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Thursday 20 February 2014

OVA and hardware versions

I made a virtual appliance a while ago for a client everything seemed to be working, but there was a slight problem with it, since it was exported in ova and imported back to a ESXi 5.0 it didn't work because of the virtual hardware version. I spent some time figuring what the correct version should be and here is what I found:

 virtualHW.version = "4"                 # essential for ESX 3.5
 virtualHW.version = "7"                 # essential for ESX 4.0
 virtualHW.version = "8"                 # essential for ESX 5.0
 virtualHW.version = "9"                 # essential for ESX 5.1

You will find the hardware version in the VMX file afterwards you can export it back to OVA. Let's cross fingers and hope it works this time.

Thursday 6 February 2014

Ubuntu Server 12.04 - network settings

I had to setup today a Ubuntu Server 12.04 virtual machine for a client with some of our products pre-installed on it. First thing was that they used IPv4 and second for some reason I was unable to resolve properly. So here is what I did and worked:

I disabled IPv6 putting the following lines in  /etc/sysctl.conf :
net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1

In /etc/network/interfaces I set the static IPs for the network addapters:
# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.6
gateway 192.168.1.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255

In Ubuntu Server 12.04, any changes made manually to /etc/resolv.conf will be overwritten later by a DNS information manager called resolvconf.

If you want to change the default settings, you could modify files base, head, or 
tail under /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d.

base: Used when no other data can be found
head: Header of default resolv.conf. The server inside will the first ones to check.
tail: entries appended at the end of resolv.conf. In some cases, upgrading from a previous Ubuntu release, will make tail a symlink to original.

After this small changes everything worked as planed.

Monday 3 February 2014

FreeNAS 9.1.1 and APC ES700

I got a ES700 APC UPS the problem was that I needed to connect it to my FreeNAS server and eventually configure it, but for some reason I couldn't run the service related to the UPS in FreeNAS 9.1.1. And then I found this:

https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/2548

First thing to do before you apply the fix be sure that the UPS is configured on the correct port.
If you turn on "show console messages" in System -> Settings -> Advanced and watch the messages as you plug in the UPS, it should show the FreeBSD device name. 

Second be sure to have the correct profile for the UPS, for me "APC ups 2 Back-UPS ES/CyberFort 350 USB (usbhid-ups)" worked.

Apply the fix:

scp usbhid-ups.xz to somewhere writable, e.g. /var or the main pool
SSH into FreeNAS
unxz usbhid-ups.xz
mountrw /
Btw I noticed that the copy command (the path) in the instructions for the fix was mistaken:
cp usbhid-ups /usr/local/libexec/nut/usbhid-ups
mount -ur /

Start the UPS service.