Technolab 2.0

Memory hotplug in Linux

Frode Sandholtbråten — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:25:48 +0000

VMware has a nice feature where you can add memory and CPUs on the fly without rebooting the server. It works like a charm in Windows, but it did not work out of the box in Linux. The trick is to load the module acpi_memhotplug so that the Linux kernel discovers the new memory that …

Ubuntu boot issues

Frode Sandholtbråten — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:48:40 +0000

One issue I ran into while upgrading from Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04 was the infamous “nuking initramfs contents: directory not empty”. At that time I did not do much about it as the previous kernel worked fine. However, today my router refused to boot any of the installed kernels. As the issue has been there …

Playing around with Citrix XenServer

Frode Sandholtbråten — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 17:22:55 +0000

I recently had the pleasure of playing around with Citrix XenServer/XenCenter. I tried to mimic another setup based upon VMware to compare features and see whether we could use XenServer instead of V Mware. Although it might not be a fair comparison since VMware is at least 2-3 times more expensive, I have become a …

VMware ESXi 5.0

Frode Sandholtbråten — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 20:46:44 +0000

A few brief notes on the new VMware ESXi 5.0 release that are probably not covered elsewhere yet. My Asus P8H67-I mini-ITX board is fully supported in 5.0 (it was supported in 4.x as well) Realtek RTL8111E is supported out of the box. I have not yet tried it (I am using an Intel Pro/1000 …

Recovering data from MySQL InnoDB files

Frode Sandholtbråten — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 19:20:08 +0000

Databases are usually not something that you play around with. Especially not when they are over 700G in size and can make-or-break a huge company. However, it might be clever to use hexedit on the data files once in while! I recently found myself in a situation where some critical data in one of the …

Dirty mod_cache hack

Frode Sandholtbråten — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 22:08:27 +0000

Let us say that you have a couple of Apache HTTPd servers in front and a number of machines running Windows IIS in the backend, all connected through a number of load balanced addresses. Say that said setup is running Apache HTTPd 1.3.x, which is getting pretty old, and that you want to upgrade it …

Getting WordPress to behave

Frode Sandholtbråten — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 18:44:55 +0000

First of all, a little disclaimer: I believe that WordPress is a nice Open Source project – and it is awesome that they are giving it away for free. It makes it easy for anyone to publish content on the internet. However, it has a couple of issues that makes it a bit of an …

Multi-monitor setup

Frode Sandholtbråten — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 15:01:07 +0000

I promised that I should write about more than just virtualization systems, so I figured I might share my current desktop setup. The setup is as follows: 6x Dell U2410 24″ 1920×1200 monitors. 1x AMD Radeon 5870 1GB plus 1x AMD Radeon 5850 1GB that powers three monitors each. The current setup is running Windows …

Installing ESXi 4.1 from an USB stick

Frode Sandholtbråten — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 22:33:56 +0000

As I wrote in the previous post, I recently bought a mini-iTX card with an Intel Core i3 to replace my aging firewall/router. It so happens that it fully supports VMware ESXi as well, so I loaded it up and are running the router/firewall as a virtual machine. Now, installing VMware ESXi 4.1 from an …

Whitebox ESXi

Frode Sandholtbråten — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 22:13:18 +0000

I remember the first time I got my hands on VMware ESXi. It was the 3.5 version and it quickly became apparent to me that this was the feature. Long gone was the chubby ESX COS which I used before. Of course, having a full COS (Linux) had its benefits, but it did little to …