How To

How to Install CrashPlan on Linux

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I like CrashPlan. They support a wider range of operating systems than some of their competitors, they have a simple pricing model, unlimited storage & retention, and a nice local, mobile, and web interfaces. I’ve been a customer for a few years now, and recently have switched a few of my clients’ businesses over to them, too. What I don’t like is that they don’t seem to support Linux very well, which is typical of companies when their installed base is mostly Windows & Mac. Most notably, their install instructions are sparse and they don’t tell you what packages you need to have installed, which is important because cloud VMs and whatnot are usually “minimal” installations. I’ve attempted to open …

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How to Replace an SD Card in a Dell PowerEdge Server

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We use the Dell Internal Dual SD module (IDSDM) for our VMware ESXi hosts. It works great, and saves us a bunch of money per server in that we don’t need RAID controllers, spinning disks, etc. Ours are populated with two 2 GB SD cards from the factory, and set to Mirror Mode in the BIOS. The other day we received an alarm: Failure detected on Internal Dual SD Module SD2 We’d never seen a failure like this so we had no idea how to fix it, and the Internet was only slightly helpful (hence the point of this writeup). Here’s what we did to replace it. Note: I’m certified to work on Dell servers, and have been messing with …

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Upgrading to VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 from Windows vCenter 5.1

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My coworkers and I recently undertook the task of upgrading our vSphere 5.1 environment to version 5.5. While upgrades of these nature aren’t really newsworthy we did something of increasing interest in the VMware world: switched from the Windows-based vCenter Server on a physical host to the vCenter Server Appliance, or vCSA, which is a VM. This is the story of that process. If you aren’t familiar with the vCSA it is a vCenter implementation delivered as a SuSE-based appliance from VMware. It has been around for several major versions, but until vSphere 5.5 it didn’t have both feature parity with Windows and the ability to support very many hosts & VMs without connecting to an external database. Under vSphere …

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Error While Loading Shared Libraries, Cannot Open Shared Object File

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In the “I wish the Internet had an actual correct answer” category comes a question from a Windows colleague trying to build software on Linux. He asks “I’m trying to do some web performance testing and I compiled weighttp and the libev libraries, which worked fine, but when I try to run the program it gives me the following error.” weighttp: error while loading shared libraries: libev.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory “I checked /usr/local/lib and the files are there. Do you have a suggestion?” Ah yes, a classic problem when building software. The problem here is that libev installed itself into /usr/local/lib: $ ls -l /usr/local/lib/libev* -rw-r–r–. 1 root root 435770 Feb 22 15:20 …

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Changing vCenter Operations Manager vApp IP Addresses

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I needed to renumber one of my VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.6 instances and it’s not immediately clear how to do it. It isn’t like the other virtual appliances VMware delivers. Here’s how I got it done, with some encouragement from Matt H. in VMware Support. It also seems to me someone wrote this up recently, but I could not find it. If that was you please leave me a comment with a link to your work. 1. Shut it all down. Take a snapshot of the individual VMs. I ended up having to revert to the snapshot, so that was nice. Remember that if you revert it reverts the VM config, too. 2. Edit the properties of the vC …

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How To Find Your iPad/iPod/iPhone's UDID Without The Device

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Sometimes you need the UDID for your iPad, iPod, or iPhone and you don’t have the device. Or you do have the device but it’s b0rked, like from installing development iOS and forgetting to add the device to your account. And you’ve got a Windows desktop, so all the Mac instructions out there don’t help a ton. It’s simple. Start->Run, then: %appdata%Apple ComputerMobileSyncBackup The folders there are named according to your device UDIDs. You can probably use the folder dates & times to figure out which is which, or if you need to get more detailed open Info.plist or Manifest.plist and look at the applications that were installed. If you need your device’s serial number check this post. Good luck!

How To Boot Into The Apple Boot Camp Menu

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One of my goals for this blog is to make things that are difficult to find on the Internet less difficult to find, and one of those things is the key to hold in order to boot into the Apple Boot Camp menu at system startup. Finding that information once a year when I need it is always a many-step process, because the Apple documentation is wordy and doesn’t just come out and say: Hold the Option key down. Or Alt if it’s a PC keyboard.   There’s also the Boot Camp control panel, too, but obviously you did not, or could not, use it, which is why you were searching for the keystroke combination instead. Hopefully you didn’t have …

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How to Install Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 for VMware vCenter 5

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My venerable post on installing MS SQL Server 2008 for vCenter 4 was getting old, so I thought I’d update it, if only because I have a new admin helping me and I’m going to stick him with doing a bunch of installs. Ha! I thank the VMware folks who have incorporated a lot of the tweaks from my original document into the defaults for vCenter 5. They were probably obvious, and not taken from my work, but it’s content I don’t need anymore. Awesome. While I don’t mean this page to become a general support site for vCenter SQL Server installations please leave a comment if something needs to be clarified or corrected, or if I’m doing something dumb …

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How to Fix Google Chrome Font Rendering Issues

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I’ve been having a heck of a time with terrible font rendering in Chrome. In fact, it’s been my biggest complaint about that browser. I get fonts with missing pieces, fonts that don’t render completely, text that is completely absent, and text with severely pixelated edges. I don’t mean to be a snob about it, but I look at this thing many hours every day, and I’d like it to work right. Here’s a severe example. The image on the left is what I saw in Chrome, and the image on the right is what I should have seen when visiting a particular web site:         That’s like WTF levels of crappy, right? It was happening all the time, on …

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How to Change SCSI Controllers on your Linux VM

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A question from Matt Vogt prompted this, where he wants to go from the BusLogic  SCSI controller to the LSI Logic SAS controller. It’s actually a straightforward conversion if you have the right steps. This is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, and 5, but the principle should be the same for everything. It’s basically: snapshot, change config files, change hardware. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, in contrast, appears to have all the LSI Logic, parallel & SAS, drivers, as well as the paravirtual SCSI drivers, so all you need to do is shut the VM down and change the type of SCSI controller you’re using. I always recommend trying this on a test VM before you try …

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