When configuring Jumbo Frames on a vSwitch that also has Beacon Probing selected as the Network Failover Detection method I noticed DUP ICMP packets. Moreover I wasn’t able to ping with more than 1500 bytes using vmkping indicating that Jumbo Frames is not functioning. Myteriously things started working normally once I disabled Beacon Probing and set the vSwitch to Link Status Only. I’m not sure why this doesn’t work. The only reference I have seen to this problem is KB 10167. According to the article, this was fixed in ESX 3.0.2 but I’m still seeing this behavior on ESX 3.5.
Which presidential campaign has a better taste in music? The winner here has to be Obama’s campaign. A recent video from the Obama team popped up on Youtube labelled Signs of Hope & Change. It features music from The National’s latest CD titled Boxer.
Here is The National performing Fake Empire on the Letterman show.
What do you do if you have a 10GB physical/virtualdisk with only a 8GB ntfs formatted volume on it? Windows 2003 allows you to extend the volume and reclaim that unused 2GB however there is a catch. Windows will not allow you to extend system volumes (your boot disk) or volumes that have pagefiles on them. However in the virtual world the solution is simple.
Lets assume that the aforementioned 10GB disk is a system disk of a VM (VM A) on VMware Server. In order to extend the 8GB volume -
Shutdown the Virtual Machine
Assign the vmdk file from VM A to another Windows 2003 VM (B) as HardDisk2
Boot up VM B
Go to a command prompt and run diskpart
Get a list of volumes using the command - list volume
Select the volume # you want to extend (in this case 1) using the command - select volume 1
Extend the volume using the command - extend. Additionally you can pass the ’size=<n>’ parameter if you don’t want to use all the available free space
Exit Diskpart and shutdown VM B. Remove HardDisk2 from VM B settings
Boot up VM A and we are done!
What if 10GB wasn’t enough and you needed another 5GB on this disk. Since it is a virtual machine you can grow the VMDK file using ‘vmware-vdiskmanager’. Example - vmware-vdiskmanager -x 15gb “/VM/VMA.vmdk”
A few days ago I noticed that one of my VMs on VMware Server simply won’t boot. I would get a blank screen and the following (last) entry in the log:
Jun 30 20:38:43: vcpu-0| Unknown int 10h func 0×0000
It turns out that this is because of a simple permissions issue. The permissions on the .vmx file should be set to 754. Once I did that the VM didn’t have any problem booting.
The Weepies is collaboration between two singer/songwriters – Deb Talan and Steve Tannen. Deb & Steve’s music has been featured in TV shows such as Dawson’s Creek and Felicity. The two came together in 2003 and released their first CD – Happiness. Hideaway is their latest creation.
If you are running VMware Server or Workstation on a linux machine that has power management features enabled you may notice that your guest machines can’t keep accurate time. The clocks on these guests might run too slowly or too fast. This is because the power management features can vary the speed of the CPU based on demand.
VMware has a nice article describing the problem and the resolution here. The simple fix is to add the below three lines to your /etc/vmware/config file.
The value in the first line is the maximum CPU speed. You can use the cpufrequtils to figure out what your maximum CPU frequency is as well as what frequency its currently running at.
New music video from Weezer incorporates some of the popular YouTube videos. The new self-titled album comes out on June 3rd. The single Pork and Beans can be purchased from Amazon.
Shorpy is a blog about old photos and what life a hundred years ago was like: How people looked and what they did for a living, back when not having a job usually meant not eating.
If you are a history or a photography buff, you will waste several hours browsing the thousands of photos going back to 1908.
What happens when you combine the lyrics of folk singer Ani Difranco, vocals of Dave Matthews, and music of Jazz trio Soulive? You get this version of Joyful Girl!
Terminal Services or RDP is a great tool for managing Windows servers. Its much faster when compared to other remote access methods such as VNC, PcAnywhere, or Dameware. All Windows servers allow two concurrent users to log in to the server however a number of times this limitation can be annoying. Users frequently forget to log out of their terminal sessions which causes the server to stop accepting any new sessions.
Luckily Microsoft provides some command line tools that make it very easy to manage RDP sessions remotely. qwinsta is used to query the current sessions and rwinsta is used to disconnect sessions.
C:\>qwinsta /?
Display information about Terminal Sessions.
sessionname Identifies the session named sessionname.
username Identifies the session with user username.
sessionid Identifies the session with ID sessionid.
/SERVER:servername The server to be queried (default is current).
/MODE Display current line settings.
/FLOW Display current flow control settings.
/CONNECT Display current connect settings.
/COUNTER Display current Terminal Services counters information.
C:\>rwinsta /?
Reset the session subsytem hardware and software to known initial values.
sessionname Identifies the session with name sessionname.
sessionid Identifies the session with ID sessionid.
/SERVER:servername The server containing the session (default is current).
/V Display additional information.
In order to list the current sessions on the remote server machine_a, use the following command:
qwinsta /server:machine_a
In order to disconnect a session we need to use rwinsta and pass it the ID number of the session. The session ID is the third column displayed when you run qwinsta. So in order to kill session ID #2 on machine_a we use the following command:
