VMware VM can't be cloned, moved or backed up? No problem.

There are probably easier (or harder) ways to do this, but my back was up against a wall yesterday after a very important virtual machine was in a very bad state yesterday, after a series of hardware issues with the host, and basically one of those perfect storms of bad backup and bad host and bad VM happened.

Apparently, backups for this machine had been failing in a deceptive manner that didn’t clue us in that they were failing, and the host (VMware ESXi 5.0) was building new snapshots of the drive over and over again when Veeam tried to take a backup.

Worse, every time you tried to do a VMware level operation with the machine, it was complaining about the disks with something like “Error caused by file /vmfs/volumes/########-########-####-############/VM-Name/VM-Name-0000001.vmdk” and failing out. Little extra could be gleaned from SSHing into the host and checking dmesg, but it was plain the disk was being weird in a software way, not a hardware way. Luckily, the virtual machine itself could read the whole disk just fine, and it still ran just fine. So I was stuck with flaky hardware and no way to move the VM off of it.
Continue reading “VMware VM can't be cloned, moved or backed up? No problem.”

VMware VM can't be cloned, moved or backed up? No problem.
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Linux is dead? Long live Linux!

Mike Gualtieri of Forrester pontificates on the swan song of the venerable open source computer kernel Linux, declaring its hopes for world domination to be “game over”.

Poor Linux. It struggled so hard to dominate the world. It was the little open source engine that could, but it didn’t. It never even came close to Microsoft Windows on the desktop, with less than 2% share of desktops. The bright spot for Linux is that 60%+ of servers on the Internet run Linux.

But the real end to Linux’s hope for world dominance came when mobile platforms iOS and Android cleaned clocks in the mobile market. Sure, Android is built on top of Linux, but Linux is only one of many piece parts of the Android mobile operating system. It is not Linux.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Linux is, of course, because if anything is Linux, it’s Android.
Continue reading “Linux is dead? Long live Linux!”

Linux is dead? Long live Linux!

Linux Pirattitude!

Today be Interrrrnational Talk like a Pirate Day. Yaaarrrrr! As be th’ norm fer this blog, I must post a little nonsense t’ mark th’ occasion. If ye’re usin’ Linux, th’ easiest way t’ convert a chunk o’ text into somethin’ respectable be t’ use th’ pirate filter. On Ubuntu (and prrrrrobably other Debian-based distrrrros), do th’ followin’ or walk the plank:

sudo apt-get install filters

Open a terminal then run:

/usr/games/pirate

Paste a chunk o’ text into th’ terminal, and it will echo yer text as filtered through enough grog t’ waylay Blackbeard himself.

If you already have a chunk of text in a file, do the following:

cat textfile.txt | /usr/games/pirate > walktheplank.txt

Previous Talk like a Pirate posts:

Other FtB bloggers who won’t be made to walk the plank:

Get on it, me hearties! Post yer piratey entries now or we’ll chum the waters with yer entrails! Yarr!

Linux Pirattitude!