I recently had the need to move a rather large (450GB) VMDK file from an external hard drive into ESXi. Since ESXi doesn’t support external hard drives, this makes things quite a bit more difficult. At first I tried using SCP to copy the file over (after enabling SSH access for ESXi). However, when I tried to do this the time left was almost 20 hours – a tad too long!

I’ve had issues before with OpenFiler where doesn’t update the permissions, although they appear correct in the UI. To rectify that, I stumbled upon a one liner that fixed it. Let’s say you have a group called “Trusted” that you want to have full access to your music folder. Here’s the one-liner: [root@files data]# pwd /mnt/openfiler/data [root@files data]# setfacl --recursive -m u:nobody:rwx,g:Trusted:rwx music

I found VMWare Server to have very slow I/O, and sought to improve it. Below are a list of tests I performed, the change, and the results. ### Host OS ### /dev/sdb1: Timing buffered disk reads: 220 MB in 3.05 seconds = 72.17 MB/sec kelvin@gorilla:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb1: Timing buffered disk reads: 266 MB in 3.01 seconds = 88.33 MB/sec kelvin@gorilla:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb1: Timing buffered disk reads: 310 MB in 3.01 seconds = 102.99 MB/sec ### Before Changes ### /dev/mapper/openfiler-data: Timing buffered disk reads: 8 MB in 3.36 seconds = 2.38 MB/sec [root@files etc]# hdparm -t /dev/mapper/openfiler-data /dev/mapper/openfiler-data: Timing buffered disk reads: 24 MB in 3.63 seconds …

I rank OSSEC as one of my favorite pieces of open source software, and finally decided to play around with it more in my own free time. (Yup, I do this sort of stuff for fun). My goal was quite simple: send syslog packets from my Cisco to my “proxy” server, running OSSEC. I found that, although OSSEC supports Cisco IOS logging, it didn’t really work. In fact, I couldn’t find any examples or articles of anybody actually getting it to work.

I’m always forgetting the exact string to enter at the CLI for updating the IOS on a wireless Cisco AP, so I’ll just put it here to end my future searches: Chimp# archive download-sw /force-reload /overwrite tftp://192.168.83.150/c1100-k9w7-tar.123-8.JEC1.tar 192.168.83.150 obviously being your tftp server, and the .tar file sitting in the root of the tftp server. I suppose if you wanted to backup your IOS you could do something along the lines of:

I’ve lived in several different parts of the world, and they all do internet differently. Back in the US I had 8Mb/sec cable (leaving just before Fios was really an option, darn!) In New Zealand, for instance, I was paying for “high speed ADSL” rated at 1.5Mb/256k. Vrooom. Up in Taiwan I was paying 1/2 what I paid in New Zealand, but for 12Mb/1Mb. Down to Sydney and we have a rated 24Mb/1Mb.

I think possibly one of the most practical upgrades in VMware Server 2 appears to be the ability to automatically turn on virtual machines in a stagnated order. I have fond memories of turning on a server with 10 virtual machines, and when they all turn on at once, the hard disk grinds to a halt. This forced me to turn on the machines manually afterwards. +1 VMware in my books.

I needed another Python fix, and I need one pretty badly. I spent the weekend wondering why it appears to be impossible to edit the GUIDs inside an Exchange mailbox store (read: NOT the GUIDs stored in AD for Exchange). Anyways, I digress. My goals were simple. I wanted to use Python, wanted something to do with traffic, and wanted to play around with Glade/PyGTK and graphing stuff. My end result was a little app that allows you to specify a GPX file, and it plots the waypoints (and calculates the moving average!). Pretty simple, pretty useless, but pretty fun. I really do like pretty pictures.

I showed a few of my co-workers my graph and one replied – oh! that’s really cool. (I think only two of my co-workers are actually interested in my geekyness). He then emailed me tonight a .kmz file containing a colorized file of his speed. I looked at the kml and noticed it appeared to be dynamically allocated judging by the top speed. Well, as you could guess, I surely had to modify my code to include colors.

I recently have been playing with parsing GPX files and spitting out the results into a special KML file. I initially wrote a parser using minidom, yet after running this the first time – and my Core2Duo laptop reaching 100% utilization for 10 seconds – I realized I needed to re-write it using something else. I spent a little time reading the different parsers for XML and eventually read more about cElementTree. And it is included with Python2.5, sweet.