Nice to know – Volume 2

udev re­names you net­work in­ter­faces

Some­times udev re­names your de­vices. This hap­pened to me when up­grad­ing a server, eth0 sud­denly be­came eth1 and vice-versa. Of course, this broke nearly all fire­wall scripts on the server… There is a nice ex­pla­na­tion how to get udev to name your de­vices the way you want.

Vi­sual Stu­dio 2005 Ser­vice Pack 1 on Mi­crosoft Win­dows Server 2003

When in­stalling Vi­sual Stu­dio Ser­vice Pack 1 under Win­dows Server 2003, it might fail be­cause it can­not ver­ify the sig­na­ture. You should take time and visit the link pro­vided in the error mes­sage, be­cause it will take you to a hot­fix that will cor­rect the prob­lem.

(via Mark Car­oll’s Blog)

VMWare Server on Ubuntu 8.04

A nice tu­to­r­ial for get­ting free VMWare Server 1.0.5 run­ning on Ubuntu 8.04.

Nice to know – Volume 1

As I def­i­nitely should post more on my blog, I now try to start a new se­ries: “Nice to know”. It will be a col­lec­tion of in­ter­est­ing things I con­sider mem­o­rable but which don’t de­serve their own blog-post.

Trickle

Tricke al­lows you to limit band­with for processes that do not sup­port band­with lim­i­ta­tion out-of-the-box. It works by pre­load­ing and sim­u­lat­ing the socket API. You use it as a wrap­per when start­ing the process, like trickle -d 80 someapp.

You can use it to limit rsync speed for in­stance (thanks to http://​www.​yak.​net/​fqa/​404.​html): rsync -au­vPe “trickle -d 80 ssh” user@​host:/src/ /dst/

VMWare Tools and Ker­nel 2.6.24

VMWare Tools out of the box do not in­stall on ker­nel 2.6.24 (as used in Ubuntu 8.04 for in­stance). A pos­si­ble so­lu­tion is de­scribed here. It is based on using the open-source ver­sion of the VMWare tools (open-vm-tools).

Increasing Performance of VMWare Virtual Machines on External Devices

By de­fault, VMware Work­sta­tion 5.x use a mem­ory mapped file for back­ing the RAM of the sim­u­lated ma­chines. This eases the pres­sure on the sys­tem’s page file. If you host the vir­tual ma­chine on an ex­ter­nal drive, how­ever, this can be­come a bot­tle neck, es­pe­cially if the ex­ter­nal de­vice is slow (e.g. USB 1.1, flash, etc.).

As de­scribed in this VMware Knowl­edge Base Ar­ti­cle, you can turn of VMWare’s be­hav­iour to use a mem­ory mapped file and force it to use the sys­tem’s pag­ing mech­a­nism in­stead. To do so, you just have to add

mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE

to your vir­tual ma­chine’s con­fig­u­ra­tion file (.vmx).