The hiccup, as nearly everyone knows now, is that you have to find a way to get your monitoring server to talk to your cell phone company -- and, honestly, you're cell phone company does not want to make this easy....they'll try to upgrade you to various unlimited SMS/messaging plans and then have an internet SMTP -> SMS gateway that fails constantly.
I've switched from provider to provider over the last 4-5 years and they are all the same. Alerts may be reliable for a few months on one or the other, but eventually there comes a time when you didn't get the call because the email -> SMS gateway was down, or worse -- delivers the message a day later.
So, screw the cell phone company, let's use Skype:
Steps I Used to Teach The Hobbit Monitor to Use Skype:
WARNING: Alloc: ppn=0xc0000 out of range: 0x0-0xc0000 (count=3)
WARNING: P2MCache: GetPhysMemRange failed: PPN 0xc0000 canBlock 0 status Bad parameter.
This patch fixes this problem.
More information available at: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1007243
The official release notes are available at: http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_esx35u3_rel_notes.html
]]>I don't see much that is earth-shattering for VMware ESX Server Deployments- but then, this is RHEL, and a .3 release so you wouldn't expect that anyway. The good stuff is probably all in Fedora now and being saved up for RHEL6.
Anyhow, I was just thinking this morning that the rate of security updates for the RHEL 5.2 kernel was getting annoying.... When kernel security notices are as frequent as phpmyadmin ones, you know something is not right.
]]>For me, I always look back to ancient Rome. After all, our government was founded to actually be a modern version of Rome. I don't think I'm alone. In fact, I'm pretty sure that was the whole reason Latin and ancient history were required courses for most of American History.
So, how does one interpret current political events in light of roman history?
Anyone who knows anything of Roman history, knows that there were essentially five stages:
a) Pre-Rome (Government is ad-hoc and essentially hereditary with frequent changes and violence, focus is on survival and growing faster than neighboring cities over a ~300 year period.)b) The Roman Republic (The civilization that America's founders wanted to emulate and which relied on a culture that valued liberty, reasoning, rhetoric, universal military service, and human achievement. Not that everything was perfect as there was a constant class warfare, but the society as a whole was dynamic enough to take on any challenges thrown against it for almost 350 years).
c) Civil War ( Shortly after the Roman Republic reached it's peak, the classes of society became increasingly polarized and over a 100 year period decided that they couldn't stand anything but the total subjugation of the other...... The winning side killed off the leaders of the other and shredded the equivalent of their constitution, resulting in the death of the republic and birth of the empire. )
d) Emperors ( Except for a few exceptions, the emperors who ruled Rome presided over a 500 year decay of its power and the loss of cultural identity/virtues which had kept the civilization together ) .
e) Living Dead ( Various external powers, especially in Europe, fight until the renaissance (~1000 years) over the remains of Rome and pretend to bring it back to life (the most notable being Charlemagne), but what was undone could not be brought together again. )
I would argue that if the life of the United States mirrors the life of Rome in general form, then the Presidential Election of 2000 signaled the move from the Era of the Republic to Civil War. Note that in Rome, this was almost a 100 year process, which could have been stopped at any point.
The year 2000 is when Americans first started hearing signs of "The victor is not our president" from a losing party, which is as good a sign of real polarization as any.
In 2004, after losing again, moderates in the Democrat party were essentially thrown out (Lieberman/etc) and a more extremist message proved to be a winning strategy in 2006 and now 2008. This message was accompanied by thuggish actions of Obama supporters and directly encouraged with statements from party leaders that they should "Get in the face" of their opponents.
Also, in 2008, the golden American standard that politics ended at its borders was eliminated for good. The chance of using the worldwide popularity of a candidate became a political yardstick (whether the candidates positions are good for his country, or even correct, becomes irrelevant.) There appears to even been a silent effort to accept cash from anyone, whether they were a foreign power at war with the United States or not, as long as it gave one a political edge.
I have the feeling that now the Democrats are going to suffer the same vilification (within the USA) as Bush did. Whereas it might have been bearable for Republicans to lose the Presidency to a moderate democrat who might compromise as needed, they will not suffer having the presidency and both houses of congress in the hands of the non-compromising extreme side of the Democrat party. Therefore, they will not provide any honeymoon to Obama and will work harder than they ever to obstruct him. Remembering their treatment by Obama "thugs", they're also going to loosen the definition of acceptable behavior of a "Loyal Opposition." And, since the have now lost nearly all power in blue states (including the entirety of New England), they will no longer be required to "moderate" their positions. Indeed, you can already see the complaints being made by extreme republicans, that McCain lost because he was too "bipartisan".
It is certainly possible that we will see an ever expanding cycle of each party attempting to nullify the accomplishments of the other over the next 20-30 years (Society is certainly not growing any more cohesive, and I have no reason to believe their Obama ever meant his bipartisan overtures as anything more than a way to score political points for his side.)
Furthermore, consider that in Rome's case, once a party loses it becomes harder to win again, therefore losing becomes an unacceptable option - a situation in which we are doing our best to replicate via:
a) Each decade, the winning party exerts ever more control over the drawing of voting district boundaries.
b) With each election, Money becomes more important, and the loser having lost influence with lobbyists has less of getting it.
c) More and more of Government employees are politically chosen, meaning that the government functions more on behalf of the parties than the people.
d) The winning party attempts to exert more and more control over the media to stop the distribution of the other sides message.
e) The winning party does not moderate its goals and attempts to destroy those things which are "sacred" to the other party.
We're still far from being stuck in a loop, and up until the last minute, we can step back....but I have no reason to believe that the US populace will not continue down its current path.
After all, look how easy it was for us to think of ourselves in terms of "red states" and "blue states". And, due to hyper-partisanship, a renown novelist (Orson Scott Card) has recently written a plausible novel about an American Civil War that gathered significant attention.
Just this week, Obama's current victory was being described as a "non-violent revolution".
If America had wanted to avoid this pessimistic future, the GOP could have nominated McCain in 2000 - but they thought it was more important to gain power than to have a qualified man to use it. Likewise, the democrats could have nominated a moderate in 2004 or 2008 (Instead they killed off the moderates). I was hoping their strategy would backfire this year, but it didn't (another article on that later).
Regardless, Seeing their success, the GOP is sure to mimic the democrats tactics in 2012. Short of a repeat of the carter years and a new highly popular candidate, the GOP will have no choice but to do so if it wants to regain any power.
A study of history does make one optimistic about human nature. I'm still waiting for my change that I can believe in.
]]>A few years ago, VMware suggested that all ESX Linux guests standardize on the pcnet32 driver. Then, shortly afterward, a vmxnet driver was released which was supposed to be faster. We all dutifully migrated.
When x86_64 VMs became supported, we were told to migrate again to e1000.
And recently, ESX 3.5U2 unveiled a new "enhanced vmxnet" driver. I've been investigating for a few months the benefits of switching, and indeed found that the new driver seemed to perform better and have fewer bugs.
So, it was no surprise to me when I read today in the vmware communities that VMware is pushing a migration to enhanced vmxnet:
]]>
Here we see the reclusive basset in fine form competing for the coveted "walk the boy" gold medal.
Now the basset is demonstrating the proper technique for "loosening up the legs."
Lastly, our basset explains that picture time is over and beer and rest time has begun.
]]>Boom.
Apparently, there is some bug in the vmware license management code. VMware is scrambling to figure out what happened and put out a patch.
Running VM's will not be immediately impacted.
There is a major discussion going on in the vmware communities about the issue: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/162377?tstart=0
OK, while we're all remaining calm....just imagine the implications that bugs like this can occur and get past QA testing....5 years down the road, nearly all server apps worldwide running in VM's if you believe a lot of forecasts ......some country decides to initiate cyberwarfare and manages to get a backdoor into whatever is the prevailing hypervisor of the day.....boom. All your VM's are belong to us.
I honestly think a lot of the hype from those who want to build a vm security industry is crap, but god protect us if the baseline code for critical hypervisors like ESX isn't kept secure and regularly audited.
I'd love to find out what happened here.
What regression testing on new releases does vmware do to check for date based bugs? I'd think they'd at least check for simple things like changing the date to 1 year or 1 month in the future.
UPDATE: Frank Wegner has posted the following suggestions:
You can see the latest status here: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1006716 Please check back often, because it will notify you when this issue has been fixed. Until then the best workaround I can think of is:* Do nothing
* Turn DRS off
* Avoid VMotion
* Avoid to power off VM's
I'd council against turning DRS off as that actually deletes resource pool settings....instead, set sensitivity to 5 which should effectively disable it w/ minimal impact.
UPDATE 2: VMware Website appears to be having trouble keeping up with people requesting updates.
UPDATE 3: VMware has stated they will have fixes available in 36hrs at the earliest.
UPDATE 4: Anand Mewalal comments:
We used the following workaround to power on the VM's.
Find the host where a VM is located
run ' vmware-cmd -l ' to list the vms.
issue the commands:
service ntpd stop
date -s 08/01/2008
vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/vm path/vmname.vmx start
service ntpd start
UPDATE 5: Apparently, there are no easily seen warnings in logs/etc or VC prior to hitting the bug. VC will continue to show the hosts as licensed and no errors will appear in vmkernel log file until you try to start up a new vm, reboot a vm, or reboot the host.
UPDATE 6: Welcome Slashdot readers! I've temporarily disabled comments to allow the server vm to handle the load. Apparently Movable Type 4.1 executes a seperate perl cgi script to handle comments on each page load. Load times might have been slow for the last 45 minutes, but should be OK now.
UPDATE 7: I made some minor corrections to this entry that others have requested.
UPDATE 8: VMware has provided a FAQ about the bug with an updated ETA and a few responses to common complaints.
UPDATE 9: Here are some additional external links to blogs/media covering the bug:
SearchServerVirtualization.comVMware continues to make a reasonable argument that all software will have major bugs at some point, and customers keeping calm and being patient is the best course for everyone to take at this time.
The Register - Date bugs kills VMware Systems
blog.scottlowe.org
virtualization.info
Anyhow, the best thinking I've found so far on the story is over at blackfive:
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2008/08/no-its-not-good.htmlUpdate: The President of Georgia has managed to get an Op-Ed in Monday's Wall Street Journal.
Still, people are finding other bugs:
a) Yesterday I tried to clone a running vm, one of the cool new features. It didn't work out well. Despite VC reporting success, the new vmx file pointed to the old vm's vmdk path which rightly caused a locking problem. I don't think I'm going to use hot cloning again, or whatever they are calling it, until the first set of U2 patches are released.
b) ESX 3.5 Update 2 - vmkernel messages FileIO failed with 0x0xbad0006(Limit exceeded)
]]>The Website Is Down]]>
For a long time now, VMware has been the undisputed technical leader in the x86 virtualization space. So much so, that despite major qualms about depending on a single small company in a rapidly growing space, CTO's everywhere have essentially writing blank checks annually to get the piece of mind from knowing they're deploying the most production-ready/datacenter-ready virtualization products which VMware has.
The back and forth conversations between CTO's and VMware before signing the checks can be illuminating. Last year, at VMworld 2007 in SF, the CEO of VMware publicly discussed the impact of a EMC's purchase of VMware and subsequent IPO of a portion of the companies shares. Mrs. Greene had to balance the honesty that VMware's founders were no longer in control of the company with the hope that as long as VMware delivered strong financial performance the company would essentially be left alone to deliver products as they saw fit. The undertone of the discussion being that regardless of who owned what, as long Mrs. Greene and others at VMware were kept on board, customers were going to be taken care of hell or high water.
So, it was a little poignant today when I heard that Mrs. Greene was leaving and that a former Microsoft exec would be taking her place.
Good news, not. Pay attention CTO's.