Posts Tagged computers
Oh, Compellent… again with the disk prices.
Posted by evan in Uncategorized on August 25, 2010
Time to expand the SAN again.
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Generate a report of Exchange mailbox sizes broken out by department and location
Posted by evan in Uncategorized on April 29, 2010
I found a script a few months ago that generated a CSV report of mailbox size, which included the Mailbox Name (usually the user’s name), size in Kbytes, number of items, which server it’s on, etc. This was very helpful, but I wanted to see which department within the company used the most space on the mail server, and the department wasn’t one of the pieces of data included in the report. It took a while but I figured out how to do LDAP lookups in vbscript and was able to add that info, so the report now has the user’s department, office location, and quota limit in it as well as the other fields. This makes it very easy to do a PivotChart in Excel to generate a pie chart of the size by department. The script is attached – change the extension to .vbs to run it. You’ll need to plug in your Exchange server and domain controller where the placeholders currently are.
Upgraded to Fedora Core 12
Posted by evan in Uncategorized on April 20, 2010
I upgraded my work laptop from FC11 to FC12 yesterday using the “preupgrade” tool. It was pretty simple, though it took a lot longer than I expected. There was some funkiness with my screen going crazy after the upgrade – my external monitor and the laptop’s LCD both did this crazy wavy-line thing. I tried changing the refresh rate, running system-config-display, nothing worked. I found a post that suggested passing “nomodeset” to the kernel boot options – that solved it. Yay!
The other problem I had was reinstalling VMware Workstation – I couldn’t. I got this error: /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmnet-only/vnetUserListener.c:240: error: ‘TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE’ … etc. I ended up having to edit the vmplayer source files directly (!!!) to get them to compile – instructions found here
So far FC12 seems exactly like FC11. But that’s fine – I only upgraded because I didn’t want to be on a dead-end version once FC13 is released.
Passwordless SSH Everywhere
Posted by evan in Uncategorized on March 30, 2010
I’ve known about ssh keys for a long time and frequently use them, most frequently so that a script can transfer a file between two servers without having to do some mumbo-jumbo where I try to pipe a password into it or some other wacky thing. I hadn’t fully embraced ssh keys, though, because I didn’t like the idea that if I lost my laptop, I’d be losing a free key into my servers. Then I discovered ssh-agent. This isn’t new, so I’m kind of embarrassed I didn’t know about it, but I’ve been using it for a few months now and I can’t imagine going back.
Lotsa downtime.
Posted by evan in Uncategorized on March 18, 2010
Lots of power outages lately. Not the greatest time to move my site. 
Good thing I don’t need 99.99%+ uptime. Or even 95%…
Sped up WordPress by adding 1 index.
Posted by evan in Uncategorized on March 17, 2010
I noticed WP was taking a long time to load since I moved it. I added an index to the “autoload” column on wp_options and it seems to be much faster.
I still hate MySQL though. Postgres is so much better.
More fun with ovftool
Posted by evan in Uncategorized on September 20, 2009
I tried restoring my .ova into vCenter and it failed. It said something like “Device ‘virtual disk’ uses a controller that is not supported. this is a general limitation of the virtual hardware version.” This kind of pissed me off, especially when I couldn’t really find anything in Google about what the error meant, but it turned out to be pretty easy to fix – I just clicked “upgrade virtual hardware” in VMWare Server to upgrade the hardware version from 4 to 7. I then created another .ova, uploaded it to the datacenter and successfully deployed it in vCenter in its own resource pool. Yay!
I think the real problem was that some of our VMs were created with the BusLogic driver rather than the LSI Logic driver (which is recommended for Linux guests).
Ovftool also turned out to be a pretty sweet way to backup VMs. Once in .ova format you can use ovftool to convert back to .vmx just by specifying the .ova file as the source and something .vmx as the target. Because it so nicely shrinks the .vmdk (my 20 gig VM became a 2.5 gig .ova) and is pretty quick to run (seemed like < 10 minutes per 20-gig VM) it seems like a decent choice for backing up VMs.
Exporting VMWare Server VMs to OVA/OVF with ovftool
Posted by evan in Uncategorized on September 11, 2009
Well, I thought this was going to be a huge pain in the ass, but it turns out not to be a really big deal. I found this post which includes instructions and a link to download VMWare’s “ovftool”. There’s a win32 version and a 32-bit and 64-bit linux version:
Windows 7 RC – day 1
Posted by evan in Uncategorized on July 12, 2009
So I’ve been having problems with my computer since I built it. In particular the screen will freeze up from time to time with this checkerboard of black and normal. I can’t really describe it, and since the computer’s frozen when it happens, I can’t screenshot it. Anyway, I reinstalled XP a while ago and that didn’t do anything to solve it.
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