Installing old versions of the VMware VI client

The old VI client installer packages don't work with the  latest windows installer. Here's how to work around the problem:

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Rob | Friday 27 May 2011 - 3:57 pm | | Tech Stuff | One comment
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HA Active / Passive NFS Cluster

Get a Pair of CentOS 5.5 machines serving up Highly available NFS

I use NFS volumes for all of my production vmware servers. As a result, loosing your NFS server to a hardware failure would be a very bad thing.

We accomplish this using drbd, and heartbeat

This Guide assumes you have two identicaly configured systems, with an empty partition on each node that is un-formatted and ready to go. It also assumes a dedicated crossover connection between network cards on both nodes.

This setup was completed on a CentOS 5.5 system, utilizing the centosplus yum repository for drbd and the fedora epel repository for heartbeat.

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Rob | Thursday 10 March 2011 - 1:39 pm | | Tech Stuff | Two comments

Bluetooth Headset with Kubuntu

Getting a SIP softphone (Twinkle) working with a Bluetooth headset and Kubuntu 10.04

I hate wires. I like wireless devices, (Mice, Keyboards and Headsets) I wanted to see if I could get the bluetooth headset, a Motorola MotoPure H5, I bought for my crackberry to work with my SIP softphone running on Kubuntu 10.04. This will help you get the headset working, but I'm assuming you have a working Bluetooth stack already (either Dongle or built in adapter) and a working IP soft phone (SIP or something like Skype)

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Rob | Friday 25 February 2011 - 7:47 pm | | Tech Stuff | Two comments

Cisco MLPPP with 2 ADSL connections

Aggregating 2 ADSL connections from Teksavvy in Calgary on Telus Copper

Yes! MLPPP works out west for Telsavvy customers, they don't officially support it but they were quite helpful through the setup phase.

I did this with a Cisco 2691  router, with two wic-1adsl line cards.

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Rob | Sunday 06 February 2011 - 10:42 am | | Tech Stuff | Three comments

Resize a root filesystem on the fly

Resize the root filesystem on a Red Hat Virtual machine without rebooting

Most sys-admins have been there, a full file system on a critical production server that you cannot afford to reboot.. If you are using VMWare, and linux LVM, You are in luck. As always, Keep good backups, and use at your own risk, mistakes can render your system completely unusable.

This guide can be used  for any filesystem that has been mounted on a Linux logical volume.

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Rob | Sunday 16 January 2011 - 4:39 pm | | Tech Stuff | Five comments