mainesysadmin.com

In the last year we had a physical server’s O/S have a severe blue screen error which required the server to be rebuilt.  This server was a critical server for our operation and the downtime was not easy.  In order to prevent that from happening in the future we decided that server would be a better fit in the virtual infrastructure because of the High Availability offered by Vmotion.  The only problem is this server requires a USB license dongle.  Everyone knows that you don’t have a USB port to plug into when running VI3, so what do you do?

Keyspan USB server (USB over IP)

This specific USB server allows you to choose which USB port(s) you want to dedicate to each server.  Some USB servers do not allow you to dedicate each port to a different server.

What a breeze to setup as well.  After you mount the device, give it power and ethernet…Just install the Keyspan software.  The software client will find the USB server automatically.  Than you need to edit the config to dedicate the USB device to that VM and you’re ready for action.

Now you can reboot and vmotion to your heart’s desire and not lose connectivity to your USB license dongle.  Great little trick if you’re as dedicated to virtualization as we are!

Download and install “Sound Converter” (http://soundconverter.berlios.de/).  I just installed the latest from source and it’s working great!.  Download, Extract the compressed the file.

cd to the directory of the uncompressed files

sudo ./configure

sudo make

sudo make install

If you have default ubuntu configuration you also need to run this command for mp3 encoding action:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse

Browse to Applications-> Sound & Video -> Sound Converter

Change your preferences, add a folder of flac files and convert to compressed!