My Geek Finds

Check out Google 411 – 1-800-GOOG-411 or 1-800-466-4411

Google’s new 411 service is free, fast and easy to use. Give it a try now and see how simple it is to find and connect with local businesses for free.

Just call 1-800-466-4411

But I have some more stuff to post coming soon.

Follow Santa as he delivers toys around the world.
Norad Santa

Merry Christmas!!!

Bare Metal Software’s Bare Tail

Bare Tail is a handy little free utility that allows you to monitor log files on Windows real-time. Basically a GUI of the Unix command tail -f.

Allows you to tail monitor multiple files. Pretty neat check it out here http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baretail/index.php

The Windows 2003 Resource kit contains a command line tail utility that is also pretty handy.

Last night a tech from EMC was here to update the Control Station and DART code on our Celerra to enable file system deduplication (more about this later).

As part of this process we had to failover to our standby datamover. Thought these commands might be useful later so here they are.

server_2 – Primary datamover
server_3 – Standby datamover

Fail over to standby mover

# server_standby server_2 -a mover

Faults server_x and renames it to server_2.faulted.server_3
Renames server_3 to server_2
server_3 is now online as server_2

During the time it took to failover I dropped 3 pings to the datamover.

Fall back to primary mover

# server_standby server_2.faulted.server_3 -r mover

Renames standby server to server_3
Renames server_2.faulted.server_3 to server_2
server_2 is now back online as the primary mover.

Again I dropped 3 pings while the datamovers switched.

Here are a couple other useful Celerra commands.

Listing your datamovers and their status from the command line:

# /nas/bin/nas_server -l
id type acl slot groupID state name
1 1 0 2 0 server_2
2 4 0 3 0 server_3

You can get this info from the GUI but this is quick if you are logged into the Control Station CLI.

View the nas version running on your datamovers:

# server_version ALL
server_2 : Product: EMC Celerra File Server Version: T5.6.46.410
server_3 : Product: EMC Celerra File Server Version: T5.6.46.410

Basic stuff but it might be useful to have on hand later.

I just picked this up today – VMware Cookbook – A Real-World Guide to Effective VMware Use

Most of the book was written while vSphere was still in beta so the book covers ESX/ESXi 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5.

I have only thumbed through it so far but it looks like there is a lot of good information. There are some pretty good tables with the configuration differences between 3.5 and 4 in Chapter 1. The command line reference in Chapter 5 should be useful to both versions, as well as the Security stuff in Chapter 6.

Looking forward to reading the book cover to cover.

Interesting little how-to article on using iTunes to organize your pdf documents.

http://lifehacker.com/240447/geek-to-live–organize-your-pdf-library-with-itunes

Defraggler – http://www.piriform.com/defraggler

Use Defraggler to defrag your entire hard drive, or individual files – unique in the industry. This compact and portable Windows application supports NTFS and FAT32 file systems.

And it’s free for personal and commercial use.

Handy little free utility that allows you to extract icons from dlls or exes and save them as an ico file.

Download it here http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/iconsext.html

I put these instuctions together several years ago. I am moving from a co-located physical server to a VPS with Hands-on Web Hosting so in the process of moving I am trying to consolidate some of my older sites that I no longer update. I am guessing these instructions should also be usable on newer versions of RedHat, Fedora, or other Linux distros.
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If you are running RedHat 9.0 and want to run “headless” (no monitor, keyboard, or mouse) but still want to have a console to receive console messages or login, here are the basics of what I did to get it working.

This example will set up a serial console on Com 1 (ttyS0) at 38.4K Baud, Data bits 8, Parity None, 1 stop bit.

Requirements:

* agetty – alternative Linux getty – agetty is included in the RedHat 9.0 Installation (unless you chose not to install it)
* A Null Modem Cable – To connect to your PC, laptop, or terminal. You can make one yourself or pick one up from Radio Shack for a few bucks.
* Running lilo as your boot loader.
* Support for console on serial port must be compiled into the kernel (not loaded as a module) This option is located under Character devices – it is compiled in by default on Redhat 9 installations.
* Root access.

Make sure you set up your BIOS to continue on Keyboard or Mouse errors. Some machines will allow you to ignore these errors specifically, on others you may have to configure it to continue on any error.

In /etc/lilo.conf add this to the global section:

serial = 0,38400n8

Then add this to the append line in the kernel section:

append = “console=ttyS0,38400n8″

If you are already using an append for other options just add console=ttyS0,38400n8 to the end of those. Once you have made the changes to /etc/lilo.conf remember to run /sbin/lilo to set the new configuration for the next boot.

To enable the ability to login on to the machine using the serial console add the following line to /etc/inittab:

s0:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -i -h -L 38400 ttyS0 vt100

Connect the null modem cable to Com 1 and then to your PC, Laptop, or Terminal. Configure the connection (terminal program) for 38400 baud (38.4k), 8 data bits, parity none, and stop bits 1. (On windows you can connect using Hyperterminal, TeraTerm, or any other terminal program that supports serial ports. On a Linux machine you can use minicom).

Now reboot the linux box that you configured the serial console on and monitor the connection. You should see the kernel decompress and then the boot messages over your serial connection. Once the machine has finished booting you should receive a logon prompt on the console.

If you receive a bunch of garbage on the terminal check your baud and parity settings. If you do not receive a logon prompt check you inittab configuration and make sure agetty is running on ttyS0 (ps -ef | grep agetty).

For more help check out the man pages for agetty, lilo, lilo.conf, and inittab.

You can also try a google search for linux serial console, there are a lot of other similar ways to do this.