General

I dont like the term “Uncategorized” so if I cant fit a post into anything else it goes in here ;)

Consolidating my blogs

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After a lot of thinking 🙂 I have decided to merge my two blogs previously at www.vmwhere.net and jayakumar.co.in into a single site/blog here at www.jayakumar.org.

The reason was simple, am lazy and do not want to maintain two sites. Plus after I moved out of VMware late last year I don’t feel the need maintain a separate blog for VMware so as maintain that thin distinction between work (VMware) and personal (linux/networking) stuff. Also since I have joined Cisco I wanted to blog bout Nexus 1000v and Cisco UCS products, but the mere thought of setting up and maintaining another blog kept that idea far. So theoretically I have merged 3 blogs into one.

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All downloads are gone :(

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Thanks to a catastrophic failure during migration from a private server to a shared server, all the site downloads are gone 🙁 the blogs posts, comments etc basically everything that was on the database we were able to recover from a db backup, but anything on the filesystem is gone. So all the virtual machine … Read more

Improve linux raid rebuild/resync speed

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I have a small 🙂 NAS box with 6 x 1TB HDD in RAID 6 and 4 x 500GB HDD in RAID 5. Recently thanks to the arrival of my baby girl and a HD handy cam, I was running out of space fast on the array and so when when I saw a decent deal for 1TB drives in NewEgg I picked up couple to add to the RAID 6 volume.

Growing a raid array in linux using mdadm is easy. I made sure I used fdisk to create single large partition on the drive and mark the partition type fd (Linux raid autodetect) prior to adding it to the array.

 Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdm1               1      121601   976760001   fd  Linux raid autodetect

Adding the drives to the raid is straightforward

mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sdl1
mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sdm1

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PXE boot VMware ESXi 4.1 and Manual Install

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an awesome new feature in the just released ESXi 4.1 is the ability to do PXE boot and script the install using a kick-start script. If you looking for information on how to do this see here at billhill’s post.

http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/vmwareinsmb/2010/07/13/esxi-41-scripted-installation-via-pxe-and-kickstart

However while adding that feature VMware seems have slightly broken the PXE boot, but manual install ability of ESXi. This is useful if you have lights-out lab and want to use the local pxe server instead of those virtual media options but also want to customize the install options as the lab servers do not have standardized components and hardware and may other issues.

Refer to the above link for overall PXE/dhcp/tftp install steps. I plan only to document what’s different for a manual install.

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setting up http proxy for cli

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Okay, I have to google this information every-time I need it, to so am going to blog it, so that I know exactly where to look for it 🙂

Setting up a proxy from the GUI on you browser or system does not always work for command line utilities like apt-get, yum, wget or customer bash scripts etc…

So here is how to setup proxy for CLI from CLI, assuming your proxy server is proxy.example.com (IP 192.168.2.252) and port 3128.

export http_proxy='http://proxy.example.com:port/'

OR

export http_proxy='http://192.168.2.252:3128/'

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