It’s a simple command:
vmkfstools -X new_sizevmfs_name:disk_name
How To Resize A Virtual Disk In VMWare ESXi
March 31st, 2009cPanel Addon Domains and SEO Woes (Google Duplicate Content)
March 19th, 2009I was doing some web design work for a friend/customer of mine, and he had a Web Hosting account with a company that used cPanel. I’ve used cPanel before, I’ve dabbled in it and fixed problems with it. But never really used it extensively as a client so to speak. Anyways, included in the customers Web Hosting package was 20 Addon Domains. What are “Addon Domains”?
http://cpanelguide.net/addon.php
Basically it allows you to run mutiple websites off your single account/domain name. Brilliant idea, if it was done properly. When you add an Addon Domain, it creates a folder in your main sites public_html folder, typically its name is that of your domain name. Lets just say that my customer has two domain names, the main one bob.com and an additional one jill.com
The customer creates jill.com as an Addon Domain, all is swell. Until they find out they can access the addon domain at “jill.com” and “bob.com/jill.com”. Why is this bad? Well google will see it as duplicate conent and your site will either never get indexed or have funky SEO results.
How do you fix it? Change the root directory to not be placed inside the public_html folder and viola, no duplicate content. Also make sure to edit the subdomain to forward to the correct URL as well or more duplicate content will exist.
How To Install VMWare Tools on Debian Lenny
March 10th, 2009This article will step you through the required steps to install VMWare Tools on Debian Lenny. Although this article is for Ubuntu, it will still work. I’ve successfully done it. http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=987631
How To Remove Public Folder Database When Uninstalling Exchange 2007
March 2nd, 2009http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesvradmin/thread/ff6ddaf5-2c8e-486d-94ea-f2b0cd4ba0e7/
How To Remove Roles After An Exchange Server Re-install Or Dead Exchange Server
February 18th, 2009I had run into a little bit of an issue when install Exchange 2007, which lead me to revert my VMWare ESXi Snapshot back to a later date. Once I did this, I had a fresh install of the same PC. When I tried to install Exchange 2007 I got hte following error message.
“[ERROR] The Client Access server role is already installed on this computer.”
For each rolle that I had installed on said server. I didn’t know why it was doing this. I suspected that ESXi left some reminents of the Exchange Install and that VMWare ESXi Snapshots weren’t really “Snapshots”. So I did a full re-install and still was receiving the above message.
I think starting doing some research and found out that there is Active Directory information that states what roles a server has, and the setup checks this before installing. All I had to do was delete this information. Here is the steps, that I found on the web.
1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Windows 2000 Support
Tools, point to Tools, and then click ADSI Edit.
2. Expand each of the following items:
Configuration Container
CN=3DConfiguration, DC=3DDomain_Name,DC=3Dcom
CN=3DServices
CN=3DMicrosoft Exchange
CN=3DYour_Organization_Name
CN=3DAdministrative Groups
CN=3DYour_Administrative_Group_Name_Or_Exchange5.5_Site_Name
CN=3DServersNote In this procedure, Domain_Name is a placeholder for the name of
your domain, Your_Organization_Name is a placeholder for the name of
your organization, and
Your_Administrative_Group_Name_Or_Exchange5.5_Site_Name is a
placeholder for the name of your administrative group or Exchange 5.5
site.
3. Right-click the Exchange 2003 server object, and then click
Delete.
4. Click Yes in every adsiedit dialog box that prompts you to confirm
the deletion.
Once I completed this, I was able to install Exchange 2007 again. I had to process this on the Domain Controller which is a separate machine.
HowTo Clone a Virtual Machine On VMWare’s free ESXi
February 17th, 2009You will require SSH access to your Virtual Machine, read over my article Gaining SSH Access To VMWare ESXi which provides the steps required to gain SSH access.
Once you have SSH access, you just need to create a Virtual Machine Directory in your DataStore which should be located in “/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/”. Type the following.
mkdir /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/NewVM
You will then need to run the “vmkfstools” to clone the Virtual Machine.
/vmfs/volumes/4991bc35-5ced5b0c-a99e-00221953f98d # /sbin/vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/exch01/exch01.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/newvmware/newvmware.vmdk
Destination disk format: VMFS thick
Cloning disk ‘/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/exch01/exch01.vmdk’…
Clone: 100% done.
/vmfs/volumes/4991bc35-5ced5b0c-a99e-00221953f98d #
The Virtual Machine should now be cloned.
Some may ask how you now create a new Virtual Machine based on this clone. You simply do the following.
- Make a new VM on this server
- Choose ‘Custom’ and when you get to the ‘Select a Disk’ portion of creation you will browse the datastore and select this newly renamed vmdk file.
Viola! Done!
Gaining SSH Access To VMWare ESXi
February 17th, 2009I was trying to get access to VMWare ESXi as this is the only way to access the images for each Virtual Machine as snapshots seem to have messed up an Exchange install. I will go into more depth below. But first, the following steps are required to open up SSH access to your ESXi Machine.
ESXi 3.5 does ship with the ability to run SSH, but this is disabled by default (and is not supported). If you just need to access the console of ESXi, then you only need to perform steps 1 - 3.
1) At the console of the ESXi host, press ALT-F1 to access the console window.
2) Enter unsupported in the console and then press Enter. You will not see the text you type in.
3) If you typed in unsupported correctly, you will see the Tech Support Mode warning and a password prompt. Enter the password for the root login.
4) You should then see the prompt of ~ #. Edit the file inetd.conf (enter the command vi /etc/inetd.conf).
5) Find the line that begins with #ssh and remove the #. Then save the file. If you’re new to using vi, then move the cursor down to #ssh line and then press the Insert key. Move the cursor over one space and then hit backspace to delete the #. Then press ESC and type in :wq to save the file and exit vi. If you make a mistake, you can press the ESC key and then type it :q! to quit vi without saving the file.
6) Once you’ve closed the vi editor, run the command /sbin/services.sh restart to restart the management services. You’ll now be able to connect to the ESXi host with a SSH client.Update for ESXi 3.5 Update 2 - With Update 2 the service.sh command no longer restarts the inetd process which enables SSH access. You can either restart your host or run ps | grep inetd to determine the process ID for the inetd process. The output of the command will be something like 1299 1299 busybox inetd, and the process ID is 1299. Then run kill -HUP <process_id> (kill -HUP 1299 in this example) and you’ll then be able to access the host via SSH.
Credit to the above steps go out to vm-help.com and you can read the above steps and comments on thier site.
The main reason why I required this, is the snapshots provided with VMWare work great. But I had to re-install exchange becuase of a configuration change that couldn’t be reversed. I had created a Active Directory Child Domain on an existing Domain, and then had setup Exchange 2007. But in the long run, this wasn’t required, instead I wanted to use our existing Domain. Removing the new Child Domain and deleting the Domain Controller/Demoting woudl have caused issues with Exchange.
So I decided to use ESXi Snapshot Manager to revert back to when I created a Snapshot after install Windows Server 2003, as it was a clean install. Once I did then and then went on to install Exchange again. Exchange Setup had complained that the server’s role was already installed and setup. Which was not the case, so I don’t know what really happened, either way. I’m going to make backups through SSH from now on.
Drupal to Wordpress Migration
February 6th, 2009So you might have noticed that my last post about this topic was removed. I had some issues with the migration that I’ve now fixed. Specifically if you’re migrating Drupal to Wordpress and have the URL Aliases module setup with Drupal. You will run into issues with Wordpress permalinks, I plan to release some information on how I fixed this. At the moment its really manually. Leave a comment if you need assistance with this. I think I might also update the following information provided by someone else on how to migrate your site.
http://www.darcynorman.net/2007/05/15/how-to-migrate-from-drupal-5-to-wordpress-2/
At the moment I have posts and permalinks working. So I didn’t take a big SEO hit. I am now working on comments. I won’t be migrating the categories over, I’m going to create new categories and go through my articles and re-tag and categorize them.
Cheers!
fastcgi and the dreaded aborted: select() failed
November 3rd, 2008I was getting reports of “500 Internal Server Errors” on two of my web servers. And after further investigation it looks like it was related to the following error.
(4)Interrupted system call: FastCGI: comm with server “php-fastcgi.fcgi” aborted: select() failed
After doing some reasearch I stumbled upon the following patch.
http://groups.google.com/group/linux.debian.bugs.dist/browse_thread/thread/3de22bc415d3da02?pli=1
Will test this out and see if it has resolved some of the problems.
lighttpd won’t start and doesn’t output or log any error message
October 30th, 2008I was working on a server and for some reason lighttpd wouldn’t start for some odd reason. Running it via Debian/Ubuntu “invoke-rc.d lighttpd start” or “/etc/init.d/lighttpd start” wouldn’t reveal an error message or anything in the log.
I hop’d on irc.freenode.net and put some information about my problem in the channel #lighttpd channel.
11:15 < comm> Hi, lighttpd recently won’t start up and doesn’t give any error output in the logs or stdout, I have an strace log.
11:17 < comm> The following is the strace output http://pastebin.com/m74389d99
11:35 < hoffie> comm: you are probably running in the bug that there are some error messages in a bad stage (right after forking, but
before having the errorlog available), so you cannot see the message…
11:35 < hoffie> this is being worked on
11:36 < hoffie> strace -ff -ewrite lighttpd … should reveal it
11:48 < comm> hoffie: danke!
11:49 < comm> hoffie: and it did find my error, thank you!
Now I can go about fixing this blunder!