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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!

This would be my first how-to posting around wordpress but what the hell, this thing works a lot better than my bottomless pit of bookmarks. I found this person’s website helpful when integrating adsense into my website recently. Looks like they wrote up a bunch of other how-to’s around wordpress.

http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/adsense/

http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/

Found this via the old google search which landed me upon the how to geek’s friendly advice:

In Gnome select “System->Prefrences->Sound->System Beep Tab

You’ll see the checkbox.  The link to the site I found this is below.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/ubuntu/disable-the-system-beep-on-ubuntu-edgy/

I found this url in the endless ubuntuforms.org. These steps worked great for me. In order to get this working correctly you must know your external ip and/or dns name and also have ssh installed with the correct port (22) forwarded to the machine in question.

Start by setting up your repos:
Add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://www.datakeylive.com/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://www.datakeylive.com/ubuntu gutsy main

This next step failed for myself, but is only the repo apt-key and didn’t cause the install to fail:

wget http://www.datakeylive.com/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/wjeremy.key | sudo apt-key add -

Then run good ol: sudo apt-get update

This next step will install the packages required:

sudo apt-get install expect openssh-server tcl8.4 libxcomp2 libxcompext2 libxcompshad nxlibs nxagent nxproxy nxclient freenx

You can check to make sure it installed correctly by executing:

sudo apt-get -f install

sudo apt-cache show expect openssh-server tcl8.4 libxcomp2 libxcompext2 libxcompshad nxlibs nxagent nxproxy nxclient freenx | grep “Unable”

I needed to add the following to the bottom of /etc/X11/xorg.conf (make sure to back your’s up first!)

Section “Files”

# path to defoma fonts
FontPath “/usr/share/fonts/X11/misc”
FontPath “/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled”
FontPath “/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled”
FontPath “/usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1″
FontPath “/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi”
FontPath “/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi”
FontPath “/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType”
EndSection

You’ll need to download the following file ( i used my home directory)

nxcupsd-wrapper

You need to set the permissions on that last file downloaded to make it work right:

chmod a+x nxcupsd-wrapper
sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/cups/backend/ipp

Now you need to add a user that is able to remote in; replace xxxx with username:

sudo nxserver –adduser xxxx

On your remote machine make sure to install the client and you’re good to go!

I thought the upgrade went completely smooth but not so much.  After the upgrade and reboot each esx’s host file needed to be edited to include it’s own name and ip address.  127.0.0.1 will not work.  I added my other hosts to each host’s /etc/hosts file for good measure.  Once that file was saved I enabled HA and all was happy.  I’ll add the error I saw in VC later…

During our VMware VI3 deployment I’ve been very impressed with Virtual Center. I was however very surprised to not find a patching or update mechanism that is so ancient. One must run commands from the console to query what patches are installed and maintain their own local patch repository if they have more than one esx servers and require speedy patching. Crazy! Us windows admins have been point and clicking updates since Win2k!

VMTS came to my rescue..A patch program for ESX that utilizes Virtual Center. The program has been great so far and have erased a nightmare that is CLI patching. Besides…have you seen how many patches were released for 3.0.1? Give me a break!

If you want to make you’re life easier like mine check out: http://vmts.net