So I'm writing this down here to help me remind me to think this out. I think the internet will be the downfall of democracy.

I watched a video from the TED conference with a speaker (he was familiar, but I forget who he was, a journalist) who was taking about science denial, and how everyone is entitled to an opinion, but not their own facts. I think the internet is great, but it does a terrible job (good job, but terrible effect) of empowering people who have an opinion counter to science. Vaccines are a great example of this (although I think we seem to have a handle on that one), but now theres a furor over high-fructose corn syrup. Our soda in Canada has sugar, not HFCS in it, and we still get fat from drinking it. I think its a victim attitude.

Maybe I shouldn't say the internet, maybe I should say facebook will be the downfall, although its existence is necessary for facebook to exist. People with some political agenda think product X is evil, with no scientific background whatsoever, make facebook page to convince others its evil, and those people think its right! no science involved whatsoever.

Anyway, when we stop listening to experts, our system is going to fall into chaos, with only the loudest or most popular voices being listened to. Sean Penn will be president! Or something equally as bad.

While enabling mailboxes in Symantec Enterprise Vault (software that archives most of you mail except the last 30 days, put in place because we're too nice to tell users to FUCKING DELETE THEIR SHITTY 15 year old emails) this error popped up. Funny.

If it looks like I'm not doing anything, it's because I did it right the first time

I can't stand make-work projects, and I also can't stand being bored. That means I end up writing a lot of scripts to make my life easier, rather than do something meaningless that someone else will look at twice and then forget about.

I also hate people who get panicked. Calm down and think about the situation before you make a snap decision.

NFS is great.... sorta

NFS is great technology when it comes to VMware - thin provisioning by default, no HBAs to mess with, dynamic storage allocation, etc.... however there is one pitfall that I've just noticed on our test lab.

With HBAs, when you ran out of space in a presented LUN, only VMs that had snapshots attached would crash, because they were writing a redo log, and no space was available for that.

Now, with NFS and thin-provisioned VMs (and even thin-provisioned VMs on VMFS) all the VMs have redo logs essentially, so if you run out of space on a volume, all the VMs in that volume are going to crash (which could be a large number fyi).

Thankfully, dynamic allocation of NFS volumes should prevent this, given sufficient warning on your storage.

VMworld 2009

Just got back from VMworld 2009 in San Francisco. Conference was great - good sessions, great labs (although I hear they had some trouble on Monday) and good people. Overall a great value, I'll be going again next year.

Max.

VMware storage migration script

We're moving from SAN attached to NFS storage on our vmware environment, (and vSphere4 isn't out yet) so I wrote a script that will migrate VMs from current location to the new one (I had to hard-code the new location in, since when using sed the path with vmfs/ messed up sed due to the s/).

Warning: if you have VMs with 2 disks with the same name (if they were created in different directories) then this won't work. It will work for up to 3 disks, and should be easy to make support more.

#!/bin/bash
HOMEDIR=/vmfs/volumes/d42ddbc9-93beeb73
for VMNAME in `vmware-cmd -l | awk -F/ '{print $5}'`
do
mkdir $HOMEDIR/$VMNAME/
VMPATH=`vmware-cmd -l | grep $VMNAME | awk -F. '{print $1}'`
for VMDK in `grep scsi0:.*fileName $VMPATH.vmx | awk -F\" '{print $2}'`
do
vmkfstools -i $VMPATH.vmdk $HOMEDIR/$VMNAME/$VMDK -d 'thin' -a lsilogic
done

vmware-cmd -s unregister $VMPATH.vmx

sleep 2

cp $VMPATH.vmx $HOMEDIR/$VMNAME/$VMNAME.vmx.new

sed "s/scsi0:0.fileName.*/scsi0:0.fileName = \/vmfs\/volumes\/d42ddbc9-93beeb73\/${VMNAME}\/${VMNAME}.vmdk/" $HOMEDIR/$VMNAME/$VMNAME.vmx.new > $HOMEDIR/$VMNAME/$VMNAME.vmx.new2
sed "s/scsi0:1.fileName.*/scsi0:1.fileName = \/vmfs\/volumes\/d42ddbc9-93beeb73\/${VMNAME}\/${VMNAME}_1.vmdk/" $HOMEDIR/$VMNAME/$VMNAME.vmx.new2 > $HOMEDIR/$VMNAME/$VMNAME.vmx.new3
sed "s/scsi0:2.fileName.*/scsi0:2.fileName = \/vmfs\/volumes\/d42ddbc9-93beeb73\/${VMNAME}\/${VMNAME}_2.vmdk/" $HOMEDIR/$VMNAME/$VMNAME.vmx.new3 > $HOMEDIR/$VMNAME/$VMNAME.vmx

rm -rf $HOMEDIR/$VMNAME/*.new*
chmod +x $HOMEDIR/$VMNAME/$VMNAME.vmx
vmware-cmd -s register $HOMEDIR/$VMNAME/$VMNAME.vmx
done

HP Onboard Administrator LDAP authentication search context issue

This was an annoying problem today, so I'm posting it in case it helps anyone else.

I was trying to get the OA for our blades connecting to our AD. I setup the LDAP like the manual said, but no joy. Some research on the HP forums said that if the user you want to connect as is in a different OU than the group they're a member of, both need to be configured as search contexts in the OA config. My config page looks like this:

Directory Server Address: dc.domain.com

Directory Server SSL Port: 636

Search Context 1: OU=AdminGroups,OU=Admin,DC=domain,DC=com

Search Context 2: OU=Admins,OU=Admin,DC=domain,DC=com

And then the group setup is like so:

CN=ILO-Admin,OU=AdminGroups,OU=Admin,DC=domain,DC=com

So the group above is listed in the search context 1, but my admin account is in a different OU, which is search context 2. Bah.