MWalker's blog
Posted Fri, 12/09/2011 - 17:03 by MWalker
I recently wanted to start monitoring some ports on my switch stack. Specifically several uplink ports and several trunk ports. Doing a little research I found the best plugin was the "check_iftraffic3" plugin available from the Nagios Plugin Exchange. Ref: http://exchange.nagios.org/directory/Plugins/Network-Connections%2C-Stats-and-Bandwidth/check_iftraffic3/details
Posted Fri, 12/09/2011 - 09:54 by MWalker
It is important to have a basic understanding of how to check out your Linux server's performance to help diagnose / troubleshoot various issues. Below is some useful tools and reference materials I have found helpful.
Posted Tue, 11/15/2011 - 08:53 by MWalker
My notes from setting up ESXi 4.1 and ESXi 5 for iSCSI datastores.
- Install OS, configure Mgmt NIC and Mgmt IP Address
- Test vSphere client Access
- Open Console Session
- TroubleShooting Options, Local ESXi Shell
- Alt-F1 to access shell
- Create iSCSI vSwitch
- esxcfg-vswitch -a iSCSI
- Enable Jumbo Frames
- esxcfg-vswitch -m 9000 iSCSI
Posted Fri, 09/02/2011 - 11:15 by MWalker
Recently had to verify version numbers of Microsoft Office on numerous systems. Of course I hope to automate the process, but the starting point is to find out what all the various version numbers are. I compiled this table from the various KB articles into a single page for reference.
Posted Fri, 08/26/2011 - 09:42 by MWalker
Recently I was asked about customizing the standard ESXi splash screen with a security message. While it is easy in ESX using a standard Linux approach, not as obvious for ESXi. However a quick google search found a nice little blog post on customizing the "welcome" file in /etc/vmware on the ESXi host.
Posted Thu, 08/04/2011 - 15:25 by MWalker
I found myself needing to alter a PHP program I had that queried for data to one that read from a CSV file. After a little research, seems it is really straight forward. There is the fgetcsv function which makes it all a snap. Here is the example from PHP.net's website.
<?php
$row = 1;
if (($handle = fopen("test.csv", "r")) !== FALSE) {
Posted Thu, 08/04/2011 - 08:10 by MWalker
I wanted to be able to generate a small little bit of content based on a variable the user sets. I could have created a small form, but in this case it was easier to pass the variable in a link based on a choice the user selected. Here is a really simple example of passing a variable via URL string to my php page.
if ($_GET["id"]) {
$programID = $_GET["id"];
} else {
Posted Wed, 08/03/2011 - 07:34 by MWalker
On two new 2008R2 Servers I noticed an error similar to:
Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-Windows-WMI
Date: 1/18/2008 2:37:27 PM
Event ID: 10
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
Posted Wed, 08/03/2011 - 07:27 by MWalker
The DNS Server Event Log was throwing the Event ID: 4007 error for "domain.com" and "_msdcs.domain.com". When I investigated it seemed to be throwing it for an old AD integrated domain that was no longer in use. I was not the original creator of the environment, but was just trying to create some good clean living.
Posted Thu, 07/28/2011 - 08:48 by MWalker
In my Nagios testing I was trying to work with the CHECK_ESX3.PL script to run some scripts against the ESX hosts in the environment. I installed the required VMware vSphere Perl SDK (latest from VMware's site). I was able to run "./check_esx3.pl" without any errors. However when I tried to run an actual check against a host I received:
