rhel

CentOS 7 Refusing VMware vSphere Guest OS Customizations

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So I just spent two hours of my life trying to get my CentOS 7 VM template to deploy correctly with a vSphere customization specification. No matter what I did it would customize the VM, then uncustomize it, essentially leaving me with the template again. I finally asked our oracle and savior, Google, and two amazing things occurred. First, I found the answer. About three weeks ago a fellow named Jeff Burns asked this same question on Server Fault, then answered his own question five minutes later (this is often what happens to me immediately upon filing a support case). He built on something I’d seen in /var/log/vmware-imc/toolsDeployPkg.log, where the VMware Tools couldn’t figure out what the OS is and …

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Strange Characters in My WordPress Blog

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In late August I moved my blog from a host running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 to a host running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. With it came an upgrade to MySQL, from 4 to 5. The migration itself seemed pretty painless, as I was able to recompile Apache on the new host and just copy everything over intact. I moved the databases by dumping each one and importing them on the other side. A week ago I was doing some work on the blog and noticed that for every apostrophe there were three other characters now: ’. I use a lot of apostrophes, and it sort of sucks to have every “it’s” become “it’s”. More specifically, it was only …

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