2009 May 24 - Sun
VMWare on HP DL360 G6
I recently acquired a couple of decently configured HP DL360 G6 servers. Each boots VMWare directly from an
embedded USB Token. Now that is a server that works right out of the box. And it did.
It is an excellent ability to be able to use HP's management tools to view the console remotely. I've not
laid hands on the server, but I have almost complete visibility into the unit. There are about 20 different
temperature sensors, I can monitor and cap power usage, evaluate processor utilization, and much more. Remote
access to CDRoms is also available through a virtual media Java mechanism. I'm using that now to upgrade to U4
of ESXi.
HP has their own special image and after a bunch of searching, I found it at
Software Depot Home.
I had tried the U4 version from VMWare's site, but it wouldn't install itself in the correct spot. That is
when I figured that HP must have a special version. Don't try to install HP's v8.20 of management tools either.
They are frought with installation problems.
[/Networks/VMWare]
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Sun Java 6 on Debian Lenny 5.01
I'd think Debian Linux should get simpler all the time. Maybe not. My tricks from
Installing Sun Java on Debian Lenny didn't yield the desired
results.
Perhaps if I had performed a standard Debian Lenny Desktop install, I would not have had
this problem. Instead, I took the expert/custom route. During the beginning of the
install of Debian Lenny, I chose the advanced options where I could install a KDE desktop.
I'm not sure if the standard variation would have worked out of the box, but, whatever, this
one didn't.
I had to go to
Debian Tutorials to find the answer, which was a basic one-liner, a long, but it required one preparation
step before hand. The directory /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins needed to be corrected first. Then the one liner
could be performed: ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.12/jre/plugin/i386/n s7/libjavaplugin_oji.so
/usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins/
With that in place, I can now run Java applets in IceWeasel.
[/OpenSource/Debian/Development]
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Enable SSH on VMWare ESXi
VMMWare ESXi is installed and started with SSH disabled. To enable it is an unsupported
option, as it allows a user access to the console, operating system and associated file
system.
My primary reason for accessing the VMWare ESXi file system (vmfs), is the ease in which
one can get ISO images on to the system. When running the VMWare Infrastructure Client,
during the creation of a virtual machine, the virtual CD Drive can be attached to an ISO
image resident in the DataStore, with the DataStore basially being the vmfs file system.
So to get read/write access to vmfs, one needs to activate SSH on VMWare:
- At the console of ESXi host, press Alt-F1 to access bypass the simple management
window and gain access to the console window.
- There is no prompt and no text echo, but type unsupported and hit
the enter key.
- Enter the password you've assigned for root.
- A prompt of ~ # will become visible.
- Use vi to edit /etc/inetd.conf.
- Find the line that begins with #ssh and remove the #, and save the file.
- Use ps | grep inetd to find the existing inetd process id.
- Restart the process with kill -HUP id.
- You will now have access via SSH.
After logging in, the default datastore can be found at /vmfs/volumes/DataStore1. I
created a sub-directory there named ISO to hold my ISO images. The directory and files are
accessible from the VMWare Infrastructure Client when creating a new Virtual Machine. ISO
files can be retrieved with the wget command.
I havn't done it yet, but one could add a .ssh directory on /root, do the appropriate
magic (covered in another article), and login with an ssh key rather than root password.
Much of the information here was extracted from a couple of web sites, with
VM-Help
being the primary one. It's forum entries have additional useful information.
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