SNMP trap receiver

The application Trap Receiver can be verry useful when testing SNMP.
It’s a simple application receiving traps and display the trap data so you don’t have to setup a complex management application.
You can get more info and download Trap Receiver on www.trapreceiver.com

VI Toolkit

Are you writing scripts to automate tasks in VMware?
VI-Toolkit is a wiki alike site that has lots of documentation and samples.

Learning Powershell

Dr. Tobias Weltner has written a great Master-PowerShell guide that will provide a good and comprehensive explanation how to use Powershell.
You can view it online or download it as PDF.

Update vCenter after editing the VMX file

I often edit a VMX file of a VM using FastSCP or VI. Downsize of this methode is that vCenter is not picking up de changes fast.
One methode is to unregister and register the VM, but this a not a prefered way.
A better, safer and faster way is to use vimsh, here a the steps:

1. logon to the service console and have root permissions
2. enter the command:
   vimsh -ne “vmsvc/getallvms | grep <VM name>”
   e.g. vimsh -ne “vmsvc/getallvms | grep server1″
3. get the VM ID, this is the first number of the output
   e.g.  the output  is 32   server1   [LUN1….
   the VM ID = 32
4. enter the command:
   vimsh -ne “vmsvc/reload <VM ID>”
   e.g. vimsh -ne “vmsvc/reload 32″

And your done, vCenter displays nows the updated information.

VMware VMX items

Ever want to know about the various entries in a VMware virtual machine config(vmx) file?
Checkout this site.

Collecting diagnostic information for VMware products

In case you need to troubleshoot VMware products you will probability are looking for log files and other diagnostic data.
Good for you VMware has thought of that and has some scripts and tools available doing the job, refer to this site for more information.

Scripting help

Simon Sheppard has a very nice site with lots of information for the creating scripts in Windows XP, Windows PowerShell, Bash, Oracle and Windows SQl server 2005.

Linux toolbox

A nice Linux command reference can be found at the Unix Toolbox site.

Running Microsoft IE6 on Ubuntu 8.10

I finally decided to move from Windows Vista to Ubuntu 8.10 on my HP 6710b laptop and it’s works great so far. But some sites such as the Microsoft OWA site of my company who I work for doesn’t work well with Firefox. OWA works best with Microsoft Internet Explorer.
So I found a project that enables you to use Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 on Ubuntu 8.10, please refer to the IEs4Linux project site.
There’s an instruction how to install the package on Ubuntu however they are for Edgy (Ubuntu 6.10).
Just replace edgy for intrepid and follow the instructions.
I had to run the install script (ies4linux) several times before the installation was finished successfully but Internet Explorer 6 works fine now and OWA look great.

Sysprep Windows 2008

Well as you might know sysprep no longer exists in Windows 2008, this is replaced by WAIK (Windows Automated Installation Kit).

Brian Desmond wrote a nice howto for deploying Windows 2008 at the ’sysprep’ way.

More info on http://briandesmond.com/blog/how-to-sysprep-in-windows-2008/