blogs this time “Top 10 blogs that VMware administrators must read”. A whole bunch of my favorite blogs are on there like Mike Laverick’s, Scott Lowe’s and Eric Sloof’s blog…. and I’m also on there!

I’ve only been doing this for 7 months now and it’s definitely great to see that people are enjoying my blogs! Thanks Eric for putting me on there and thanks to everyone for participating!

Update: Cool Tool

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They’ve just released a brand new version of WinSCP which contain the following bug fixes:

  • For internal directory listings with FTP protocol LIST is used unless LIST -a was already proven to work. 263
  • Bug fix: .. directory become visible eventually in Explorer interface. 259
  • Bug fix: Open session in new window was not working for stored sessions in folders. 266
  • Bug fix: It was not possible to permanently select English language, when default system language was different (and that language for WinSCP was installed).
  • Bug fix: It was not possible to move files by drag&drop to other applications when using drag&drop shell extension. 261
  • Bug fix: Failure when starting console interface tool. 260

Download it now!

Cool tool

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I was just searching for a way to clone my laptop just in case disaster strikes. I found a cool tool called Clonezilla. It’s free, open source and very easy to use. You can burn a “live cd” or even copy the tool to a USB memory stick and just boot from it.

It supports a whole bunch of file systems: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, and FAT, NTFS of MS Windows! Check it out.

Command line tips and tricks #3

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Enter maintenance mode from the ESX command line:

vimsh -n -e /hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter

Backup every running vm via vcb in just one command:

for /f “tokens=2 delims=:” %%i in (’vcbvmname -h <virtualcenterserver> -u <user> -p <password> -s Powerstate:on ^| find “name:”‘) do cscript pre-command.wsf “c:\program files\vmware\vmware consolidated backup framework\” %%i fullvm

Enable VMotion from the command line:

vimsh -n -e “hostsvc/vmotion/vnic_set vmk0″