I know there are many good hypervisors, some of them are free and are full of advanced features (someone say oVirt?) but if you want to work into virtualization you can’t ignore Vmware.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Vmware products and I use them every day on servers, on my lab workstation and also on my old duty laptop, but sometimes customers tend to be too much conservative and sticked to it.
For example I found many people who prefer to use free Vmware ESXi (without vcenter, vmotion or svmotion) insted other solutions (free or low cost) with all the advanced features that any server hypervisor must have.

One of the most evident limitations of the free ESXi is the client which require a Windows OS, fortunately there’s a wonderful free solution for that: ESXi Embedded Host Client.

The installation is really easy, first of all you must download the installation package (esxui_signed.vib) from the official site and copy on the ESXi host (you can use the datastore browser or copy via scp).
After that you must access ESXi using ssh protocol, and launch “esxcli software vib install” command

That’s all, now you can open your browser to url https://youresxiserver/ui and…

What?!?!?
Keep calm, if you’re using ESXi 5.5 prior to update 2 there are some known issues, this is one of them.
To solve it we must edit  /etc/vmware/rhttpproxy/endpoints.conf, but the file is locked (operation not permitted error), so we must copy it to a temporary location (for example /tmp), edit it and copy on the original path again.

The only change you must to is to comment the line starting with /ui putting a # at the beginning (force write on exit with :x! vi command)

Now copy the edited file into its original path with “cp /tmp/endpoints.conf /etc/vmware/rhttpproxy/endpoints.conf” and restart rhttpproxy daemon with “/etc/init.d/rhttpproxy restart”

Now try to browse https://youresxiserver/ui/ url (don’t forget the trailing /, another bug in ESXi 5.5U2 and earlier versions) and…

Mission accomplished!

Sometimes it happens to find a service which rotates logs but don’t rename them using an easy date format (for example logYYYYMMDD.log), that’s horrible if you have to archive those logs :\

Here is a simple bash script I use to compress them based file modification date, check comments for adapt it to your log names.

download: logmonth_1.0.sh
md5sum: 4b587eb3c2d9ac413d81a0bdc055c6cf

Happy new year to all the four readers of this kender blog :)
I’m really happy that 2015 is gone, for me it was a really hard year, too much stress at work, to much time spent on stupid things and sadly to many people passed, relatives and people I really loved.

I think it’s a good habit to think at new goals for the new year, so that’s my list.

1. Get rid of old OS’s
   At work and customers It’s plenty of old, really old systems based on Rhel 3, Rhel 4, Windows 2000 (yep, you read right, Windows 2000), Windows 2003.
   We always talk and plan to replace them with new OS’s but those activities always fall in the end of the to-do list, we got to move forward.
2. Get an Oracle dbms certification
   It’s years I’m planning to get this damn OCA certification, this is the year I got to absolutely do this!!
3. Move systems to virtualize environment
   I have too many systems and services running on old hardware, IBM xSeries 3xx, old DS4300 storage SAN and many other, I need to virtualize and get rid of these old machines.
4. Push the KISS model
   Developers and commercials always try to push for more features and more complex environments, I have to push more and more for simple services and get rid of ridiculous complex services.
   If a web application can run an a simple and scalable Tomcat why you have to deploy it on that huge, complex and useless WebSphere Uber Application server cluster?
5. Get a motocycle license
   Yes, It’s an old story and I reapeat it every year :)
6. Swim
   I already have a swimming pool subscription in my hands (perhaps the most useful Christmas gift I ever had), It’s time to move my ass and start swimming.
   In past when I did it frequently I felt much better, much less stressed, my blood pressure problems vanished, no more headaches, all seemed better, so why don’t start again?
7. Get a second Eve account
   I know that’s the less importart, but after a year of Eve experience I feel I’m ready for a second Eve account, my income from planetary interaction can cover a monthly plex so I think it’s the time to make this step.Maybe a Jumpfreighter pilot? :)