Trying to put a host into maintenance mode in vCenter and one machine wouldn't VMotion because it said VMware Tools were being installed or upgraded.

Searching Google came up with this article which applies to ESX 4.x:

http://lonesysadmin.net/2009/12/11/how-to-cancel-a-stuck-vmware-tools-in...

Well vmware-cmd is gone in ESXi 5.x. Here's how you do it in ESXi 5.x:


cd /vmfs/volumes/[datastore]/[vmname]
vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms


Note the VmId of the machine having the issue. Then run:


vim-cmd vmsvc/tools.cancelinstall VmId


Last night I wanted to record some things (for personal use only) coming out of the stereo mix on my Linux workstation (currently running Fedora 11 x64). In the past I've been able to use Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) - the awesome open source and free audio editing software available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. For some reason I wasn't able to get Audacity to pick up the stereo mix as an input so I searched around to find out how I could record the stereo mix coming out of a Linux workstations soundcard. Here's what I found ...