Macky Ruiz VMworld 2015 was last month, which means its been about 1 year since I’ve started this blog! Last year I had the opportunity to attend my first conference as a attendee. This year I attended as a booth staff for my company, and what a difference experience! It was great to run into some old … Read more
Ever tried deploying an OVA but the VM version is not supported by your ESX host? Heres how you can modify the vmx file to make it compatible with your host Uncompress the OVA archive. It can be done with a compression utility like 7-zip. You should now have three different type of files: .mf … Read more
This post is on deploying a new Ubuntu VM, dynamically adding more disks, having the guest OS recognize the new drives and increasing its capacity without rebooting. This is really useful for critical production servers that cannot go down for reboots like a NFS server. Lets get started. OS: I’m using Ubuntu 12.02.4 LTS server OS … Read more
Do you work with networking devices but don’t have the money to shell out for a Opengear, Pele, or Tripplite serial console server? Fear not, Raspberry Pi is here! Home lab users and budget constrained Network Admins will enjoy this. For those who are unfamiliar with the Raspberry Pi (RPi for short), its a credit … Read more
Spotify has a preview build for Linux users! I have it successfully running on Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS Instructions from their website: # 1. Add this line to your list of repositories by # editing your /etc/apt/sources.list deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free # 2. If you want to verify the downloaded packages, # you will need to … Read more
My colleague Ashish Hanwadikar wrote a quick post on Linkedin on discovering ESX servers in the same subnet. Here is the post: “VMware ESX servers have SLP (Service Discovery Protocol) enabled by default making it easy to discover all ESX servers in a given subnet through any SLP client. For example, on linux, running the … Read more
This is a utility that sets Access Control Lists (ACLs) for files and directories for linux hosts. I’m managing a Linux host on AWS and a design firm is working on the website itself. Even though the host itself is a sandbox webserver, I don’t want to give out root credentials – so we set … Read more
Sounds cool! But what is it? Lets start off on what its made of: Knowledge based authentication. Possession based authentication. A good example of two-factor authentication is your ATM card. You know your PIN. Its something you made up. But that is something anyone can glimpse over and see. To safeguard that, you need your … Read more
Today, our cellphones are more powerful than a vintage supercomputer that helped NASA bring astronauts to the moon in 1969. With all the advancement in technology, some hardware manufacturers require you to flash BIOS or firmware with DOS. Okay maybe the comparison from hardware in 1969 and 2015 is a bit extreme, but you get … Read more
With a lot of servers in my lab, I run into my fair share of ESX boot medium issues in the lab. Typically this exhibits weird issues where the ESX host is online, VMs are incredibly slow or completely hung and ping-able. The quickest way I would determine of the boot media (USB, SD card, … Read more