i believe i’ve experienced this exact same problem at least 3 times all because i keep repeating the same mistake. the problem is that i’m unable to ping the IP address of the service console no matter how much i mess around with recreating the vswif, verifying/changing networking settings, disabling/reenabling the vswif, trying different vmnics, restarting networking, the list goes on. the mistake i keep making is changing the VLAN ID of the Service Console port group. that particular VLAN ID needs to stay as 0.

so this time i made sure to write it down before i experience this a 4th time. but on a positive note, in process of trying to resolve my problem i stumbled upon a more user-friendly method of setting up service consoles. vsphere 4u2 ships with a menu based utility named “console-setup” . much more convenient to use than the esxcfg* commands.

sources:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1000258

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=1000266

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/documentLinkInt.do?micrositeID=&popup=true&languageId=&externalID=1003796

i recently played around with a kindle 4th gen device which is now simply known as the “kindle”. the 3rd gen kindle that i still own is now known as the “kindle keyboard”. the new kindle has scrapped the physical keyboard and in doing so has made the device much more compact. the screen is still the same size as the previous model. getting rid of the keyboard makes sense…besides when i had to type in a WPA2 key for joining a wireless network, i can’t recall the last time i used it. the other differences between the 4 and previous generation are minimal. one thing that kind of sucks is the fact that they went from 4GB of internal storage to 2GB. e-books are generally a couple 100K in size so it would seem like it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. however, i store a lot of technical pdfs with graphics on my kindle that take up a good chunk of space. for instance, i have 230 items total on my kindle and i’m using up 1.3GB of the storage. so it’d be nice if they returned to the 4GB storage again for the 5th gen.

the kindle fire and kindle touch were also released. neither i find interesting. one is a color mini-tablet the other is an e-ink reader with a touch screen. i think i will always feel like a touch screen has no business existing on a reading device. and it adds nothing but cost. but i realize the vast majority of people nowadays expect every device to have a touch screen. so i imagine amazon just caved into consumer demand, no matter how stupid that demand might be.

now, is there any reason to trade-in or throw out your kindle 3rd gen (keyboard) for a 4th gen? not really at all. even if your battery was dying you can still buy a brand new kindle keyboard (as of today 10/29/11) cheaper than you can a kindle 4 (non-ad supported model). the kindle 4 does indeed look sleeker but there’s not sufficient improvement or perks to make you want to “upgrade” to one. and speaking of which i’m not sure there’s much more improvement or features that they can actually add to the kindle. it’s already a pretty great device. i suppose the e-ink technology will keep getting better though.

in the short term, i believe the only real enhancement amazon can add would be a continuing decrease in price. i imagine by the time a 5th gen model is released that the ad-supported model will debut at $59 and the non-ad supported model at $99. $99 being that magical sub-100 dollars number.

and finally, slightly off-topic, what’s really messing up the whole e-book business is the greed of book publishers. ever since apple entered into the arena of e-books with the ipads it seems that the greed of publishers skyrocketed. e-books on average are only slightly cheaper than physical copies and sometimes inexplicably more expensive than the physical copy. i’m quite okay with new releases debuting at standard paperback prices, but it gets quite ridiculous when a 40 year old book sells for $15-16 in e-book form, that evidently is even full of typos…what the heck? hopefully, increased competition will sort the pricing out eventually…

there’s a very well put together vmware kb article regarding running a SQL script to purge old performance data from the vcenter database. the script is included for download in the article.

source: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1025914

during my recent distribution upgrade to ubuntu 11.10 i ended up needing 2GB of free space in /var. no amount of me deleting excess logs and so on was ever going to free up that much space. i had a lot of extra space on /usr so i decided to use gparted live to resize the partitions. normally, i would be cautious and backup my data just in case something went amiss. at the time though, i wasn’t much in the mood to do all of that. and i felt since i’m just messing with /var and /usr, the worst i could do is mess up my linux installation and all my personal data in /home would be fine (hopefully).

anyways, i proceeded with no backups and used gparted live to resize the ext4 partitions. the process was rather painless and the result was a success.

vectorworks uses a HASP license manager. if the machine hosting the license manager is going to be on a different subnet than the vectorworks clients, then the clients will require a nethasp.ini file that includes the IP address of the license manager machine. on windows PCs the file goes in the same folder as the vectorworks executable. on macs the file must be copied to the /etc directory.

sources:
http://kbase.vectorworks.net/questions/469/NetHASP.ini+Configuration+Guide
http://www.hasp.com/support/hasp/enduser.aspx

update 5/22/2013:
wanted to notate that for the client installation that you do need to enter a serial number. serial numbers that work in conjunction with a networked licensing server begin with the letter C.

it’s been a few years since i messed around with windows imaging files (wims). here’s a quick list of diskpart commands needed to be ran to prepare a drive for the application of a wim file:

select disk 0
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
format quick fs=ntfs
assign letter=”C”
active
exit

and then a wim can be applied with the imagex utility
source:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744531(WS.10).aspx

i was pleasantly surprised to find that you could still install a gnome classic-like option in ubuntu 11.10. i stumbled upon it actually while i was trying to install the normal gnome3 non-unity environment.

i did give unity a try for about 20 minutes. i don’t outright hate it, if i could move the positioning of the launcher bar, make the icons smaller, and disable animations i would use it all the time. however, browsing thru the gigantic icons of non-launcher bar applications is ridiculous. i realize the idea is that you’re supposed to search for your apps, but hey i don’t want to. i want to use mouse-clicks to launch apps unless i’m at a CLI. and i still think kde4 is a pretty slick and fast environment, but i still can’t get used to widgets-only based desktop.

first impressions-wise of 11.10, i don’t have much to say either good or bad. just seems like a solid release so far.

this post has information on setting up gnome classic on 11.10:
http://www.upubuntu.com/2011/10/how-to-use-gnome-classic-on-ubuntu-1110.html

after upgrading to 11.10 i could start virtualbox, but could not start any VMs. i received an error stating the “vboxdrv” kernel module was not running. when i tried to load the module manually i got an message saying the module wasn’t found.

i ended up doing a reinstall of the virtualbox-dkms package and everything was fine after that.

update 5/5/2012: i had to repeat this process after the upgrade to ubuntu 12.04…so perhaps it is safe to assume this needs to be done after every upgrade.

today in unity connection 8.5 i needed to start the database proxy service again and was unable to access the service control center via the UC serviceability page. the following error was listed on the page “unable to communicate with service control center. the password for appadministrator (the administration account that was created during installation) may be locked out or expired.”

i found some cisco troubleshooting docs that mentioned that exact error and provided a solution, that, evidently was incomplete. further searching brought me to this post: http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-voip/2011-July/023010.html which offers a complete solution.

in short this is what needs to be done:
run cuc dbquery unitydirdb select alias, displayname, objectid from vw_user where alias =’appadministrator alias’

run cuc dbquery unitydirdb select objectid, userobjectid, credentialtype, encryptiontype from tbl_credential where userobjectid = “appadministrator userobjectid”

run cuc dbquery unitydirdb update tbl_credential set encryptiontype = “4” where objectid = “appadministrator objectid”

utils cuc reset password appadministrator

then restart the tomcat service (utils service restart Cisco Tomcat)

my thanks to ariel posting this information.

update 3/25/13:
much to my surprise this issue reoccurred today. however, this time around i simply logged into connection administration and opened up the appadministrator account’s Password Settings and checked the “Does Not Expire” option.

i’ve been annoyed for quite some time about receiving an error when trying to open downloaded files directly from chromium in ubuntu (using gnome classic). i’m not sure exactly when this function broke, but i’ve kind of just lived with it without looking into what the problem was. today, i finally got fed up enough and started googling. several forums pointed to uninstalling the exo-utils package which appears to be a core package of xfce. i’ve verified that this does indeed work. however, i’m sure i’ve probably broken xfce doing so (unverified).

there’s probably a less destructive solution out there, but i’m content with this for now as i won’t be switching over to xfce as my main DE until next ubuntu release.