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


Being a Linux admin at heart I want my Windows Powershell prompt to look like my bash prompt (yep, I'm a nerd, or OCD, or may a little of both).

What you'll need to do is place some code in your Powershell profile file. By default Powershell doesn't allow scripts to run unless they're signed. This is good security practice. There are many articles out there on how to sign your Powershell scripts and maybe one day I'll write one and put it up here on the I.T. Nerve Center, but for now I'll just give you the code to change your prompt.

If you're having problems passing your vulnerability scans and you have a Citrix Netscaler Application Delivery Appliance, here are the links to the Citrix KB articles which describe how to resolve the issue.

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 ...

Twitter is all the rage these days and I've been using one of the more popular desktop Twitter applications - TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com. TweetDeck runs on top of Adobe AIR - http://www.adobe.com/products/air/.

My day-to-day OS on my workstation is Linux (Fedora 10 to be exact). I installed Adobe AIR and TweetDeck with no issues on the initial installation.

A buddy of mine at work showed me this nifty registry addition for Windows that sped up my network connections significantly.

WARNING! Backup your registry before you perform this addition and if you don't know what you're doing, don't attempt this modification without the help of a friend or professional. Incorrectly modifying your registry can cause your system to become unusable.

Add the following this DWORD entry:


BufferMultiplier


with a hexidecimal value of 400 to this registry hive:

There are a lot of postings out on the Net about performance tuning VMware products to run more efficiently. I'd thought I'd share some that I thought were farily useful (most related to running VMware Server on a Linux host).