Monthly Archives: April 2011

Linked: Remove the “host currently has no management network redundancy” warning from your whitebox HA enabled ESX cluster

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I found a great post on how to remove the Host <ESXi Hostname> currently has no management network redundancy warning that you get on a typical ESXi whitebox installation. Due to the fact that most whitebox machines don’t have multiple nics..

For more info and screenshots, checkout the original post.

When you completed building your ESX cluster from so called whitebox machines, you might see a warning sign at the cluster level. It will tell you the management network has no redundancy. This is probably correct because whitebox clusters usually don’t have 2 NIC’s for the management network.

To loose this irritating warning message do the following.

  1. Go to the properties of your cluster
  2. Select HA from the left pane
  3. Click the ‘Advanced Options’ button
  4. Fill in the first column of the first row by double clicking and typing the value ‘das.ignoreRedundantNetWarning’
  5. Fill in the second column of the same row by double clicking and typing the value ‘True’
  6. Close the Advanced Options window
  7. Now deselect the option ‘Enable HA’ and press OK
  8. HA will be disabled, this will take some time
  9. Go back to the options and select ‘Enable HA’ and press OK
  10. HA will be enabled and the warning will be gone

HazeOver

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Yesterday I bought HazeOver and I really like it when I’m working on my MacBook Pro. But I only use it when I use the built-in monitor..

Linked: How To Rebuild LaunchServices to Remove Duplicates from “Open With” Menu

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Have you ever used the right-click “Open With” feature in Finder when opening a specific type of file?  While this feature is usually pretty handy, if you install and remove applications on a regular basis there may still be traces of those applications that have been long-gone from your Mac. In this how-to, we’ll show how you can rebuild this list so it remains up-to-date and only shows what you currently have on your hard drive.

Basically you open a terminal and run the following command…And wait.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

Source

Logging my work to a text file and making it readable in VIM

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I use VIM to edit text-files on my mac. Or I use VIM to edit a couple of text-files containing my my worklogs. So I can keep track of what I have done on different projects and at what time.

Creating a quick log entry

I have edited my .bash_profile with the following line
alias wl='vim + ~/Dropbox/NV/worklog.txt; clear'

This in combination with quick access to terminal.app using Visor makes appending to my worklog almost instant.

  1. Visor keyboard shortcut, in my case Alt + § (On a Swedish keyboard It makes sense)
  2. I type wl and press enter
  3. VIM opens the last line in my worklog
  4. To enter insert mode and append to the end of the line i type A.
  5. I type enter -> nnow ,which is my TextExpander abbreviation for inserting a date and time stamp, on the new line. (Example: 2011-04-12 20.20 [Tuesday] )
  6. The I write a short log of what I’m doing at the moment.
  7. I save and exit the worklog file by typing Esc (to exit insert mode), then wq -> enter.

Done.

Making the text file readable in VIM

To make this logfile more readable I use a customized color formatting.

Edit the ~/.vimrc file

This is the content of my .vimrc file.

colorscheme desert
syntax on

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.txt set filetype=txt
au! Syntax newlang source ~/.vim/syntax/txt.vim

Create the ~/.vim/syntax/txt.vim

Source

I downloaded Tomasz Kalkosinski’s universal syntax script for all txt docs. But I added a couple of changes of my own:

syn match logDate /^\d\{4}-\d\{2}-\d\{2}/
syn match logTime /\d\{2}:\d\{2}:\d\{2},\d\{3}/

And later in the file:

HiLink  logDate Comment
HiLink  logTime Todo

You can download my vim.txt file here.

Linked: VistaSwitcher

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I’ve had some issues with application switching, Alt + tab, on my virtual Windows 7 machine. When I pressed alt + tab the Aero-preview pane got stuck. I had to press enter to switch applications.

So I downloaded and installed VistaSwitcher.

Great little app that’s, in my opinion, much better than the original in Windows 7.

Linked: Bash reference

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Found this awesome bash reference here and thought I’d share it.

Ctrl + A Go to the beginning of the line you are currently typing on
Ctrl + E Go to the end of the line you are currently typing on
Ctrl + L Clears the Screen, similar to the clear command
Ctrl + U Clears the line before the cursor position. If you are at the end of the line, clears the entire line.
Ctrl + H Same as backspace
Ctrl + R Let’s you search through previously used commands
Ctrl + C Kill whatever you are running
Ctrl + D Exit the current shell
Ctrl + Z Puts whatever you are running into a suspended background process. fg restores it.
Ctrl + W Delete the word before the cursor
Ctrl + K Clear the line after the cursor
Ctrl + T Swap the last two characters before the cursor
Esc + T Swap the last two words before the cursor
Alt + F Move cursor forward one word on the current line
Alt + B Move cursor backward one word on the current line
Tab Auto-complete files and folder names

How I manually migrated from vCenter 4.0(32-bit) to 4.1u1(64-bit)

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Last week I upgraded a vCenter 4.0 installation to 4.1u1. The vCenter was installed on a 32-bit VM so I needed to migrate the installation to a new 64-bit host.

I tried to do the migration according to the vSphere 4.1 upgrade pre-installation requirements and considerations guide. But sadly I got an error during the migration process.

RESTORE FILELIST is terminating abnormally.

The error is described in this thread at vmware communities.

Also, the datamigration scripts makes the original vCenter database corrupt. So if the datamigration fails, as it did for me, the original installation is trashed. (Luckily the datamigration scripts exports a backup before trashing it. But this procedure stinks anyway.)

So how did I migrate? Well I found a workaround and did the following.:

On the old vCenter 4.0 server (32-bit)

  1. Stop the vCenter service
  2. Install Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express
  3. Open Management Studio and detached the vCenter database.
  4. Copy the database files.
  5. Copy the % ProgramData% \ VMware \ VMware VirtualCenter \ SSL folder.
  6. Shutdown the vCenter VM.

On the new vCenter 4.1u1 server (64-bit)

  1. Install vCenter 4.1u1 with all the default settings. (This installs SQLExpress and the vCenter database)
  2. Uninstall vCenter from add and remove programs. (This does not remove the SQLExpress installation)
  3. Restore the % ProgramData% \ VMware \ VMware VirtualCenter \ SSL
  4. Install Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express
  5. Detach the newly installed database and attach the one from the old vCenter server.
  6. Create a ODBC connection to the local SQLExpress server with the old vCenter database.
  7. Install vCenter 4.1u1 and choose existing ODBC connection during the installation. The installer will detect the old vCenter database and upgrade it.

I wonder why VMware don’t recommend this procedure in the first place?

HTTPS Everywhere

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HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It encrypts your communications with a number of major websites.

Many sites on the web offer some limited support for encryption over HTTPS, but make it difficult to use. For instance, they may default to unencrypted HTTP, or fill encrypted pages with links that go back to the unencrypted site.

This plug-in is an absolute must-have.

Download it here.