Chris Farris

Originally published at Chris Farris.

I'm not a big fan of the idea of VMware running on a host OS for production servers. One reason for that is that you have direct access to the VMware data files.

You could do something unfortunate, like:

cp server-flat.vmdk /backup_location/server-flat.vmdk
gzip server-flat.vmdk


You won't notice your mistake for weeks or months. So long as that VM is running it will keep an open file handle to the uncompressed file. You might notice some weirdness with "df" but that is about it.

Of course once you do restart the VM or reboot the VMware host OS, you'll discover your harddrive is gone, and that backup is several months old.

Originally published at Chris Farris.

I suppose I should start demanding my head on a pike.

Yesterday I was elected to the Executive Committee of the 7th District for the Georgia Republican Party. I didn't seek the position, I was asked by the new chairman to run. My goals are to revamp the district's web presence and work to leverage social media to engage younger voters in the conservative cause.

I ran un-opposed so I didn't need to make a speech. That is good because I really didn't write one. However if I had made a speech these are the talking points I would have used.

The GOP has two problems these days. Our Brand is in the toilet, and we were out organized by the opposition. The two are somewhat related, but the solutions need to be managed somewhat separately.

Our Brand is in the toilet because the worst President since Nixon just left the White House. When our party controlled Congress it increased spending, increased entitlements, reduced privacy and civil liberties, and generally created a circus atmosphere (Terry Schiavo). Congressmen went to jail for corruption, and were forced to resign over sex scandals. One was with a teenaged boy.

Honestly, the GOP deserved what it got. Unfortunately, the American People are going to pay the price with the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate in power.

The GOP must reform its brand. But it is not the place of the Republican Party apparatus to do that. The Brand must be reformed during the primaries by the electorate and by affiliate groups like the RLC and others. The Party should not be taking sides in primaries. The Party should not be deciding who is Republican enough and who is not. Showing the American People what the GOP stands for is done by the elected officials who bear the Republican badge. If we want to fix the brand we must fix or replace our elected officials and candidates.

Our Party also has an organizational challenge. In 2000 and 2004 the 72 Hour efforts was the cutting edge, and it helped elected and reelect a mediocre President. But technology moves fast and what was cutting-edge in 2004 was insufficient in 2006 and 2008. Social Media has been adopted by the left as a method of recruitment and organization.

The Republican Party must begin to use these tools, and the next generation of tools to follow to organize. We have begun to see that happen with the Tea Parties. They initially were organized via Twitter.

Mastery of Facebook and Twitter are not sufficient to restore the GOP to majority status in Washington. Our elected leaders will need to demonstrate they have reformed before we will again be trusted with the leavers of power. However, once we have reformed ourselves we will need to spread that message and the social media revolution will be part of that.

Originally published at Chris Farris.

So earlier this week I needed to build a new VMWare server in the lab because the existing VMWare server had a few production instances running on it. Our Lab is mostly hand-me-down hardware and not the best. I didn't want the VMs I needed to create to impact those legacy production servers.

A coworker had installed VMWare Server 2.0 a few months back and we had several issues with it. It was slow and the Web GUI was nowhere near as easy to use as the VMWare Server client in v1.x. I needed to test out VMWare's latest offerings before settling on the path forward for work and (by extension) home.

That's when I discovered that VMWare had released a version of their Bare-Metal Hypervisor ESX under a no-cost license. Woot! I'd rather not be running my multiple VMs under a heavy-weight OS where someone could accidentally compress the running filesystem and leave a time bomb for the next time VMWare was restarted.

Well, the first issue I had was getting ESXi to install on a box with an IDE or SATA drive. Work has its own HW platform we ship to the field (1U, half depth, P4 3.4GHz, 4GB Ram 250GB SATA), and I have a loaner in my lab. ESXi was designed to run on enterprise class HW. The Spec sheet names Dell and HP as the only approved vendors. The installer will only install to a box with 2+GB of RAM and a SCSI or SAS/SATA drives/controllers.

Tip: If you have a Supermicro PDSMi-LN4 motherboard and you want to install ESXi, in the bios set SATA mode to enhanced and enable the Intel RAID driver.

Consulting my research assistant Dr. Google, I discovered there is a way to fool ESXi's installer into installing to an IDE disk. When you get to the first menu prompt, hit ALT-F1. Login as root (no passwd).
vi /usr/lib/vmware/installer/Core/TargetFilter.py
Change the line:


return interface.GetInterfaceType() == ScsiInterface.SCSI_IFACE_TYPE_IDE

to:

return interface.GetInterfaceType() == ScsiInterface.SCSI_IFACE_TYPE_ISCSI

Then type install
You must then hit ALT-F1 again! Install will switch you back to the first installer instance with the old code.

You should be able to Install ESXi to your IDE drive. If you have difficulties, from the command prompt run an fdisk -l to be sure the installer kernel sees your disks.

Thoughts

I must say the ESXi client (VMWare Infrastructure Client or VI Client) is pretty slick. I like the performance graphs and the ability to add NFS shares as data stores.

There are quite a few disadvantages. Some I'm afraid may be show stoppers for what I need at home and at work.

• The VI Client only runs on Windows. That's not a big deal for work as we all run or have access to Winders to do our jobs. Its a problem for me at home because I want to virtualize my Windows Box (Doenitz) and that would leave me no way to manage my ESXi server.


• The VI Client doesn't support IDE hard-disks in guest VMs. This is the most puzzling because they support them in their other products. Many of the servers I need to virtualize are currently physical boxes with IDE drives. Many times I'm virtualizing our product which, to be useful in testing, has to be exactly like its physical instance. I can't be creating a custom kernel for SCSI disks, or editing my fstab for device name changes. I also suspect this may play havoc with my efforts to virtualize my Windows box.


• VMWare Server supports USB pass-through to guest VMs. I don't see the ability to add a USB device to an ESXi guest.

I have not yet played with VMWare's networking stack, but the little I've seen makes me think it would be real nice fo emulating customer networks. You can tag multiple VLANs to each physical interface and then connect each VM to one or more of those VLANs.

One slight hurdle is that ESXi uses a different VM format than Server. I'm going to have to convert them all from server to ESXi (assuming I can figure a work around for the IDE Disk issue). VMware provides a nice tool Converter to migrate those VMs and also to capture physical boxes and convert them to VMs. I'm gonna mess around with it some more soon.

I think ESXi may be an excellent tool for consolidating some of my production servers to reduce my power and RU footprint in anticipation of seeing a large number of new servers going into our racks. But I'm thinking for Lab purposes it won't cut the mustard. My next post on this topic may be a review of VMware Server 2.x.

Oh, and if you must poke around in the guts, instructions for enabling SSH on the ESXi server.

Originally published at Chris Farris.

http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_PXE_install.html

For Ubuntu you need the tftpd-hpa package as the install.tgz file is larger than atftp will allow.

Originally published at Chris Farris.

I've decided to consolidate all my blogs into one place. I plan to shutdown geeklog, I don't update that very often. I've not decided what I'll do about VitalPowers.

I've stopped using my LiveJournal and only check it once every other day to keep up with the friends who still use it. There are plugins to cross post WordPress to LJ, and I may continue to do that.

Most of my active blogging is being done on Facebook. The intent is to cross post those into here.

This site is a work in progress.

My inspiration is to be a New Media Douchebag.

Originally published at Chris Farris.

Those of you who have followed this blog for any length of time know I'm pretty damn angry. I'm angry at the GOP for following an incompetent President and drunk-with-power Congress for 8 years. I firmly believe that the American People would never have elected a radical leftist like Barack Obama had the GOP not screwed up governing as bad as they did. Charles Grassley should consider committing Seppuku himself before calling on AIG employees to do so. His crimes are far greater that AIG's.

So I find it somewhat odd that I was eager to support Chuck's slate at the Gwinnett GOP Convention. Looking at both slates it was clear that Steve Ramey's slate was more in line with my angry views. I'm pissed off. They're pissed off. While we might quibble on the role of the Fed vs the role of the Congress in the mess we're currently in, the fact of the matter is that both of us blame the current elected GOP. The Convention Rules Committee even tried to insert rules changes that would have allowed the county party to recruit candidates to challenge a sitting incumbent. I'm all for that. I want to see every single member of the Gwinnett Commission booted out of office for being no better than communists with regard to the trash plan.

Yet I didn't support Steve's slate. And I've been wondering why all weekend. Its not that I regret supporting Gwinnett Forward. I think they will do an excellent job and they still have my support. I just find it curious. I think I now know why Chuck and his team is the better choice for the county and the party.

If you look back at most of the revolutions since the enlightenment, most all have been total disasters. Cromwell's revolution against the English Throne, The French Revolution, The Russian Revolution, The Nazi's, China, etc were all disasters. The notable exception to the revolting revolution rule is the United States of America. Why did our revolution succeed where so many others failed. Its not ideals. The French Revolution was about liberty. The Soviets fought to overturn a tyrant. The fundamental difference between the American Revolution and the others is who were the core revolutionaries. In Russia it was the coffee-house intellectuals. Germany's main revolutionary was a hack author/artist who in normal circumstances would have never amounted to a hill of beans. China's revolution was formented by peasants.

The American Revolution was different. Our young country had some of the best minds working for it. They were scientists, lawyers, planters and businessmen. They were the cream of the colonial society.

That's when I hit upon the differences between the elite and the mob.

The elites can be honest, or they can be crooks. Its the difference between Meritocracy and Kleptocracy. Our founding fathers were meritocratic. Our current elected officials in Congress are, by and large, kleptocrats - extending their power and wealth at the expense of the rest of us.

However, there are worse things than being ruled by kleptocrats. Historically mobs have done populations much worse. From gassing Jews, to seizing productive farmland leading to famine, mob rule murders millions. Mob rule also panders to our basest emotions. "Those people talk funny, dress funny, and don't worship the same God as we do, lets kill them and take all their stuff". I'll take double digit inflation over worrying if my neighbor or I are the next ones to be loaded on a cattle car.

It is the reason I can't stand John Oxendine. He panders to the mob. It is why I no longer support the FairTax. What was once a plan developed by the elites is now a rallying cry for the mob. It is why I've all but tuned out talk radio.

So do I want to see the heads of George W. Bush, Saxby Chambliss, John Linder and the rest of the US Congress on a pike? You betcha. Is that worth the damage the mob will cause to my county, party and Country? Hell No.

Originally published at Chris Farris.

The Georgia General Assembly is considering repealing the sales tax exemptions for groceries and allow residents to deduct the sales tax on their annual income tax filing.

This is the most absurd plan imaginable. To claim your deduction you would have to keep all your grocery receipts, and you would not see that money refunded till you filed your taxes the next year.

The Sponsor of the bill, Chuck Sims (R-Ambrose) says people would be able to deduct the cost of the sales tax by saving their receipts and documenting how much they’ve paid in taxes or by taking a standard deduction based on family size. You can be sure that no one is going to be able to keep up with fifty-two weeks of grocery receipts, which leaves the standard deduction. And that will be less than the actual taxes paid by people.

This bill is a tax on the poor at a time when food prices are high and will be going higher. Proponents rationalize that it will bring in money from non-residents who purchase groceries in GA but who do not file state income tax returns. However this tax will be paid by every single person who grocery shops and those who pay income taxes in Georgia will have to wait a year to get their ‘deduction.’

Fax your legislator and tell them to oppose raising taxes on the poor!

Originally published at The Exercise of Vital Powers . Please leave any comments there.

The Georgia legislature is poised to vote on the JOBS Act, a responsible stimulus bill that enables businesses to focus resources on hiring unemployed Georgians.

We need you to contact your state representative today and urge adoption of the JOBS Act. Also known as House Bills 481 & 482, the Act features:

• Tax incentives for companies hiring unemployed workers,
• A repeal of the inventory tax, and
• A gradual phase out of the corporate income tax.

This Act will encourage Georgia business to hire and other businesses to open in Georgia. This is the kind of stimulus legislation Georgians can support! The time is right and the time is now to get this legislation through the House.

Fax Your Legislator Today

Originally published at The Exercise of Vital Powers . Please leave any comments there.

I'm not too worried about LJ going away. I've mostly stopped posting here anyway and all my posts have now been archived.

If you really want to follow what I'm up to you should friend me in Facebook.

LOL:

I’m still torn over whether the Bush administration’s post-war efforts over there are just ass-covering to make up for the war and lack of WMD, or if they really truly believed they could send a bunch of Heritage Foundation interns to run Baghdad, and a liberal society would magically arise from the rubble, sand, and centuries of ethnic violence and bloody factionalism. –The Agitator

Originally published at The Exercise of Vital Powers . Please leave any comments there.

I love the bio lines in the WSJ

Originally published at The Exercise of Vital Powers . Please leave any comments there.

Scoll down to “Other Links” on the left side bar and tell me whats missing.

Georgia Chapter of FreedomWorks

Originally published at The Exercise of Vital Powers . Please leave any comments there.

Homeland Security | Change.gov
Protect Our Information Networks

As president, Barack Obama will lead an effort, working with private industry, the research community and our citizens, to build a trustworthy and accountable cyber infrastructure that is resilient, protects America’s competitive advantage, and advances our national and homeland security.

Strengthen Federal Leadership on Cyber Security: Barack Obama will declare the cyber infrastructure a strategic asset and will establish the position of national cyber advisor who will report directly to the president and will be responsible for coordinating federal agency efforts and development of national cyber policy.

Initiate a Safe Computing R&D Effort and Harden our Nation’s Cyber Infrastructure: Barack Obama will support an initiative to develop next-generation secure computers and networking for national security applications. He will work with industry and academia to develop and deploy a new generation of secure hardware and software for our nation’s critical cyber infrastructure.

Protect the IT Infrastructure That Keeps America’s Economy Safe: The public and private infrastructure that keeps America running is increasingly brought online to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Barack Obama will work with the private sector to establish tough new standards for cyber security and physical resilience for critical infrastructure.

Because government management and oversight is what made the Internet what it is today.

Originally published at The Exercise of Vital Powers . Please leave any comments there.

Amusing

Originally published at The Exercise of Vital Powers . Please leave any comments there.

Obama campaign workers angry over unpaid wages

Stocks fall 500 points on postelection nerves.

Originally published at The Exercise of Vital Powers . Please leave any comments there.

I post this (again) because according to Reason, Prop 8 failed among white voters, but 70% of black voters supported it.

Michael Crichton died

Mainly because my desire for revenge against social conservatives is strong:

According to his own Web site, Obama supports the federal Freedom of Choice Act [FOCA], which would eliminate all state and federal regulation of abortion (such as informed consent and parental notification in the case of minors seeking an abortion); these regulations have demonstrably reduced the absolute number of abortions in the jurisdictions in which they are in effect. FOCA would also eliminate, by federal statute, state laws providing “conscience clause” protection for pro-life doctors who decline to provide abortions. Obama (along with the Democratic Party platform) supports federal funding for abortion, opposes the Hyde amendment (which restricts the use of taxpayer monies for abortion) and has pledged to repeal the “Mexico City policy” (initiated by Ronald Reagan and reinstated by George W. Bush, which bans federal foreign-aid funding for organizations that perform and promote abortion as a means of family planning).

Originally published at The Exercise of Vital Powers . Please leave any comments there.

Republicans Ponder Path to Renewal After Party Suffers a Harsh Setback:

The Republican Party begins debating its future Thursday in Virginia, where a group of leading conservatives will meet to discuss how to rebuild their movement. Party governors continue the conversation at a meeting next week in Miami.

The best step these folks could play would be sticking a loaded gun in their mouths and pulling the trigger.

Originally published at The Exercise of Vital Powers . Please leave any comments there.