måndag 21 september 2009

THE BLOG HAS MOVED!

here:
http://www.robinengstrom.se


still very much a work in progress. a constant battle with wordpress

fredag 1 maj 2009

ESXi and iSCSI for fun and profit!

i have a fairly minimalistic setup of computers here at home. a small apartment without room for a full blown computer lab.

my quest this past week have been to migrate (rebuild) my current lab environment from microsoft hyper-v to vmware ESXi update 4.

the computer i run as the host of the virtual machines is the HP 2510p ultraportable laptop from HP. 1,2Ghz CPU (with VTx), 2GB RAM and a slow 100GB 4200 rpm 1,8" drive.
far from supported in the HCL for ESXi. the only other computer on my network that is always on (you cant count an apple tv, right?) is a mac mini G4 PPC with 512MB RAM hooked up to a TV.

the plan was to utilize a 1TB external USB-drive from iomega with built-in RAID0 as storage for the VM:s (no problems in hyper-v offcourse) on the 2510p.
but ESXi does not support USB and i have been hacking the oem.tgz, trying all kinds of stupid ways to get USB support and finally gave up.

now i have it working and want to share.

i now have two 1TB drives connected via usb to the mac mini and is running netbsd:s iSCSI package, sharing one of the 1TB drives as an iSCSI SAN.
the HP laptop is booting vmware ESXi from a usb-thumbdrive and is connected to the SAN.


here is how you do it:

  1. install ESXi to a thumbdrive
  2. iSCSI on OS X


    run ./iscsi-target you should get a output similar to this:



  3. connect ESXi to you new SAN!
    • open the VI client and connect to your ESXi server
    • go to the configuration tab and click storage adapters
    • open properties for the iSCSI hba.
    • under the general tab, click configure and check enable.
    • under the dynamic discovery tab, click add and type in the IP for the iSCSI-host
    • confirm by clicking close.
    • click storage and verify that you have some newly connected storage to play with.



  4. test!
    • create a virtual machine and see if it works. mine does!



note: i don't run XP. it is just a virtual machine to run the VI client in from my primary apple laptop.

söndag 8 mars 2009

no GPT in XP

note to self:
the next time i'm formatting a USB-disk for windows use on a mac, putting important data on it, travels and tries to use that disk in a windows xp machine: remember to use MBR instead of GPT/GUID.




had to download damn small linux to be able to get the files of the drive.

error 2229 when installing bootcamp on Windows 7 32bit

bootcamp-error-2229

 

apple are sloppy when they create their windows installer packages. you have to use the English format to be able to install bootcamp in Windows 7. change back to your preferred language after the install and you are good to go again.

 

bootcamp-error-2229-fix

onsdag 4 februari 2009

tisdag 3 februari 2009

humor




putt print? e-mait?

onsdag 14 januari 2009

update to my appe aiport rambling

frid's comment in my blog regarding 802.1x in aiport extremes made me investigate the issue further.

i can't find this in apples documentation anywhere, but if you have the “Allow this network to be extended” checkbox checked, the options for WPA2-Enterprise disappear.








jiha! thanks frid!

söndag 11 januari 2009

at last...

itunes adds every song two times when you import albums

maybe i am the last person to understand why this happens.

when you drag in albums into itunes you sometimes get two copies of every song. very frustrating.


seems like this happens when the folders contains playlist files. if you want to drag the albums into itunes, remove .pls and .m3u files in the folder. if you just want to add one album, just drag the playlist file into itunes.

söndag 4 januari 2009

i have been walking around thinking that both Apple Airport Extreme and Apple Airport Express had support for WPA2-Enterprise and 802.11x. none of them have.

there goes my vacation-project :(.