What version of Ubuntu am I running?

To find out run the command:

lsb_release -a

This command is used to display the Linux Standard Base and Distribution info and the lsb_release man page can be found here.

Here is the information it displays:

user@srv:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 10.10
Release: 10.10
Codename: maverick

 

Speed Limit Enforced by Aircraft

Watch it till the end.

A good laugh is a great way to start the morning.

ESXi 4.0 to ESXi 4.1 upgrade using VUM

My ESXi upgrades from 4.0 to 4.1 using vCenter Update Manager went without issue.

The process is pretty simple and detailed instructions can be found in the VMware KB here which includes this video:

I am not going to walk through the steps, the video does a great job of that. The video shows updating from 3.5 to 4.1, the only difference in the 4.0 to 4.1 upgrade process is the upgrade bundle that is used.

I had originally planned to do half my hosts on one morning and the second half the next but the upgrade was quick, it did not take more than 10 minutes for each host, so I went ahead and updated all of them.

Mr. Green/Dr. House – You’re the best ever…

Some folks in the office were talking about the House commercial that was shown during the Super Bowl last night, they didn’t get where they were going with it or what it meant.

Well here you go…

Here is the commercial for the TV Show House shown during the Super Bowl (2011)…

And here is the classic (1979) Coca-Cola commercial the idea is most likely (like there is any doubt) based on…

I reckon that are a lot of people that probably don’t remember – have never seen – the classic 1979 Coca-Cola commercial with Mean Joe Green.

Best Super Bowl Halftime Facebook Post Ever!

One of my friends from back in the day posted this during the half time show and it had me rolling.

“3 robots and a hooker?? What is going on, I was watching a football game?”

The halftime show pretty much sucked, there was a short glimmer of hope when Slash appeared but all hope was soon lost when Fergie made a failed attempt to sign/scream/whatever she does a Guns and Roses tune Sweet Child O’ Mine. (It was terrible!)

The commercial of the night – most definitely the Volkswagen one with the kid dressed as Darth Vader.

Pepsi Max had a couple of great commercials also, like this one:

And this one by Teleflora with Faith Hill was also great:

My Week in Geek – February 4, 2011

A weekly post (hopefully!?) of blogs, articles, sites, gadgets, issues, and other stuff I have found that is of interest to me (and I remembered to bookmark).

1. A new book VMware vSphere Design by Forbes Guthrie, Scott Lowe and Maish Saidel-Keesing is set for release on February 28, 2011 March 2011. You can pre-order a copy from Amazon here – I did. The books website is here – wonder if there are any plans to make the web site a resource for the book.???
    
2. A Multivendor Post on Using iSCSI with VMware vSphere. Excellent post on configuring iSCSI and storage multipathing. Speaking of iSCSI attached storage, here is a great post/script that shows How to Manage iSCSI targets with CLI part 1, part 2 can be found here. Staying with storage theme here – this is another nice powershell script to collect and process vscsistats – I looked over the docs but haven’t tried it out yet.
    
3. After updating to vCenter Server 4.1 on Monday morning (which went without a hitch btw) I noticed my vNetwork Distributed Switches had an upgrade note on them. I did not notice this until I was outside of the maintenance window so I did some searching around for information on upgrading this. I found this post in the VMware communities on it and this video on features of the 4.1 vDS and here is a step-by-step post for the vDS upgrade. All of your ESXi host have to be version 4.1 before you can upgrade the vDS to 4.1, the upgrade wizard will not allow you to upgrade if any of your host connected to the switch are not compatible. My hosts are still on 4.0 and I plan to upgrade them next week.
    
4. PowerCLI script for finding orphaned files. The script will enumerate all orphaned vmdk files on all datastores configured in your environment.
    
5. SSL Certificates and ESXi – I am currently taking the VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Security [V4.x] course offered at TCC. We covered this in class and I thought this post was a great reference.
    
6. Late last week I posted about DropBox, a cool service that allows you to store, share, and sync files. I downloaded the FREE DropBox iPhone app earlier this week and it is AWESOME! I am able to access those same files anywhere from my phone.
    
7. With VMware releasing the VCAP-DCA and VCAP-DCD exams there has been a lot of information out there. Here is an interesting post entitled How long does it take to become a VCDX with some very valuable information on the path to and the process of VMware certifications. The author of the post has also put together an EXCELLENT set of study notes for the VCAP-DCA exam AND a bunch of mock labs AND here is another great list of resources at VMwareVideos.com. I think the VCAP-DCA is going to be my next goal so I am sure I will be visiting these resources often. If you are interested the latest blueprint for the VCAP-DCA exam is here.
    
8. We are migrating our AD from Windows 2003 to 2008 (I know it’s only 2011). Here is a technet blog post – Tool for migrating IAS configuration settings to NPS is now available! that we found helpful.
    
9. Have run into this a couple of time now – WinScan Malware/Spyware. Win Scan is a rogue malicious pain in the ass false system tool that pretends to be a part of Windows operating system and reports erroneous errors with the hard disk and RAM. We have found this on several personal PCs that folks have dropped off for us to look at (if you work in the IT department of a small company you know how this works). Several malware removal tools will take care of this but here is a decent set of instructions to manually remove the malicious WinScan application. People that create these kind of things should be shot!
    
10. Next week I will be upgrading my ESXi 4.0 hosts to ESXi 4.1. Good times!
     

Have a great weekend!

Super Bowl XLV Technology

I can’t say that I care too much about the teams in the “big” game, or the “big” game itself (except for maybe the commercials), I don’t generally care too much about football but this is some seriously cool geek Stuff!

Check out the video tour of the IT infrastructure that supports Cowboys Stadium.

A couple few cool facts from the article.

…there are 884 Cisco wireless access points (AP) scattered around, and more than 70 different wiring closets containing more than 40,000 wired ports.

There is more than 8 million feet of Ethernet cabling, and 260 miles of fiber to support all the connections, and more than 100T-bytes of data storage too.

…enough cellular horsepower to support a hundred thousand individual phone conversations and video uploads concurrently.

The old data center had more than 600 aging physical servers, which were converted to 127 virtual machines running on 16 different HP blade servers using VMware.

Read the whole article here…

Use the Farfegnugen…

VMware vCenter ADAM_VMwareVCMSDS Warning

We migrated/updated our vCenter server from 4.0 with Windows 2003 Server (32bit) on a physical box to 4.1 on a VM running Windows 2008 R2 this week and so far everything has been running smooth and without issues. I did notice that the vCheck script was reporting some warnings in the vCenter log that I had not seen before the migration.

Here is the the warning message:

Active Directory Web Services encountered an error while reading the settings for the specified Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services instance. Active Directory Web Services will retry this operation periodically. In the mean time, this instance will be ignored. Instance name: ADAM_VMwareVCMSDS

This message was being repeated once every minute.

After a bit of research I found a post in the VMware Community which lead me to the fix that is here.

The registry value for \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\ADAM_VMwareVCMSDS\Parameters\Port SSL was set to type REG_SZ and the data for the value was empty. I deleted the Port SSL value, re-added the value as a REG_DWORD with the data set to a decimal value of 636, restarted the VMwareVCMSDS service, and all is well.

Thanks to TheSaffaGeek for this fix.

Mozy Home Price Change and New Tiered Storage

Just received an email from Mozy.com about changes to their storage plans and that they will no longer be offering unlimited storage. I currently use Mozy to backup my home workstations and really like the service.

Mozy is currently protecting about 90GB of data for me across 2 computers. It is easy to use – set it and forget it – backup. Just sign up, install the agent, select what you want/need to be backed up and it goes. You can access back ups to do restores online or they will send you DVDs of your data in the event of a catastrophic failure.

Here is a quote from the email I just received:

Thanks for being a valued Mozy subscriber. For the first time since 2006, we’re adjusting the price of our MozyHome service and wanted to give you a heads up. As part of this change, we’re replacing our MozyHome Unlimited backup plan and introducing the following tiered storage plans:

50 GB for $5.99 per month (includes backup for 1 computer)
125 GB for $9.99 per month (includes backup for up to 3 computers)

You may add additional computers (up to 5 in total) or 20 GB increments of storage to either of the plans, each for a monthly cost of $2.00.

My cost only increases by a few cents per month. I think I was paying $4.95 each month for each computer (some discounts for paying for a 2 year term etc.) so the $9.99/month which includes up to 3 computers is only $.09/month than what I am paying now (and there are still some other discounts for a 2 year commitment).

I still think this is a fair price for the service and the peace of mind is well worth it so I plan to continue using Mozy.com to provide remote backups of my home PCs.

Still wish they had a Linux client.

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