[jthomasser ~]$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 …

[jthomasser ~]$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 2000
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 2000 …

[jthomasser ~]$ sudo python -m SimpleHTTPServer 500
Password:
Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 500 …

specifically to get resource control information
zonecfg -z info rctl

i’ve upgraded  a couple of my systems to windows7, i like it. The sleep mode seems to work pretty well. Unfortunately i’ve installed something that keeps it awake. To force it to sleep automatically  i’ve created a simple script sleep.bat:

powercfg -h off
rundll32 powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState

this will turn off hibernation and make your system sleep (otherwise it would hibernate, taking longer). i set up a scheduled task to call this daily at midnight (pick your own time) so if anyone else has been using the computer its forced into a sleep mode on a daily basis.

Oracle’s suppport  policy related to VMware virtualization is frustrating to say the least. It is purposely vague and sows alot of uncertainty to those who understandably want a clear concise position of support for applications that may be critical to their business.

The interpetation I have come to accept is that Oracle will support their applications (and databases) that run in a VMware environment however the Oracle customer must be prepared to reproduce the problem in a physical environemnt if Oracle cannot address using their knowledge base or in collaboration with operating systems vendors, etc.  With a background in techncial support and servcies I can’t say I  like this too much however that said I understand Oracle’s motiviation, namely more sales, push people to Oracle’s virtualization, etc.  Lest anyone think they can ride Oracles coat tails, they can’t.  Oracle only gets away with it because they are one of the 800 pound gorillas in the industry.  Microsoft, Redhat, Sun, IBM, SAP have certified their operating systems and applications on VMware (like it was hardware).

I believe that issues that arise outside of Oracles and their partners understanding  may represent an edge case which may happen no more than 1% of the time. For some companies this is too much risk , consequently adoption of VMware virtualiization is stalled where Oracle products are concerned leaving them having to evalaute options moving ahead.  Below are several approaches an organization can take to address:

1. not use VMware for Oracle prodcucts in production.
2. change application vendors
3. change virtualization platform
4. create service to convert virtual machine to physical server (V2P)

the first option is where may people start and virtualization adoption slows, option 2 and 3 quickly come up as albeit drastic alternatives with much heated debate, lastly option 4, V2P i think presents itself as a reasonable compromise. 

V2P is not entirely straight forward however I believe a viable option to the drastic alternatives; services need to ensure that a virtual machine can be quickly turned into a physical mahine with the same name, ip address, network access, etc.  With a well designed, tested and supported V2P service an organziation can succesfully remediate Oracle’s suport policy for VMware virtualization.

• specify hostname
• specify domainname
• create a key pair (this requires the name and domain)
• create a user to access device with e.g. establishs a “user” cisco with the passowrd cisco (change it to whatever you want).
• enables ssh as a service on your device
• enable remote access to sessions 0 through 4

at enable level enter configuration state
 

hostname somehost
domain somedomain.com
username cisco password 0 cisco
ip ssh time-out 120
ip ssh authentication-retries 3
ip ssh version 2

cry key generate rsa
! this will prompt you for a 512 bit key, specify 1024 or else your ssh client will complain.

line vty 0 4
 login local
 transport input telnet ssh

for more details see:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk583/tk617/technologies_tech_note09186a00800949e2.shtml

ios feature support
http://tools.cisco.com/ITDIT/CFN/jsp/index.jsp

use this to set your clock on you ios device

clock timezone PST -8
clock summer-time PDT recurring 2 Sun Mar 2:00 1 Sun Nov 2:00

this is best if used with the ntp server configuration, e.g.

ntp server [ip address]

everything else worked fine on network, ping, telnet, nslookup, etc. browser access by name address failed for ie, firefox, chrome. after some digging and experimentation it turned out because i had turned off cisco vpn service (changed to manual start) this caused http traffic to fail. strangely https connections continued to work.

the fix was to make sure if you have cisco vpn service, leave it on automatic at the very least.

i didn’t get to root cause, tghough thought it may be of use to anyone looking for a fix.

i came across unetbootin (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ ) which is available as a windows or linux installable. i downloaded the windows version, plugged in my 4GB USB stick  and ran it (it’s just an executable) on my laptop. I specified the ESX 4.0 image as the iso diskimage.

this created a perfectly bootable usb stick on a 4GB device. The creation took about 5-6 minutes on a USB 2.0 port on my laptop.

once completed I added askmedia to the boot options in the syslinux.cfg file because the default wants to boot from cdrom only.

edit syslinux.cfg

If you don’t want to do this you can select you install option for ESX and then add askmedia to the kernel parameters.

to install from USB make sure you can boot from “removable devices”, then  go through the install questions. when it  asks if you want to install from cdrom/usb, nfs, localdisk, etc.  select cdrom/USB  and install will proceed like from a DVD.

the upside of this approach is if you attempt to boot on an older server with only USB 1.1 which is all i had,  you can use an alternate method for installing.  i ended up specifying an NFS server and path which made considerably quicker work of getting data to the disk.

hopefully this was a useful trick for you to use.

Cheers – Jase

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948472