Robert Chase

Cloud Cherynobyl

2011-04-29T16:27:00.001-04:00

Amazon recently released a summary of their EC2 outage. Their summary reveals that the human element was the underlying cause of this outage.

"The traffic shift was executed incorrectly and rather than routing the traffic to the other router on the primary network, the traffic was routed onto the lower capacity redundant EBS network."

Regardless of the level of automation and intelligence that we design into systems human beings interact with these systems at some level. When systems are automated to a huge degree small human mistakes can have catastrophic consequences. In this case thousands of customer sites were knocked offline for a period of 3 days while Amazon tried to regain control of its systems and the underlying automation. Many customers suffered data loss due to the outage.

Amazon's outage reminds me about about the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. A disaster caused by the human element of control during some reactor tests. A series of simple mistakes during routine interaction caused them to loose control of the reactor.

Ironically both systems the Cherynobyl reactor and Amazon's EC2 systems were designed to be highly redundant and available. It just goes to show that no matter how well you design you can't think of every possible scenario.

Google Cr-48 Mario Netbook

2011-02-03T13:08:00.002-05:00

Many months ago a good friend of mine told me about the Cr-48 pilot program. I signed up mostly out of curiosity and because the simplicity and understated elegance of Google chosen hardware. My Nexus One for example has been the greatest phone I have ever owned. Yesterday on my doorstep was an unmarked brown box. I opened it and to my surprise inside was a Cr-48.

So first impressions on the device. Chrome OS is really interesting. The minimalism of only a browser is a bit difficult to get used to but once you do its kind of strange to go back to a full featured machine especially another netbook. I have an Ubuntu 10.04 netbook that I really love and recently when I grabbed it to look up something having to actually launch a browser and deal with the OS seemed weird to me launching a browser and dealing with the OS before I could get the information I wanted.

Google got the size of this device right though. Anything smaller screen wise theres a bit more "effort" involved in being really useful. I have my Ubuntu netbook configured to use the smallest amount of screen real estate with auto hide gnome menus and I use my browsers full screen and use virtual displays to get from one screen to another. Even with my UI tinkering the screen is just ever so slightly too small and that hampers the experience slightly. The full size keyboard on the Cr-48 is great for typing. Getting the device into developer mode and loading development stream of the OS was very easy. Battery life is nothing short of amazing. The device shows 8 hours on the timer and thats a real time. Wake up and boot times are also quite amazing. The other thing that's amazing is how nice the device looks. Its simple and very elegant without all sorts of loud logos on it. For those of you that miss logos Google did put an assortment of stickers in the box to affix to the Cr-48. Under the hood is a dual core Atom N455 running at 1.7ghz with 2gb ram. A the time of this posting my device is running a 2.6.32 kernel.

A few suggestions to the team at Google. The app marketplace that I have seen so far is nice but there's a lot of missing territory that needs to be covered. Many of the people who this would attract are developers and system's people so there is a need for RDP, VNC and other remote access apps. Im using the terminal on the device now and its great using virtual displays but the ability to organize the virtual displays would be nice. The flexibility of being able to pop from display to display with terminals, RDP sessions and other workflows would be great for dev's and systems guys alike.

It's refreshing for a change to work with an OS that has noticeable bugs in it. Linux and OS X have become refined to a point where bugs are mostly edge cases. So far I have broken the sound on my Cr-48 and my 3g wireless has broken in activation and use as well. The track pad also has some really oddball weirdness to it that needs to be sorted. This is a work in progress however and I am very happy Google is being transparent and open and putting the hardware into real use in the wild to help refine their products. The only real way to refine a product like this is to put it into the hands of users and get feedback.

Ten Great Free Android Apps

2010-12-20T23:47:00.001-05:00

With Android 2.3 Gingerbread on its way any minute now I thought it would be a great time to review some of my favorite Android apps on my Nexus One.

Already I have noticed the app store and Youtube changing on my Nexus One seemingly in preparation for the 2.3 OTA launch. It will be interesting to see when Gingerbread finally rolls out.

Wifi Analyzer - Makes your Android phone into a great wifi diagnostic device.

VR Tunnel Lite Live Wallpaper - Great wire frame 3d live wallpaper with motion sensing.

Google Shopper - Coupled with bar code Scanner allows for instant lookup of product information while shopping.

Barcode Scanner - Free bar code and QR code reader.

Advance Task Killer - Kills off apps that run in the background and saves CPU and battery.

Retro Clock Widget - Great looking clock widget that goes well with the built in Weather Widget.

Light Grid Live Wallpaper - Live wallpaper with multi colored blocks that have a sharp look.

Scanner Radio - Listen to live streaming police and fire radio on your device.

Connect Bot - SSH client for Android. Connect remotely and even to the local phone's OS.

CIDR Calculator - Calculate CIDR and net masks for your IP ranges.

OpenVZ CLI Commands

2010-11-23T18:05:00.004-05:00

For my home testing enviroments I use a lot of openVZ containers on older 32 bit hardware with Proxmox VE. Here are some useful commands for interacting directly with the openVZ subsystem on the hypervisor console.

vzlist - provides a listing of openVZ containers
vztop - similar to esxtop for openvz
vzctl enter VM#- drops to the console of the container
vzctl start VM# - starts container
vzctl stop VM# - stops container
vzcalc - resource calc for container
vzdump - backup utility for continers
vzrestore - restoration of containers

Linux Terminal Server with Xrdp

2010-10-29T14:16:00.000-04:00

Xrdp is a lightweight RDP server that can install into many different Linux platforms to provide remote desktop capabilities to X11. You can use the standard windows RDP client or RDP client on any OS to connect to an X11 session on the Linux machine. Uses of Xrdp are limitless such as remotely accessing systems without having to deal with xdmcp or X forwarding or VDI applications providing a graphical Linux desktop for developers to work within.

Proxmox VE Hypervisor / Workstation

2010-10-05T17:32:00.001-04:00

One of the drawbacks of bare metal hypervisors is their general lack of a usable console. In a data center a console is unnecessary overhead but then again not all bare metal hypervisors have to live in a data center. Take for example a large cube farm filled with powerful developer workstations with plenty of idle CPU and free RAM.

While one could manually install and configure KVM or XEN manually on a Linux system most of these packages don't "just work" out of the box and require a bit of setup and tinkering to get working well. But there is an alternative to rolling your own hypervisor. The Proxmox VE bare metal hypervisor uses Debian Linux as its base OS and can be modified to add X11 and other packages to give a very usable workstation and bare metal hypervisor combination. With more than one workstation configured and shared storage for the VM disk images a "workstation cloud" is possible for developers to harness the unused CPU cycles of their systems as shared sandboxes controlled by one central web interface. This article from the Proxmox wiki covers the steps needed to add X11 to the Proxmox VE bare metal hypervisor making it a developer workstation.

Update: This works incredibly well. Im running a dual headed workstation on top of Proxmox VE and it makes a great linux workstation. If you install gnome be sure to apt-get remove network-manager and resolvconf so they don't interfere with the bridging and web configuration interface within Proxmox.

Proxmox 32bit Hypervisor

2010-09-24T18:48:00.004-04:00

One of the problems one runs into when playing with many hypervisor platforms is the CPU requirements. Often a 64bit CPU with VT flags is needed which eliminates a lot of older cheaper machines from being good test lab machines.

I often install VMware ESXi 3.5 to get around this but just discovered one of my favorite hypervisors has a 32bit workaround as well. I found this article in the Proxmox wiki that gives instructions on how to install the product on 32bit hardware. While the KVM portion of the hypervisor does not function the really lightweight openVZ part does function quite well. If your not familiar with OpenVZ it provides a container like environment for an operating system instance to run. Check out this article for more information about Proxmox VE and openVZ. Now to put some of my ancient 32bit IBM x345's to use.

Update: Installation is really super easy. The following will get this installed on a base Debian 5.0 install. This repo is not signed so ignore the error messages. Reboot for the new Kernel and you will have a working 32bit Proxmox VE install.

echo "deb http://flippy.medialisten.net/~pille/pve-1.4-i386 ./" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update

apt-get install proxmox-ve pve-manager qemu-server libpve-storage-perl

Vmware Boot to CD after VM has been installed

2010-09-10T15:12:00.001-04:00

Once a VM is installed in VMware ESXi, ESX or vSphere it no longer will boot from the CD image that you select in the edit settings menu. When you need to boot a VM to alternate media to crack a password or to do other functions outside of the VM's operating system the following steps will allow you to accomplish this.

Select Edit Settings and then click on the options tab. Select Boot options and then check the force bios setup checkbox. Reboot your VM and then go to the boot menu within the bios of the VM. Just like a standard bios move CD up to the top of the boot priority. Reboot your VM and you will be booting on CD again. Be sure to uncheck connect at power on in the CD menu of the edit settings menu once you are done to get back to booting to your VDMK file.

Outsourcing?

2010-09-01T15:08:00.001-04:00

Now that the Indian government has worked out an arrangement with Research in Motion for Blackberry servers they are setting their sights a bit higher and are demanding access to all telecommunications within the country. One of the big problems will be access to corporate VPN's that run through the country to support call centers and other outsourcing services. American companies that rely heavily on outsourcing will then have no secrets with the Indian government for any data that travels into the country.

This also raises huge privacy issues for American consumers that are often forced to deal with overseas calls centers and provide personal and financial information. The questions of how this access is managed and what abuse of private information would be possible still do not have answers. With the negative public perception of outsourcing, privacy issues and now security issues is outsourcing really still a cost savings to the enterprise?

A Time for Change

2010-08-29T21:06:00.000-04:00

It's been a long time since I have posted anything to my blog. Work recently had some massive and disruptive changes which I won't go into. At the end of the day the last place I wanted to be was in front of a computer and because of this my blog and other personal projects suffered some neglect.

I embraced the changes and decided to move on with my career. I am very excited about the new opportunities and look forward to the new challenges that await me.

In the Computing Industry durations of time move in dog years because of the rapid changes. The past 21 dog years have been a blast and I look forward to more challenges to come.

Will Oracle Kill Sun?

2010-05-04T18:13:00.004-04:00

Initially I thought the Sun and Oracle would be a positive thing as both companies have had a somewhat symbiotic relationship with Sun hardware and OS technology running Oracle's database products for many years. Now Im not so sure. Oracle has made some pretty drastic changes so far and I am not sure they are done yet.

One of the first changes they made was on the website. The changes were small at first, an Oracle logo here and there. Now the www.sun.com completely redirects to www.oracle.com. If you look in some of the Sparc hardware line many of the more popular entry models have completely dissapeared. The worst thing however, is Oracle has cut off access to any kind of software and firmware patches without a valid service contract.

All of this heavy handed behavior is scaring off a lot of customer base in the process. I have always been a really strong supporter of Sun technology both on the hardware and software side and even I have found myself questioning the long term viability of the Sun platform.

Proxmox VE Bare Metal KVM based Hypervisor

2010-04-17T16:08:00.002-04:00

Proxmox VE is a bare metal hypervisor product that uses KVM and OpenVZ virtualization technologies. It uses Debian Linux as its base operating system and unlike a lot of other similar projects out there actually works well with no major gotchas. It's actually so well executed that I consider it a viable alternative to VMware ESXi.

Proxmox VE requires a machine with a 64 bit CPU and VT flags in the bios in order to do full KVM based VM's. If you lack the VT flag you can use the openVZ based technology that is very similar to BSD Jails or Solaris Zones. There are some limitations with the openVZ VM's but the upside is you can run them on a cheaper older hardware that lacks VT flags such as a Dell Poweredge 1850. Proxmox VE includes a number of operating system templates that allow you to provide most popular distributions of linux quickly and easily by downloading additional template files. If you want to take advantage of some of the Live Migration (aka vmotion) technologies shared storage is helpful but not required. Some of the OpenVZ vm's are able to move from host to host easily because they are not based on large disk images. Even if you don't utilize the live migration features VM's can be moved back and fort between systems through the web interface and without resorting to painfully slow SCP.

VM provisioning is handled through a rather well done web interface. OpenVZ vm's can be booted and installed in under 10 seconds with all configuration such as IP assignment and root passwords handled from the web interface. KVM VM's do require OS installation and manual configuration due to the style of virtualization but work very well. The Console is handled over VNC and works well even over slow network connections.

One of the big selling points of VMware ESXi to many people is the CPU and memory overcommit capabilities. With a simple Kernel upgrade Proxmox VE offers a similar feature set and impressively runs Windows 2008 R2 better than VMware ESXi 4.0.

Google Nexus One Car Dock

2010-04-10T16:40:00.003-04:00

Normally cellphone accessories are utilitarian boring things that we use to keep our devices charged or protected. They are not really something to get excited about. Except for this accessory for the Nexus one.

The Nexus One car dock does a number of things. It holds the phone for use with the GPS. It charges the phone while it is docked and it acts as a speaker system for the phone. All of these things by themselves are not exciting but the way that the Nexus one takes these elements in and blends them seamlessly is what is exciting.

For example. The speaker system. It's a small speaker but its quite loud and even is "ok" for listening to music and audio books. The Navigation system operates through it and so does the phone acting like a great noise canceling speakerphone. The noise canceling is simply amazing. I mounted it in my rather noisy Porsche and the callers heard me clearly but did not hear my shifting and revving in the background at all. Transfer between phone, Nav and audio sources are seamless and intelligent. The phone also know's when its in a car dock vs a home dock and brings up the car home which provides large buttons with Navigation, Voice search and Contacts. Voice commands like "navigate to the mall" and "call company name" are quickly and clearly translated into actions on the phone with google's powerful cloud based search technology so the driver does minimal "fiddling" with the device.

Google designed this as a thoughtful quick accessory but I think they have hit on something much greater. A 12V accessory cable and a wired audio out would take this from being a nice accessory into being a full on car kit. The Navigation, speakerphone and audio integration on the Nexus one with a more developed car kit like this would easily rival in car entertainment systems like Ford Sync, and Mercedes Command.

Create Root SSH Trust VMware ESXi

2010-03-22T22:45:00.004-04:00

VMware ESXi is UNIX like but at the end of the day is an appliance with many limitations. Since its based on Linux we still have a number of tricks up our sleeve.

SSH by default is disabled on VMware ESXi. Turning it on is just as easy as un commenting the ssh line in /etc/inetd.conf and restarting /sbin/services.sh. VMware uses the dropbear ssh client and there is no configuration file on the system.

To create an ssh trust on ESXi do the following. Create a .ssh directory off of the root directory for the root user. Create an authorized_keys file in this directory. Copy your public key to this file on the system and you have your root trust. The next time you log in you won't be prompted for a password and you can run remote commands on your ESXi system.

Google Nexus One Desktop Dock

2010-02-25T02:47:00.006-05:00

I have always been a big fan of desktop charging docks for mobile phones. I have purchased them for most of my recent phones and they are quite handy for being able to quickly charge a phone without hassling with cords.

I bought the dock for the Nexus one and have been using it for a few weeks not and just recently connected the audio out jack to my Bang & Olufsen stereo in the bedroom. The dock itself was nice without the audio but the addition of the audio brings this dock and the phone to a new level of usefulness.

When the phone is placed in the dock it automatically opens the clock application making it a very useful bedside alarm clock. From the clock application there is a direct button to the mp3 player. When the phone is in the dock it automatically pairs with the dock via bluetooth and provides a high quality audio signal to the bedroom stereo. Since the connection is bluetooth wireless the phone can be removed from the dock and disconnect from the audio system with no popping or other noises that one might get with a physical connector.

With the thought and attention to detail of the dock design and clock application one has to wonder what the Nexus one Car dock is going to be like. I have already seen the "car home" application on the phone but one has to wonder what kind of integration the dock might have with the car's audio system.

Create Windows install bootable USB key

2010-02-16T15:45:00.006-05:00

I recently had to install a 64 bit version of Windows 2008 on a Dell Poweredge 1850 that did not have a DVD drive and used these steps to create a bootable USB key. You can also create a Windows 7 bootable USB key using the same method for use with a Netbook without a DVD or CD drive.

Open a command prompt and type

diskpart

list disk

select disk #

clean

create partition primary

select partition 1

active

format fs=ntfs quick

 assign

exit

Now we need to make the drive bootable

d: (drive letter to windows media)
cd boot
bootsect /nt60 h: (the drive letter to usb key)

Once this is complete use Windows explorer to copy the contents of the media to the USB drive. On the machine you want to install on go into bios and verify that it is configured to boot from USB.

Google Nexus One Superphone

2010-01-27T18:31:00.011-05:00

So I took the plunge. I have been a loyal Blackberry user for a few years and just recently upgraded to a Bold 9700. When the new Google phone came out it was just too difficult to resist.

From the speedy 1ghz processor and OLED display to really high quality web browser and 5 mega pixel camera the new Nexus one truly earns the title of "superphone".

And the really amazing part. Its a great phone as well. The noise canceling is amazing as well as the ease of dialing and call quality.

And of course Linus Torvalds has one as well and claims its the first mobile phone he does not hate.

ipad = overpriced and crippled phone / netbook halfbreed

2010-01-27T17:35:00.013-05:00

The new Ipad released today and with all the hype the device itself is a huge disappointment. While a neat concept its list of limitations and issues outweigh any practical use the device might have. Any sales of this device that Apple does have will soon collect dust and be left in drawers as the gee whiz factor wears off. The lock down and limitations of the various "retail stores" embedded onto the device make this another Apple TV waiting to happen.

Here's a small list of limitations this device has.

1. Price. $500 - $829
2. Its a big Iphone that cant make calls.
3. Carrier locked to AT&T
4. Still can't multitask
5. Still no flash support
6. No OLED display
7. Its a big retail kiosk in your living room

Gizmodo also did not think much of the device either in their article 8 Things that suck about the ipad

Google. If your listening. This would be great hardware to put chrome OS or even Android on. Imagine all the well made Apple hardware you could liberate from a locked down crippled operating system.

Update: Wow talk about being wrong. Never underestimate the power of a shiny portable Apple device. People everywhere are lugging these things around like digital fashion accessories.

It's Comcraptic !!!!!!!

2010-01-04T21:41:00.008-05:00

Why is it a bad idea for a company to be involved with providing media services and internet services? Conflict of interest comes to mind.

Here is the speedtest.net results of Comcast throttling my connection to nearly unusable speeds because I decided to download something.

You have to admit though its a great strategy they have. Strangle and choke home connections so the consumer has no other choice but to buy TV and phone services from them. Hopefully our friends at the FCC might have something to say about this new way of mistreating their customers. I will be moving to DSL really soon!

OpenDNS hijacking www.google.com

2009-12-08T21:38:00.006-05:00

I recently changed from OpenDNS to the new Google DNS servers. I noticed an article regarding a DNS benchmarking app from Google code and wanted to see how fast my internal nameserver was in comparison to some of the others available. Then I noticed something interesting. The app indicated that openDNS was hijacking www.google.com. So then I ran an nslookup and found the following.

nslookup
> server 208.67.220.220
Default server: 208.67.220.220
Address: 208.67.220.220#53
> www.google.com
Server: 208.67.220.220
Address: 208.67.220.220#53

Non-authoritative answer:
www.google.com canonical name = google.navigation.opendns.com.
Name: google.navigation.opendns.com
Address: 208.69.32.231
Name: google.navigation.opendns.com
Address: 208.69.32.230

Ok. That's really uncool. Not sure what their motivations are but if I wanted to go to google.navigation.opendns.com I would have typed it into my browser. Its one thing to redirect NXDOMAIN's but a regular URL? That's pretty sleazy. One has to wonder the motivation and privacy implications for doing this.

Google Public DNS

2009-12-04T13:29:00.009-05:00

Possibly the coolest news in quite some time. Google is providing RFC compliant DNS for free to the public. More information on public dns here. One of the really great things about this is the DNS servers are very easy to remember.

nameserver 8.8.8.8
nameserver 8.8.4.4

I switched my internal DNS from OpenDNS (I never really cared for their default filtering and sketchy settings based on your IP) to Google's DNS servers and noticed quite an improvement in resolution that my internal servers had not already cached. While Google does strict RFC compliance for domain.tld if you try to resolve a non domain.tld the results come back as a search query or a site. For example if you type cnn into your browser without the .com you will be directed to cnn.com. If you type in blah blah into your browser a search on Google for blah blah will appear. Personally I think this is much more useful behavior than being redirected to a spammy page full of ads by using an ISP's DNS server.

Video Console on ESXi VM without using Infrastructure Client

2009-12-03T14:24:00.005-05:00

A lot of people (especially those who don't run Windows) don't like to log into the VMware Infrastructure client in order to get a console on a VM. ESXi has the ability to run a video console over VNC by adding the following to the VMX file.

remotedisplay.vnc.port=”59xx″
remotedisplay.vnc.enabled=”true”
remotedisplay.vnc.password = “pwd”

The port number corresponds to the display number +5900. For example display 0 would be port 5900 and display 33 would be 5933. Keep in mind the password is stored in plain text in the vmx file.

This console is great for providing console access to developers or other support staff without giving them full access to the other VM's within the Infrastructure client.

Free Virtual San Appliance on ESXi

2009-11-06T17:29:00.014-05:00

I recently had the need to use some NFS storage within my ESXi hosts. I had plenty of data store left on the physical disks and wanted to create a VM with a large amount of storage. Then I ran into the size limitation of VMDK files which derailed my idea for a while.

Then I did some thinking about how to get around this issue and was able to create my own virtual san within a VM. Here is a rough guide of how you can create your own Virtual SAN within VMware ESXi. This guide assumes some Linux knowledge and will create a 1.17 terabyte NFS VM.

First create a VM with a single drive large enough for your distro of choice and with enough ram. I used CentOS and gave the VM a 4gb disk and 512mb ram. I did the minimal install of CentOS for my appliance and this included NFS in the default group of packages. You will also need packages for Linux LVM in your distro.

After Linux is installed edit the VM settings and add 6 200gb disks to the VM and reboot the VM. Once your back up and running You can list them out with fdisk -l. The first thing we need to do is partition each one of our disks. You can do this with fdisk /dev/sdX with X corresponding to the device indicated in the fdisk -l output. You have to do this for each of the 6 disks. Here is the "template" that I used for my disk partitioning.

fdisk /dev/sdX

n - new

1 - partition number

default - start of disk

default - end of disk

t - type

8e - hex for linux LVM

w - write

Now that the drives are partitioned we have to create physical volumes, volume groups and do a number of other steps to get LVM going. Here is part of my template for doing this.

pvcreate /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1 /dev/sdg1

vgcreate vol1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1 /dev/sdg1

lvcreate --name shared --size 1.17T vol1

mkfs.ext3 /dev/vol1/shared

mount /dev/vol1/shared /export/shared

Now that LVM is going we need to mount it to the filesystem. Create the directory /export/shared and mount the filesystem using mount /dev/vol1/shared /export/shared You should be able to see the filesystem mounted in the output of df -h at this point.

Now that we have the filesystem mounted we need to have it mount on boot and export it via NFS to make it useful to us. Here are the steps to do this. In this example vi /filename is followed by the changes needed to the file. You will need to modify the changes to the specific configuration of your network.

vi /etc/fstab

/dev/vol1/shared /export/shared ext3 rw,noatime 0 0

edit /etc/exports

/export/shared 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0(rw,sync)

Permissions to /export/shared should be changed to fit the needs of your environment. Adjust the permissions on /export/shared to fit the needs of your environment. If this is a well protected test box you can chmod 777 /export/shared for full access. You will also want to make sure NFS is up and running in the VM at this point and that you can mount the filesystems under NFS.

Now you can go in and mount this storage within ESXi. Click on Configuration>Storage>Add Storage and Select Network File System. Put the hostname or IP address of your NFS VM in the Server field and the mount point of /export/shared in the folder field. The Datastore Name field is a label which will be the name that ESXi refers to this NFS storage. This can be set to anything descriptive. I used the hypervisor_hostname-nfs as my name to show which system this NFS storage really lives on. Once you hit next your new data store will come up.

For my needs NFS works fine however one could configure the VM as an iscsi target as well and have an even more usable storage VM.

Vmware Console Repeating Chararacters

2009-10-21T13:11:00.006-04:00

Ever notice when your typing on a VMware console that you get repeat characters in the console for no reason? This was a slight annoyance for me for a while that I was able to put up with until I attempted to install the Vsphere Management Assistant. Because VMware let the password nazi's loose on this product I had to select a password within their complexity standards and do this through the console which is known to repeat keys. I tried in vain to do short passwords but the script kept throwing me in loops. My long password was simply impossible to enter because of the repeat bug in the console. Bringing the VM into single user mode and setting a password was not possible either because the VM would launch it's annoying configuration script again demanding I assign a long password.

With a little research I found the Console issue is due to network latency. When you type the latency causes the console to think your holding the key and the repeat function comes into play causing the all to familiar and annoying repeat issue.

To fix this you can enter a single line into your .vmx file that fixes this. VMware if your out there and listening perhaps you could make this standard in the Vsphere Management Assistant Appliance especially if you insist on enforcing your ridiculous password scheme in the setup utility. This fix would have been impossible on an ESXi host unless ssh was enabled or the user knew about the "unsupported" console.

keyboard.typematicMinDelay = "2000000"

The Caveat of course is your keyboard repeat is gone so it makes working within text editors and other applications that require repeat characters difficult to work with. You of course can still hit the key multiple times. For my purposes being able to authenticate is much more important than a few more keystrokes to move around in vi.

VMware ESXi Infrastructure Client Issues revisited

2009-10-13T14:47:00.006-04:00

In a previous blog entry I posted about how to restart the VMware management agents in the event that you could not connect via the Infrastructure Client. I have found however this does not always work and sometimes one has to get a bit more involved to regain control of a non responsive host.

After restarting the management agents within dcui from the ssh prompts sometimes you will find that the host is still unresponsive. You may also observe the following.

Before our restart in DCUI

~ # ps aux | grep hostd
62991508 22972707 hostd hostd
30481665 22972707 hostd hostd
22972707 22972707 hostd hostd
42826021 22972707 hostd hostd
42826022 22972707 hostd hostd
42826023 22972707 hostd hostd
62069036 22972707 hostd hostd
62069039 22972707 hostd hostd
45624624 22972707 hostd hostd
58286499 22972707 hostd hostd
63749610 22972707 hostd hostd

After the restart in DCUI

~ # ps aux | grep hostd
62991508 22972707 hostd hostd
30481665 22972707 hostd hostd
22972707 22972707 hostd hostd
42826021 22972707 hostd hostd
42826022 22972707 hostd hostd
42826023 22972707 hostd hostd
62069036 22972707 hostd hostd
62069039 22972707 hostd hostd
45624624 22972707 hostd hostd
58286499 22972707 hostd hostd
63749610 22972707 hostd hostd

Notice none of the PID's changed?

In order to get the host responding again to our Infrastructure client we have to kill off these processes with and restart the hostd process. After killing the processes and restarting hostd you should be able to connect again with the infrastructure client. If you don't have ssh enabled on your host you can also do this from the host console.

kill -9 PID#
/etc/init.d/hostd start