idea: a life's work

"A life's work" is mainly meant as an effort for humanity, to preserve varying approaches and experiences in many different cultures. For all of those who have lost a mentor, older relative, or dear friend, and the wisdom they embodied, and know the value that was lost, have hope - this is the place where those ideas can be preserved for eternity.

It is very common for some lucky people to be able to put forth their ideas into the mass media, but not as common for ordinary people. This effort acknowledges the accomplishments and life lessons learned by each of it's authors, just because they lived and have something to share, something that took a life of calibration and trail and error, and that the owner considers important. They are preserved in the original language they were written, and any authorized translations are included.

The teachings are as varied as the human experience itself and are never restricted - nothing is censored, ridiculed or otherwise left out. This, after all, are the teachings the author decided to leave to human kind.

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It occurs to me this is not a tough website to create and maintain. I might take this on as a project in the future - asm.

having some fun with dell and esxi

so, let's say you have dell poweredge servers as esxi hosts.

Lets say you want to take care of them. make sure you have firmware updates, check reliably for hardware errors (and not vmware's cryptic 1 liners...), and do it free cause that's who you are.

here is something fun to do with them. this is just basic but gets things moving.

there's a tool called openmanage essentials, free download, but requires 2008. install it, and the repository manager. now to be able to scan:

1) install omsa on the esxi hosts. the easy way is through the vmware update manager. the vib files are in the management section of your server downloads (select esxi as OS)

2) you need to open port 1311 in the esxi firewall. I will explain this in more detail, but you create an xml file inside /etc/vmware/firewall and modify /etc/rc.local to enable this file to be copied and run at reboot

2) now you can scan your hosts.

enable ping and ws-man (set the root creds, and check the secure mode and trusted site). if all went well, you will see the normal openmanage info for your esxi host :)


Added benefit: use the openmanage inventory in the repository manager to create a linux iso and patch your servers.

You can also just create an iso for the server model you are interested and patch, but with the above, you know which servers are where and which are more urgent than others.


Also, semi-related, but in case you only want to enable snmp using ssh:

vi /etc/vmware/snmp.xml and change:

then reboot. CLi doesn't reboot :p there should be a snmp restart command somewhere...


If you only need to re-start the OMSA service

/etc/init.d/wsman restart