Consolidating my blogs

Posted on January 12, 2011 by jay

After much thinking :) I have decided to merge my two blogs here at jayakumar.co.in and at www.vmwhere.net  into a single site/blog at www.jayakumar.org.

The reason was simple, am lazy and do not want to maintain two sites. Plus after I moved out of VMware late last year I don’t feel the need maintain a separate blog for VMware so as maintain that thin distinction between work (VMware) and personal (linux/networking) stuff. Also since I have joined Cisco I have been wanting to blog bout Nexus 1000v and Cisco UCS products, but the mere thought of setting up and maintaining another blog kept that idea far. So theoretically I have merged 3 blogs into one.

Hopefully this will spur me into writing some good content, so as to make all that multi-re-directs that I have setup worthwhile :)

Cheers!

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Improve linux raid rebuild/resync speed

Posted on August 14, 2010 by jay

I have a small :) NAS box with 6 x 1TB HDD in RAID 6 and 4 x 500GB HDD in RAID 5. Recently thanks to the arrival of my baby girl and a HD handy cam, I was running out of space fast on the array and so when when I saw a decent deal for 1TB drives in NewEgg I picked up couple to add to the RAID 6 volume.

Growing a raid array in linux using mdadm is easy. I made sure I used fdisk to create single large partition on the drive and mark the partition type fd (Linux raid autodetect) prior to adding it to the array.

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdm1 1 121601 976760001 fd Linux raid autodetect

Adding the drives to the raid is straightforward
mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sdl1
mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sdm1
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PXE boot VMware ESXi 4.1 and Manual Install

Posted on July 20, 2010 by jay

an awesome new feature in the just released ESXi 4.1 is the ability to do PXE boot and script the install using a kick start script. If you looking for information on how to do this see here at billhill’s post.

http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/vmwareinsmb/2010/07/13/esxi-41-scripted-installation-via-pxe-and-kickstart

However while adding that feature VMware seems have slightly broken the PXE boot, but manual install ability of ESXi. This is useful if you have lights-out lab and want to use the local pxe server instead of those virtual media options but also want to customize the install options as the lab servers do not have standardized components and hardware and may other issues.

Refer to the above link for overall PXE/dhcp/tftp install steps. I plan only to document what’s different for a manual install.
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setting up http proxy for cli

Posted on February 22, 2010 by jay

Okay, I have to google this information every-time I need it, to so am going to blog it, so that I know exactly where to look for it :)

Setting up a proxy from the GUI on you browser or system does not always work for command line utilities like apt-get, yum, wget or customer bash scripts etc…

So here is how to setup proxy for CLI from CLI, assuming your proxy server is proxy.example.com (IP 192.168.2.252) and port 3128.
export http_proxy='http://proxy.example.com:port/'

OR
export http_proxy='http://192.168.2.252:3128/'
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Installing Silverlight 3 on Hackintosh

Posted on November 5, 2009 by jay

Okay I have always wanted to own a Mac Pro and that wish only grew more after I bought my Mac Book and the Mini for HTPC duties. I like the OS X interface and recently bought Snow Leopard Family pack to upgrade my laptop and mini and was wondering what to do with my Dell Inspiron 530s (the only windows box in the house, ohh btw I do like Windows 7 and is really the best Windows OS Yet ) and decided to dual boot it with OS X.

The hackintosh installation was a bit round about as I had install Leopard first and then use that install Snow Leopard and then update the boot loader to Chameleon rc3 and fix the boot order from the windows with easybcd 2.0 beta. That story is for latter.

Now coming back to the title of this post after I got the setup up and running, I was trying out all my usual apps and when I tried Instant Watch from Netflix, i trt wanted to install Silverlight 3.0. I download the dmg ran the install it said I was running a Power PC and the install failed. I “googled it” and found that the installer is checking for the PC type and is parsing it wrong. So here is the fix.
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