Merrell Lastick

While tackling a speicifc business need to build, install, and configure an ESXi server for my client, I found out [the hard way] that one really needs to do their homework on the hardware compatibility with VMWare’s ESXi! There’s no shortage of documentation out there, but for the relative-newbie to VMWare, it quickly becomes overwhelming.

I was trying to go for the latest and greatest build of ESXi, which currently (6/2010) is 4.0 Update 1. I have two SAS drives in the server, and the built-in raid controller on the motherboard was not compatible with any version of ESXi.

My first attempt was to purchase a 3ware 9650SE-2LP to RAID-1 (mirror) the two SAS drives. This would have been great, except the “gotcha” with that card is: it’ll work with ESXi, but not as the primary drive. Only as additional storage. Bummer.

My next attempt was a LSI MegaRAID SAS 8344ELP controller. I hadn’t seen anything particularly bad about that card and ESXi, but I needed verification from “the community” before I threw down the duckets for the card.

I posted on multiple forums and waited over a week… no responses. So I finally shot out a few emails to some random google results for VMWare experts and Bob from StarWindSoftware.com quickly confirmed that, indeed, the LSI MegaRAID card has drivers for 4.0 U1!

Just wanted to throw a “thanks” to Bob and his company for taking the time to calm my concerns – and at the same time post this on my blog if anyone else is going in circles wondering about the compatibility of these two cards.

Baremetal or bust :)
Cheers!

I couldn’t be happier. OpenVPN instructions for DD-WRT and walkthrus have been giving me a bit of a headache. Somewhere there were simple instructions, but I kept googling and finding incomplete or vague details of how to use the OpenVPN functionality of DD-WRT.

Finally, I found a fantastic guide with a very simple step by step outline to link two DD-WRT routers. It’s silly-stupid simple and after modifying a few IP addresses in the provided sample startup scripts, I was able to paste the commands into the web-GUI for DD-WRT on both ends, tell it to run them and poof, I was able to talk to servers on both ends.

Simple a slam-dunk userguide. I commend the author and pass it along to you. No need to even enable VPN services in the DDWRT GUI. Just follow the instructions and you’ll be linked in a jiffy.

I just watched the latest OSGUI.com Tech TV Show where he’s showing off Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha. Nice guy – nice show, but this rant isn’t about the show…

Is anyone else really tired of new updates to Linux flavors that just seem to crawl along GUI-wise? For example, for this new release of Ubuntu, OSGUI.com shows off that there’s new themes, they moved the mix/max/close buttons to the left (like a Mac), and there’s a nicer looking system update tool.

When will true HCI/GUI experts take on Linux and blow Windows (and Windows 7 for that matter) out of the water? When will programmers and developers stop building on the UI of Linux and do something different. WIMP (Windows, Icons, Pointers, Menus) aren’t going to go away overnight but look at what Windows 7 did:

They introduced the shake-minimize feature… the arranging of windows by putting them to the top or sides.. The new taskbar with pinned favorites. Even the easy access to “Libraries” now. All moving in a direction that bring ease of use and accessiblity to functionality with much less hassle.

I expect greatness from Linux. The core is fan-friggin-tastic but the UI needs to be developed by interface and HCI specialists that don’t think it’s a good idea to put a scrollable list in a tiny-unsizable 150×200 viewport in the middle of the screen.

I came across this great video where a kid does a tracert in XP’s CMD.EXE and, painfully, starts to go into huge invented-fairy-tale detail on how the results you see from that command are “the current people who are using Google.com RIGHT NOW!”. Everything that comes out of this little self-proclaimed “hacker”s mouth is so very incorrect and pulled out of his arse that it’s a huge facepalm to watch.

He continues about how the tracert’s ms (milliseconds) for each entry are each person’s computer (or Internet) speed. And that the last entries that didn’t respond are “people who have faster computers than [him]“. I did mention that his conculusions were painful to hear right?

Anyway, this whole thing reminded me of when I was a kid. My dad had bought me an Edmund Scientific AstroScan telescope (I should have never pawn’d it in the 90s. To this day, they’re highly regarded).

I took it out to the back porch and pointed it at a radio tower at night with the blinking red light at the top. I had my notepad and pencil. I took detailed notes with drawings and was estatic to “discover” that the light on top of the tower was not a single bulb or point — but rather a donut shaped O-Ring! After sketching it out, I called my dad out and shared my findings with the seriousness of a college math professor.

He never stopped or interrupted me or corrected me. He just smiled and was happy that I was enjoying my new telescope. It was a week or two later that I found out (on my own) that the only reason the lightbulb showed up as a donut is because the eyepiece was out of focus! And I quietly corrected myself, discarded my notes, shook my head, and moved on.

But my dad let me be happy (and sooo very wrong).
I love you, dad. I’ll try to do the same with my kids.

Ever since I got a HP Touchsmart all in one multitouch screen, I’ve been looking for a great large-button fullscreen interface for Winamp.

I *finally* found it!

Alpha Media Player X5!

You can turn off or speed up the transition animations if you like. It looks great, works purrrfect with a touchscreen and has some nice animated lighting and visualization fx. Every function/button/slider is made for full screen touch (no tiny controls).

I highly recommend it for touchscreen computers running winamp!

:)

In my online searches, learning more about AutoHotKey scripts, I found out a couple very interesting things!

First, you can compile an .AHK script into an .EXE! Nice..

Next, there are some wicked cool scripts out there that people have turned into full blown installs. The best and most useful I’ve seen thus far is “Nifty Windows”.

How long we have put up with moving and resizing windows by specifically dragging the title bar or thin edges of windows! Barbaric, I tell you! Enter Nifty Windows, and now I can move, resize, minimize, and close programs with such intuitive speed – like they are dynamic “cards” on a table. Folks, this is a beautiful thing. No matter where your mouse is, in the window, just move the whole thing around, without having to specifically position the cursor anywhere in the surrounding frame. Or do a Right then Left click sequence and it minimizes it. No need to find the minimize button. A simple Right click with a Middle-Mouse click, and it closes whatever you did that on. Or if I do the Right-then-Left click on the title bar instead of IN the window, it rolls up the window to just a title bar.

The download link for NiftyWindows is here.

The extent of what it does is nutty-awesome. I’m only used to (at this point) the moving, resizing, minimizing, and closing functions — which are all done with the mouse (no meta-key combos needed). But if I get into the holding down CTRL or ALT or WINKEY in combo with the mouse, there are tons of other features available — transparency, click thru, etc.

Hot-damn, sometimes I’m so clever with all these Freeware/Opensource solutions.
Having a need for a server to fire up two GUI/Win32 programs and click around/run some menu commands, I set out to find the right automation software that would provide a good amount of error checking feedback — so the headless server doesn’t just go into wonkyville and sit unnoticed for any length of time. The following combo is a pure win:

1) Autohotkey (Free!)
2) Bmail.exe (Free and 17k single cmd line exe!)
3) and finally SMTPServer ($69 single license :( But if you have a open relay smtp server, you don’t need this. I’ll explain soon…)

So I use the powerful scripting of Autohotkey with some checking IF loops to monitor the progress of opening the GUI proggies. When anything goes unexpected (or if the files I’m exporting/converting aren’t found — i.e. something went wrong) then I trigger a quick bmail.exe call which, in a single command line, sends a one liner email to myself with a custom subject/body – letting me know where in the process it went south. (Note: you can also feed a file to bmail for the body, or pipe output right into it. Nice!)

Only unfortunate thing is that bmail.exe doesn’t support authentication to the smtp server, but you can specify the smtp server addr and port. This is where that local SMTPserver (3) comes into play. It allows for relaying smtp out correctly without authentication on the receiving end!

Anyway, the comination of these three tools allows me to not only script out some serious GUI automation (saving a human from the monotomous task of doing this export/import/process every day) but to instantly notify me on my smartphone (G1) whenever something has gone awry.

On a side note, check out the rest of the command line utilities on that Bmail.exe site. He’s written some fantastic, small single .exe utilities that most any admin of a WinXP/2k/2k3 network would die for.

‘Had my client running the Buisness Ed. of ESET’s NOD32 but it was v2.x (cobwebs compared to their latest, but still did a great job of protection on the XP PRO workstations) and a problem came up with the auto-distribution of the updates.

I got on the telly with their support and they fiddled around a bit, but they’re up on v4.x nowadays so they didn’t even remember where the updates were configured in the v2 server, so they kindly gave me a full upgrade to their v4 suite. Here’s how it went down: Beautifully.

1. I had to uninstall everyone’s v2 client manually. Thankfully we don’t have hundreds of workstations, so I was able to run this individually on each machine. The uninstall of v2 was very clean and fast. Needed a reboot on each, tho. :-/

2. Installed the NOD32 server component/service on my Win2k3 server. (Smooth, and some options to navigate through during the install. Not bad.)

3. Installed the NOD32 RA (Remote Administration) client on my Win2k3 server to monitor all the clients and control the server. OKay, once again, even smoother – no real options here, since this is just the server’s control center for all operations.

4. Using the RA Console, I created an initial install “package” that contained the NOD32 Biz Edition install package. Then went thru all the configuration options that are to be pushed down to each client after the software is installed. Like making a “group policy”, you set up the options once, and they’re used for each push-install. This took the most time, just making sure all the settings were exactly as I wanted them. For the most part, ESET did a good job of setting things appropriate for a business environment. I cranked up a few things, and turned off a few notifications for the end user, so it just “did it” rather than asked first. (Oh, don’t forget to turn off the email signatures on all in/out email. Only if the email is/was infected is a much better setting). Overall, working in this configuration editor is pleasent and quick. There’s just a lot of options, so grab a coffee. Many areas you can skim over.. and don’t be fooled by the major branches/options at the bottom of the tree. The last couple major branches are meant for pushing this config out to another NOD32 server/service.. not clients.

5. Saved the config with the install package (binary) and then went to Push-Install them on the machines on the LAN. After supplying the administrator pwd for the domain just once, it ran through the whole list of workstations and it sucessfully pushed, installed, set config, and started up each one.

No reboots necessary, each workstation was now running the latest and pulling updates from the HTTP client that the server component has built in. I opted not to go with the mirror folder, since the HTTP connect from client to server works just fine.

The only change I had to do was the port number for the clients connecting to the HTTP server. The ports used to be 8082 in v2.x but now the default is 2221 so the syntax changed from http://server:8082 to http://server:2221

Much love to ESET. I even set up the whole enterprise suite (clients and server) to email my admin address whenever anything happens (client can’t update, virus found, submission back to ESET, etc).

/m

Omg, I love it. (Wondering if the bandwidth of 10 USB2 devices would clog the single USB2 hookup to the CPU?)

At least it’s self powered :P Link to product page (no, can’t buy it yet)

Currently dealing with TMobile G1 issues.

My original G1 (HTC Dream) has integrity issues – things go corrupt and apps get trashed for no reason. I’ve done like 3 factory resets and formatted the SD Card a few times but I just needed a new HTC Dream. Clearly this one’s fubar. Called TMobile and they say “sure, we’ll send you a new or like new G1″. Yeah… I got the “like new” treatement because the new replacement has an issue with the SIM card. It can’t communicate with the SIM card after 10 minutes. I called TMobile and they’re going to send me ANOTHER new or like new G1.

And then the smarmy rep says to me (after I explain to him that they deal with so many G1 returns for tech issues that they can’t possibly be spending enough time with each unit to fully test it and make sure it’s really refurbished and fixed).. he says “Oh, I’m sure you’re gonna get a good one this time”. Like he has any clue what I’m going to get from the factory. All he’s doing is fielding upset calls on the phone and punching requests into a queue for the factory to fulfill. Yeah, he’s suuure. :)

I’ll give them one more chance. If they fk it up again, I’m running to the Droid (drool).