Final VMware Post

…on this site, anyway.

Per a suggestion I’ve opened a new site: Virtual Andy. If you’re interested in the VMware side of things, it’s your place to go. I’ve also updated all of the VMware related posts on here to link to the posts on that site.

Essentials, Late 2008 Edition

Another draft I saw lying around. Here goes nothing…

An homage to Dive Into Mark’s Linux Essentials list (2006, 2008) and My WebDev Essentials (2007) here’s the update on cool software that I am using.

Note: All webapps/software on this list is FOG (Free or GTFO) and for Windows…which, ironically, is not FOG:

1. VLC – essential for playing video files
2. TweetDeck – it’s where I post to twitter
3. FoxIt Reader – my work life has be reading tons of PDFs – Adobe Reader is too large and slow, FoxIt is great and has Firefox integration — did I mention it does tabs? and doesn’t suck?
4. Firefox
5. GMail
6. Web Developer Toolbar – most of the time I have this hidden, but it comes in handy on random occaisions
7. delicious toolbar – my work life also has me bookmarking an unbelievable amount of material and having to keep it organized; across many machines… delicious and delicious toolbar are the way to go
8. Stack Overflow and Ask Metafilter are great question and answer sites for random geek and nongeek questions
9. Mint.com provides great personal financial data gathering from multiple sources (savings account, checking account, credit card) and aggregates them all, essential budgeting tool
10. Seahorse – Linux only, but great GPG/PGP key management software – couldn’t ever get WinGPG to work
11. Google Reader the obvious RSS reader choice
12. VMware Player
13. Pidgin – instant messaging
14. mIRC
15. mRemote – gracefully handles multiple remote administration sessions in tabs (SSH, RDP, VNC)
16. Winamp – classic mode only
17. Google Toolbar – I am a very serious Google searcher and the toolbar provides a lot of killer functionality while on result pages (find being the #1 with the “up a level” at #2)
18. Nagios – system notifications for our boxes here at work (Linux)
19. CNN and Reddit for nongeek and geek news.
20. KeePass – password vault
21. PuTTY oh PuTTY, where would I be without your quick SSH goodness?
22. Hulu – watch Family Guy, Arrested Development and Firefly online
23. Paint .NET – still without a doubt the best lightweight image cropping/low level editing app
24. Facebook – obvious
25. AdBlock Plus – ads are annoying

No longer using (absolutely refuse to run):

1. iTunes
2. Quicktime
3. Safari for Windows
4. Anything Apple
5. Myspace
6. Digg

The Apple apps running on Windows were awful. I am sure they are great on Mac OS and hardware, but their products on Windows are sluggish at best. I felt dumber after each visit to Digg or Myspace, so no more.

Gone, but not forgotten:

1. Last.FM – just stopped being practical, and stopped working in Winamp
2. Eclipse – no longer doing development…
3. OpenOffice – Use Google Docs for docs that I share, and Office 2007 for everything else. Office 2007 is too nice.
4. RescueTime – stopped caring about the fact I’m on the web most days writing email or in Excel
5. Greasemonkey – I either don’t visit the sites that I used Greasemonkey on anymore or the sites have changed
6. Filezilla – for the few times I’ve got to FTP

VMware Consolidated Backup: Explained

Moved to Virtual Andy

Guide to Backing up your Virtual Machines with VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)

Moved to Virtual Andy

VI Toolkit One Liner of the Day

Moved to Virtual Andy

Idiot, !learn hardware

I have had to do more hardware related work with this position than any other job.

Damn, I’ve got a lot to learn.

We bought 4 quad-port NICs and 4 HBAs for our VMware ESX hosts. We really want to beef up our Virtual Infrastructure. Well… we have IBM x346 boxes.

High Rise PCI-X Slot 1: QLA 4010 HBA
High Rise PCI-X Slot 2: Quad Port NIC

The problem? We have an additional high rise HBA, but no more high rise spots. I panic, and start the process of getting the parts acquired. Fast forward to today, after talking to our wonderful sales rep, who put me on a conference call with IBM. It went a little something like this:

IBM: “Do you have the part?”
Me: “Yes”
IBM: “Look in the box. There should be a low rise connector in the box. Remove the high rise connector and add the low rise one.”
Me: “I don’t see one. Wait a minute…”
(thinking) “SON OF A …”
Me: “Sorry for wasting your time. Thanks so much for your help.”

A Personal Update

It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to update on the goings-on here in bofehendge.

A lot of these things have gotten casual mentions here and there on the site, but I wanted to make it ‘official’ for no other purpose than me looking back on things in a few years. If you don’t feel like waiting for posts like this to come around, feel free to subscribe to my “life” feed which automagically feeds my links, twittering, and all things memememe.

I’ve got a girlfriend. WTF! She’s 18. She’s country. She can tolerate me. She’s awesome. I have no idea how it happened, and I’m definitely not complaining. =)

I’m working with VMware on a daily basis. Not the typical DBA role (or assistant DBA role), but I’m enjoying it immensely. VMware brings us new challenges, new ways of thinking, and keeps us away from our server room. Before coming back to MSU I had never even used VMware, now I can’t imagine a day in the IT world without it. We have four ESX 3.5 hosts that house production VMs and one VMware server 2.0 beta server that we use internally.

I bought a new bed. The OriginalBed by Tempurpedic, to be specific. I also bought a new frame for the bed and two tempurpedic pillows. I’m dreaming nightly. It’s an unbelievable difference. One day I’ll take down that TOOL poster and not have the bedroom look like a dorm room.

I finished a graduate school class. This one was Organizational Behavior (online)… Management 651. Pretty interesting class, not too challenging. I got a B. Then I met with my advisor about getting my graduate school program changed from an MBA to an MSIS. It’s more in line with my long-term goals.

I survived the first Rothbury Festival. Unbelievable. I haven’t decided if I want to go back next year. The best thing was going into the show with a relatively blank slate on a lot of the bands. I had heard OF bands like Widespread Panic and STS9 but not really listened to them or formed an opinion. Needless to say, I’ve got two new favorites. No complaints at all except for the obligatory gas price rant.

Here’s a video with shots of what the place looked like after dark:

Ask me for pictures. They’re on Facebook if you’re a friend =)

I ordered a laptop. It should be shipping soon. That was today. Here’s the system – I also ordered a gig of RAM and a wireless ergonomic keyboard and mouse. I’m going to make a sincere attempt at the ergo keyboard. My hands need it. I’m eagerly anticipating the arrival… I’ll have a post about my new setup when it’s done.

VMware: Find total disk usage of snapshots on a given LUN

Moved to Virtual Andy

New Geek Tools: Assembla, RescueTime, Xobni

Assembla packages SVN hosting, Trac, Wikis, Real Time Chat, Ticketing, and emails on repository commits. “It’s too hard to set up” is usually an excuse to not use SCM tools… but Assembla gets you going quickly. We now use it on BibleShark. Ask me if you want to take a look at our setup on Assembla.

Here’s a screenshot of a commit I did a while back for Google Analytics ga.js update:

RescueTime tracks what application has your focus and for how long. I can’t wait to see this product grow, they got their initial funding by YCombinator.

Here’s a screenshot of a recent RescueTime:

Xobni adds message sender/context, a better search, and email analytics your Outlook.

Here’s a screenshot of the pane it adds to your inbox:

Here’s a screenshot of inbox analytics from Xobni:

Comment if you want an invite, I’ve got a few left.