Abbott Internet Consultants

Sometimes it is the blindingly obvious that gets you.  After running into issues with creating a mount point for ISO images to be used by the host servers, we ran into a couple of problems.

Firstly, -t smbfs now appears to be deprecated, so -t cifs should be used instead.

Secondly, smbclient traffic is blocked by the firewall by default, and all you will get when trying to make the connection is:
mount error 111 = Connection refused

To resolve this, simply go into the configuration for the host, security profile and make sure to enable smbclient.

First installation of production ESX4 is almost completed now for a client in Washington DC.  I’ll be adding more notes documenting the following:

• general installation and configuration
• iSCSI & EqualLogic setup and performance tuning
• Alerting and management
• Troubleshooting

If you’re ever trying to remove a load of files from a folder that exceeds the number that can be run against a command (this is actually a compiled in memory limit on command line parameters, if you’re really keen you can recompile and increase the limit), then try this command:

find . -name "whatever*" | xargs rm

Job done.

We were very happy to help a good friend of ours with his website, Ignition Driving School with a conversion from a flat PHP structure to something to help Mark expand it more easily.

With instructors throughout the country, the site seems to be growing nicely.

Check them out at www.ignitiondrivingschool.com

I ran a virtualisation seminar yesterday for our friends at NCC and some of their clients.  Covering topics from “what is virtualisation?” to a full discussion of the in and outs of handling the organisation change that it brings, I think it gave a very good grounding for the attendees in how to build a business case for virtualising their data centres, avoiding some of the pitfalls.

We’re running a further workshop in London this time, more details and registration can be found at the NCC Website.

If you need to protect a zip file by a password to send via email, then there is no way of doing with the standard “compress to zip” context option.

Instead, go to the command line and run the following:

zip -e nameofzipfile.zip filetoadd.txt otherfile.csv

This will create it for you.  Probably needs a recent version of OSX though (I’m on 10.5.6).

For all the move to cloud/SaaS it seems like Google have really dropped the ball a little, with a breach to their docs service.  Now I use Google docs as a convenient way of sharing bits of information, but you’ve got to wonder about any corporate willing moving from internal MS Word/Excel to Google until the security is not an issue.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/09/google_docs_serious_security_breach/

Well no excuse for a lack of updates now with the iPhone application for wordpress installed.

I presented this week at the NCC round table event on “virtualisation”.  There was a good mix of attendees, from finance, manufacturing, local government and the service sector.  All organisation were using VMware already to one extent or another, but still in a fairly limited manner.

The biggest surprise was probably that so few were using DRS and HA in their production environment.

Lots of interest about the upcoming features in ESX 4.0 however, especially the lockstep VM/data protection feature.