TechniTip.Net

VMWare ESXi Test Installation

The Try

I’ve been using VMWare ESX for several years now in my company with great success. It made things really easier. Of course it’s not for free, but it’s really worth the money you pay for it. So it was really a surprise when I recognized that there is a new and free VMWare ESXi for download available from the VMWare homepage. Sounds interesting, OK let’s try it.

Just Download

So I went to the VMWare homepage and downloaded the ESXi ISO install image. After the short registration which is needed for download you will automatically receive the license key via e-mail. For installation the license key is not needed, ESXi will work fo 60 days after installation.

Installation

After writing the ISO to a CD-ROM and booting the PC from it I reconized that ESXi did not detect my good old 20 GB PATA hard disc. After putting a 160 GB SATA disc in and booting again my hard disc was detected correct and ESXi installed perfectly. But after first boot no IP adsress was assigned (0.0.0.0). After some Google research in found out that my onboard network card was not detected and that ESXi currently mainly supports Intel network cards. Fortunatly I found a old Intel Etherexpress 10/100  PCI card in the company, put it in my desktop and booted again. And oh surprise, the NIC was detected and a IP address was assigned via DHCP.

First Contact

After typing the IP address of the ESXi machine in the browser the VMWare Infrastructure Client can be downloaded and installed. New virtual machines are installed, managed and so on using the Infrastructure Client via Network. My first plan was to install Debian Etch from the net-install CD-ROM, but ESXi did not detect my CD-ROM (maybe I’ve disconnected the cable while installing the Intel NIC card, not sure). But it doesn’t matter because you can easily mount the CD-ROM of your client where Infrastructure Client is running or also just mount an ISO image. It worked and Debian Etch was installed. To check the performance on my Intel 2x3GHz 2GB RAM desktop I added Windows 2000 as second virtual machine. It also installed without problems. Very nice!

It’s Working

So far I’ve recognized command line tools like vcbMounter and vcbRestore are not available on the ESXi host like on ESX hosts which can be used for automated backups. But I’ll need to further investigate ESXi, for now it’s already running within a very short time – amazing. And it helps to warm up my living room when the 2xGHz desktop machine is running the whole day…

Screenshots

The Incredible Notebook Cooler

When my Dell notebook Latitude D820 warms up (means running for a few hours) I hear the fan louder than in the beginning also there is not much CPU load. It seems the whole notebook warms up. Cleaning the notebook with a vacuum cleaner did not help. I got this tip from a woman, for her notebook this works. Ok, a noisy fan is disturbing.

Before purchasing a notebook cooler I decided to check if such a external cooler with fan could really cool down the notebook. I tried several positions with a simple PC fan and finally found one position which cools down the CPU temperature in idle mode from 50°C to 38°C. Now the fans of the notebook are almost noiseless.

A incredible result! But I think I will purchase a more nice looking notebook cooler soon. Cooling down your notebook will also improve it’s life time since all electronic components really don’t like heat. You can read this e.g. from official statistical data from some hard disc vendors, which show how life time increases with higher environment temperature.

Putting the slow rotating fan as shown in the picture below decreased CPU temperature from 50°C to 38°C. Unbelievable!

Annoyed of Blocked Inkjet Printers?

When you have ever owned a Inkjet printer and don’t use it every day you will know the problems: black text is printed pink (yes, in my opinion “pink” is where the name of Inkjet printers comes), nothing is printed, unwanted stripes through your text and so on. And why? Printer head is blocked.

Next what you will do is start the cleaning program of your Inket and print your page again. Fine fine, the stripes went less and pink got a different colour. Ok, cleaning program is started again. Very nice, stripes are gone but pink looses any color information. No idea why, cleaning program is started again. Hrmpf, now printer reports some colour cartridges are empty. You start searching in all available drawers for new cartdriges. Yes, found a new cyan cartdrige. So put it in the printer and wait until the printer initializes. What happens next? Printer reports magenta is empty! After searching all drawers again you recognize that you have all cartdriges available, except magenta…

At this point I decided to buy a new colour laser printer. Printing photos is not important for me, but colour would be nice. After some research I purchased the HP LasterJet CP1515N for a little bit more than 200€. It’s definitly the best printer I’ve ever had. Somewhere I read that the CP1515N should be slow, but for me it’s really fast. When I want to print I turn the printer on, walk to the notebook and print my document. I don’t have to wait or start the cleaning program.

The CP1515N comes with network interface, so I can easily print from the desktop as well as from the notebook. This printer is definitly worth it’s money.

Howto Restart Apache Graceful

Sometimes when changing settings in your Apache config, adding virtual hosts and so on it’s needed to reload/restart the Apache daemon. Usually this is done with:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart


But there two big disadvantages using this method:

1. If your config is invalid, Apache will shutdown and not start again
2. Users currently accessing your server will recognize that Apache will not answer request for a short time

Indeed there is a much more better method to restart the Apache “gracefully”:

apache2ctl -t
Syntax OK

apache2ctl -k graceful

The first command will tell Apache to check your config. If everything is correct, you will get “Syntax OK”, otherwise the error will be reported but Apache will still run with the old configuration.

The second command will tell Apache to restart gracefully with the advantage that currently open connections are not aborted and the users will not be annoyed.

iPhone User Manual

When you ever got a new iPhone you will have recognized that there is no user manual delivered. The manual with 174 pages is available for download at Apple’s support website: iPhone User Guide (English) iPhone Benutzerhandbuch (German) Further iPhone manuals And the PDF with a size of 15 MByte can also viewed on your iPhone, like on the picture besides. Also this maybe not very comfortable…

By the way, do you know how to generate screen shots of your iPhone? It’s possible with Firmware version higher than 2.0: Press and hold the home button. Now press the on/off button and a screen shot will be stored in the folder “Movies (I think it should be Movie, when the language is set to German it is “Film”).