Below are how I managed to compile the VMware tools and disable NTP sync to get the guest humming… While the information I’m providing is based on EFC 2.1.2 it should work (give or take package names and gcc4 on 2.2 (RC’s)). In my guests I have set the following (in the VMX configuration file):

ethernetX.virtualDev = “e1000″

1. Install vmware-tools from the VMware Infrastucture Client
2. Install wget (and dependant info package) so you can get other packages
   • rpm -Uvh http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/info-4.7-5.i386.rpm  
   • rpm -Uvh http://archives.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/wget-1.9.1-17.i386.rpm  
3. Find the download url via the following URL http://www.endian.com/en/community/download/updates-and-source/ the package your after will depend on your version of endian (in my case the following works):
   • wget http://internode.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/efw/EFW-COMMUNITY-2.1.1-devel-RPMS.tar.bz2
4. Extract the Endian developer packages
   • bunzip2 -cd EFW-COMMUNITY-2.1.1-devel-RPMS.tar.bz2 | tar xfsv -
5. Install the required packages
   • cd EFW-COMMUNITY-2.1.1-devel-RPMS
   • rpm -Uvh binutils-*.rpm cpp-*.rpm glibc-kernheaders-*.rpm kernel-devel-*.rpm patch-*.rpm make-*.rpm glibc-devel-*.rpm glibc-headers-*.rpm gcc-3*.rpm  
   • cd ..
6. Symlink the kernel headers to save us having to path to it during the install
   1. ln -s /usr/src/kernels/`uname -r`-`uname -m` /usr/src/linux
7. Unpack the VMware tools
   • mkdir -p /mnt/cdrom
   • mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
   • gunzip -cd /mnt/cdrom/VMwareTools-3.5.0-123630.tar.gz | tar xfsv -
8. patch VMware tools for Endian (which can be downloaded from here)
   1. cat vmware-tools-distribution.patch | patch -p 0
9. build the tools
   1. export CC=/usr/bin/gcc
   2. cd vmware-tools-distrib
   3. ./vmware-install.pl
   4. cd bin
   5. sh startup-fix.sh
10. reboot

http://paulstamatiou.com/2006/06/11/how-to-display-date-in-os-x-menu-bar

Follow it to the word and you will be able to customise!

After much google searching and finding no real helpful answers I decided to check out the technet manuals.

I found the following:

RESTORE FILELISTONLY FROM DISK = ‘[full file system path to the .BAK file]‘

This command displays the logical sets and the physical paths they should be stored. From this I was able to see the “LogicalNames” of each of the data sets in the backup and where they are currently stored. From here I used the following command:

RESTORE DATABASE [name of database (doesn't need to exist)] FROM DISK = ‘[full file system path to the .BAK file]‘ WITH MOVE ‘[LogicalName]‘ TO ‘[destination file name]‘, REPLACE

As your backup may include multiple sets (LogicalNames) you can duplicate the MOVE ‘..’ TO ‘..’, section as many times for each of the respective row returned in the first query.

Hope this saves someone else some time..

*/5 * * * * root /etc/init.d/iptables stop

If you make a mistake cron (presuming its running) should stop iptables and you should be able to get back in. Don’t forget to remove it once your finished otherwise there isn’t much use in having iptables running in the first place.

Good luck!

vmware-guestd –cmd “vmx.set_option synctime 0 1″

This command under a Linux VMware host will set the VMX synctime option to true (if it was previously disabled). This means that you don’t need to shutdown and restart your VM – excelent for production VMs. There are loads of additional VMX settings some are read-only but some are read-write.

I can’t confirm but I presume you can set the respective options under a Windows host also.

dynamips-0.27-RC3-x86.bin -P 3600 -P 0:NM-1FE-TX -s 0:0:linux_eth:peth0 C3640-I-.bin

And I had a console connection to the router… 

I found that the Linux installation didn’t come with any reference documentation and the web site didn’t help much so I downloaded the Win32 version as it had supported documentation.

You are able to add multiple “virtual” interfaces so you could emulate your testing, production environment which is very nice!

The virtualisation platform I have been using is VMware Server and on the guest start-up it locks the virtual disks so it aint going to happen! After searching and much reviewing the VMware documentation I found the following configuration options that can be applied to the VMX configuration file for a given VM.

The following options allow you to share disks between one or more VM’s:

disk.locking = “false”
diskLib.dataCacheMaxSize = “0″

scsi0.sharedBus = “virtual”
scsi0:1.present = “TRUE”
scsi0:1.fileName = “pathToSharedDisk.vmdk”
scsi0:1.mode = “independent-persistent”
scsi0:1.redo = “”

Depending on the configuration you have you may need to change scsi0 to the bus id that your disks reside on and :1 for the scsi id and the fileName parameter to the path of your shared disks.

While setting this shared disk you need to ensure your using a cluster aware file system otherwise there is bound to be data corruption.

Good luck!

There are a number of key open source software applications that are critical in providing cost effective solutions to achieve visibility and history of your environment and these are a few we can’t rave enough about!

Capacity Management

If your not familiar with Cacti once it is configured it can provide you with a visual representation of how your infrastructure is performing allowing you to create baselines and trends to allow you to scale or size your infrastructure requirements. There are a ton of templates available from the Cacti community that would get monitoring your different appliances and systems quite quickly.

One of the biggest things I tell our clients is “if you can manually do it” we can figure out a way to turn that into a graph to plot it against your operations.

Availability Management

Nagios or as it was previously know Netsaint is a key application to monitor the health or availability of your environment. With Nagios you can alert based on applications, devices or services not performing to their configured parameters (i.e. failing health checks). Plug-in’s are a dime a dozen and while they are simple to construct there are a large number of them provided by community developers of the Nagios project. There are people out there that are monitoring disk space to ups’s to environmentals.

I sound like a broken record but once again “if you can manually check something not performing” there are ways to automate that and allow your engineers to get back to drinking coffee or reading the newspaper (all the useful things).

Configuration Management

“Change Control” I’m sure almost any engineer would rather just make changes than fill in countless numbers of change forms. With rancid it allows you to audit your Cisco (or other vendor supported) environment to detect changes to platform and configuration to ensure you can tie up any loose ends. While Rancid isn’t designed to be a replacement for your change control procedures it allows you to streamline your process’s to ensure your teams know the state of the environment. With Rancid you have the ability to apply bulk changes via single commands thus bringing down the total cost of management.

Taking the time to invest into proactive management of your environment can pay itself back many, many times over as we have seen time and time again. While the details of the open source applications we have listed above aren’t the be-all and end-all it’s a good place to start. There are many commercial applications in the three defined groups above and many tie closely to the ITIL framework which may or may not be required within your environment.

AdventNet provide some very cost effective commercial implementations that can really tie together some of the dispirit systems you may have laying around inside your environment. Why not have a look on their web site.

We look forward to any questions or suggestions you may have on how people can enhance or provide proactive management to their environments.

http://www.secguru.com/article/quick_tips_to_find_files_on_linux_file_system

Enjoy!