Chris Farris

So a few months ago I started thinking about virtualization and the future of my profession (System Administration). So much of the hassle we have involves software compatibility issues with libraries and the code that runs on it. My thoughts were that is would be much easier if, instead of big OSes with lots of services running on it, we had a micro-distribution running just a single application. A DNS or Mail server could be shipped as a virtual appliance with some form of hooks for shared storage via NFS or MySQL for its configuration information.

Not sure if this is documented anywhere, my link for 3.5.x is incorrect in the procedure. To enable SSHd on ESXi 4.0: At the console Hit ALT-F1 type “unsupported” it will not be echoed back to you you’ll see a passwd prompt. Enter the root passwd for that ESXi host. vi /etc/inetd.conf Uncomment the line begining with “ssh tcp” ps ax | grep inetd

VMWare ESXi 4.0 is out. It has most of what I’ve been wanting in ESXi, in particular IDE support. 4.0 supports SATA drives in the host, and IDE drives and some form of USB in the guest OS. Ever since windows 98, I’ve has a policy of never running anything ending on .0 in a production capacity. I’ve got it running in the lab at work and look forward to putting it through the rounds when I get back from my business trip.

I’m not a big fan of the idea of VMware running on a host OS for production servers. One reason for that is that you have direct access to the VMware data files. You could do something unfortunate, like: `I’m not a big fan of the idea of VMware running on a host OS for production servers. One reason for that is that you have direct access to the VMware data files.

So earlier this week I needed to build a new VMWare server in the lab because the existing VMWare server had a few production instances running on it. Our Lab is mostly hand-me-down hardware and not the best. I didn’t want the VMs I needed to create to impact those legacy production servers. A coworker had installed VMWare Server 2.0 a few months back and we had several issues with it.

http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_PXE_install.html For Ubuntu you need the tftpd-hpa package as the install.tgz file is larger than atftp will allow.

I’ve decided to consolidate all my blogs into one place. I plan to shutdown geeklog, I don’t update that very often. I’ve not decided what I’ll do about VitalPowers. I’ve stopped using my LiveJournal and only check it once every other day to keep up with the friends who still use it. There are plugins to cross post WordPress to LJ, and I may continue to do that. Most of my active blogging is being done on Facebook.