Migrate VMWare to VirtualBox

I tried VirtualBox a while back and it just worked. Stuff installed, networking worked, sound worked. I had been using VMPlayer and VMWare server but had problems with kernel module version, audio only working periodically and the final straw was when server crashed every time you started a VM, having said that VMPlayer 3 looks like a whole lot more fun.

However you can pick up your VMWare .vdk files and use them in VirtualBox. Easy..

Fire up VirtualBox. Go into the Virtual Media Manager and choose add and find your .vdk file.

Create a new machine and go through the wizard and choose the VMWare disk on the way. Here's the key bit, if you have a windows guest make sure you turn on Enable IO APIC in the System tab of the settings or your windows guest won't start. "Real" OSes seem to be OK ie my CentOS VM just worked.. The other sticky one is sometimes you need to go into the Storage tab and change the IDE controller type to PIIX3 for older windows guests. It's also worth giving the guests 32MB video memory or so and turning on 2D and 3D acceleration (through only for windows guests)

Otherwise your VMWare guest should just work.

trackerd using almost 100% CPU

Got a problem with trackerd using lots of CPU?

I had tracker-store using almost 100% CPU and it never stopped. Everything was indexed and it should have stopped but it just kept using as much as it could get of one CPU.

Weird fix: adjust the disk space up. Maybe it was running out of space but once I bumped it up and all of a sudden the CPU dropped.

Cisco Catalyst Express 500 series switches review

I've been doing a new install with an nice new XServe and two of the CE 520G switches.

They've been a bit of a pain to be honest but once you know how to do things they're bargain.

First thing is change the smartport roles on every port. They default to server for some reason. So change them to desktop for desktops and other (blank) for anything like small switches, wireless APs etc. otherwise the port security will kick in and random stuff happens...

Server teaming is my biggest gripe. You need to set the ports to the server as switch ports (otherwise you can't set up the EtherChannel) and then setup the bond or team on the server but (big but) you also need to tag your VLAN 1 traffic. Given everything else in the universe has VLAN 1 as the native VLAN and is untagged this seems crazy.

I'm not a big fan of guis for things like switches, I like to see the config on a port and be able to debug everything under the sun. So I tend to try and push people to the "Classic" Cisco gear.

Once you know these gotchas though they're good bang for your buck and have Cisco's support which is the clincher.

VMWare server problems

This was an odd one. It may be vmware, it may be Gentoo or a combination..

VMware server wasn't working. So I tried reconfiguring from scratch but go this:

emerge vmware-server --config

Configuring pkg...

* Running /opt/vmware/server/bin/vmware-config.pl

Making sure services for VMware Server are stopped.

* WARNING: vmware is already stopped

Unable to stop services for VMware Server

Execution aborted.

Well yes, it's already stopped so why error when you're trying to stop it..duh...

Simple solution after some digging through the vmware-config.pl script..

./vmware-config.pl skip-stop-start

and I could configure it up again and we were away.

Office Mac 2008 service pack 1 install (SP1)

Microsoft are out to frustrate me again.

I'm building a machine for a customer and while trying to install Office 2008 I keep running into this problem.

The initial install goes OK which is version 12.0. Upgrading to SP1 installs about 8 or 12 K and says it's done but none of the apps are updated. I done the remove office and that doesn't clean out the /Library/Receipts folder of the 12.1 install so I pulled those out as well and started from scratch. Still no joy SP1 refuses to install. Any one else come across this? The machine is already up to 10.5.8 to maybe that is too high for SP1.

I've sent office back and we're using OpenOffice for the moment. It's a standby machine and only gets used occasionally but it would be nice to get it sorted. Or maybe I'm missing the jab by karma to move to OpenOffice :-)

5 minutes later...

Typical you always notice something after posting. Clear out the /private/tmp folder of anything to do with the SP1 update and it works. There was Office2008_en_quit_12.1.0.combo.pkg.somehash and com.microsoft.updater/ in mine.

Young Girl-Old Woman Illusion

And now for something completely different...

I saw this again recently and it's always failed to click for me. I can see the young girl but never the old woman..

Then I found the trick: tip you head to the left (right in the northern hemisphere? :-) )and the old woman pops out. Ah ha finally!

This link has several versions.. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/YoungGirl-OldWomanIllusion.html

Normal service resumes..

Entourage and proxies

Grrr.. another Microsoft making their own rules.

I have a customer with Entourage which stopped working. OWA worked through Safari (note this part...) but Entourage just showed not connected.

They have a web proxy and an exclusion for the Exchange server. But not for Entourage it seems. netstat showed connections to the proxy but it does not work via the proxy. At the same time Safari had connections directly to exchange.

Turned out Entourage checks each search domain and then adds that one before checking the bypass list. So everything else worked with the just the host name in the bypass list but you need the FQDN for Entourage to bypass the proxy..