Just another WordPress weblog
Sure there are better ways to mass deploy ESX servers, but this way will save the one off farm deployment person some time 
I took liberties in assuming you would be able to fill in the blanks for variables so <VARIABLE> or _VARIABLE_ will need to be replaced ad-lib style. Just for you my friend, served up proper on a hyper-link plate….. esx4_postinstall
I had the pleasure of doing an F5 BIG-IP load balancer upgrade recently and am happy with the way the F5 people have designed their systems for fail over. Essentially you will use different system partitions to host different versions of their product and you change which one you want to boot to after updating the inactive partition. This, theoretically, means you can always go back to a working configuration if something goes awry. I’m unhappy with how fragmented their documentation is in getting from point A to point B though. Here is a quick rundown of what I had to do…
This sly bastard wrote an excellent little .NET app for enumerating esx farm information. Any sysadmins working with VMware should definitely check this out. I really like the vHealth tab which will show possible zombie vmdks. Add the ability to export to csv and you have a nice tool for on the fly farm enumeration for the boss.
Go get RVTools now!
It was about time for me to upgrade my aging home Linux server and reinstall torrentflux-b4t with ipblock (among other things). I went back to my old post on what I did previously and found everything to be similar but slightly off. To do this reconfiguration and make ipblock work without the java user interface I had to tweak things a bit and compile another deb package. Below is how I recall doing this.
I whipped up a post install script to run on our new linux servers that drastically reduced the amount of manual effort involved with post-deployment configuration. I’m sure this could some how be integrated into the kick deployment. In any case, this script helps setup your sudo users, snmp services, and some other basic things. Modify to your environment and run directly after deployment on your headless linux servers. Save the script and change to .sh and run with sh ./centos-postinsatll.sh at a command prompt. Cheers!
Not too long ago I was tasked with deploying a decent number of CentOS 5.3 and Redhat servers to BL490 blades and VMs in our datacenter (part of a massive environment deployment with HP C7000 enclosures, virtual connect, and a lot of patience). I hate manual configuration so I figured now is as good of time as any to get on the kickstart bandwagon. Here is how I did it: Read More >>
Here are a few scripts that I have cobbled together over the last few years. They are small and useful but nothing earth-shattering. One gets information about a remote system and who is logged in. The other can remotely reset the administrator password. Both obviously require you have the permissions to do so on the remote machines. Both accept multiple computer names divided by a semi-colon. Save and change the extension from .txt to .hta
Don’t have much time due to work obligations but I wanted to quickly drop this one out there for any who have followed my install guides. I was always ragging on and on about making the install somewhat portable by putting it into the /opt/ directory and now I’ll give a good example why.
I’ve been trying to get this one out for weeks but have not had a whole lot of time to do so. I’ve decided to drop what I have completed out there for those who may be interested. Simply put bridgetun is a convenient way to create tun interfaces and to bridge them (and other interfaces) together. I’d give it a once over and see if it helps with any of your dynamips labs. I’ll try to have a quick howto and explanation of why it would be useful as soon as I can but I give no promises
Setup SMART Disk Monitoring
If your disk is going bad no one going to tell you about it until you start hearing it. And if you start hearing issues with your drive it may be too late to backup your data or do anything else you need to do to not be driveless. I’m uncertain why some of this is not available as an install option for more distros but a good warning before the storm can save your data and your sanity.
