Bits and pieces ive come across using VMWare ESX 3, 3.5i and 4i along with vCentre and vSphere etc..
Posted by admin on February 17th, 2010 |
0 comments
Well like everyone out there I want my iPhone battery to last forever – i unfortunately upgraded to firmware 3.1.3 and while I dont need a baseband unlock because my phone isn’t locked, I did want a jailbreak. All this aside, I found that as soon as I had upgraded, my battery life was a quarter worse than before.
I used to get pretty much 2 days use out of a full charge – I dont use the phone loads, just normal texting, a few phone calls and a bit of facebook / twittering, but after the 3.1.3 firmware upgrade, I immediately found I was getting only a days worth of battery life 
Wasn’t happy especially as apple stopped me from downgrading to 3.1.2 which was nice and lovely.
So to help me get the best of what I had I made 2 changes which made a big difference and have resulted in me getting my 2 days usage back, and maybe even a bit more.
1: Disable location services – Go into settings > general, and change location services to off.
This does mean you no longer have your GPS active, but if you like me only use this infrequently, i’d rather switch it on in the odd occasion I do use it, than have it sucking my battery away.
2: Disable wi-fi scanning – Go into settings > wi-fi and change Ask to Join Networks to off. This means that rather than constantly scanning for available wi-fi networks, it will only use the ones you have pre-configured. Should you want to connect to a new network, you can either switch this back on or go back into settings > wi-fi and pick it from the list or add it manually. Again this saves loads of battery time as the wi-fi is not scanning.
These 2 simple tips made a big difference to mine and a few friends iPhone life, hope it helps you too.
Posted by admin on February 17th, 2010 |
1 commentCame across a very odd issue lately where guests on one of our ESX4 hosts were periodically loosing network connectivity very briefly – maybe 10 ICMP packets every half hour or hour.
After much debugging on the network side, thinking that perhaps there was a misconfigured NIC with the wrong VLAN config, the problem was still happening.
So ssh’ing onto the host, I started to trawl through the log files, and came across the below in the /var/log/vmkwarning file:
Feb 17 13:44:19 vminfraboxvmkernel: 18:00:00:11.865 cpu4:4222)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceAttemptFailover: Retry world failover device “naa.6090a028004f243d08ab44c26687e3dd” – issuing command 0×410002074040
Feb 17 13:44:19 vminfrabox vmkernel: 18:00:00:11.865 cpu4:4222)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceAttemptFailover: Retry world failover device “naa.6090a028004f243d08ab44c26687e3dd” – failed to issue command due to Not found (APD), try again…
Feb 17 13:44:19 vminfrabox vmkernel: 18:00:00:11.865 cpu4:4222)WARNING: NMP: nmp_DeviceAttemptFailover: Logical device “naa.6090a028004f243d08ab44c26687e3dd”: awaiting fast path state update…
This was occuring repeatedly every half hour and the entries above filled the logs solidly for about 2 minutes continuously every half an hour.
After doing some digging on the google, I found out that ESX4 has a bug whereby if you have a duff or old connection to an iSCSI LUN – perhaps one that no longer exists – but you never rescanned to remove it – when the host tries to check the paths every 30 minutes, it finds this duff connection and goes through the motions of trying to find failover paths. The bug is that this causes very brief network loss to your guests.
The fix for me was to simply re-scan my adapter, which removed the old mapping to one of our removed LUNS’s and the problem went away.
Posted by admin on December 11th, 2009 |
0 commentsEvery once in a while I need to extract the content of a .msi file in order to customize a deployment for a particular network environment. Sometimes initializing the .msi installer will temporarily extract the files into C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temp, but those files are removed once the installer exits.
To extract files from a .msi file at the command line, type:
msiexec /a PathToMSIFile /qb TARGETDIR=DirectoryToExtractTo
For example, to extract files from c:\installer.msi into c:\install you would type:
msiexec /a c:\installer.msi /qb TARGETDIR=c:\install
The destination directory does not need to exist prior to running this command.
If this doesnt work, a crude way is to rename the msi file to a rar file, winrar will then allow you to extract all the files – however… it doesnt name them properly, so I used a combination of LesMsierables a .net file which allows you to view msi files and compared the size to find the specific file I wanted..