motogobi

This little tidbit from The Lone Sysadmin saved our bacon this morning: if you’re finding it impossible to migrate a VM off of a host because of a stuck VMTools installation process, there’s a quick way to kill this process off via the command line to get things moving along. First, you need to know the process ID of the VM you’re working with (run this from the host where the VM is currently living):

/usr/bin/vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/datastore/vmname/vmname.vmx getid

This should return something like “getid() = 192″

Using that ID you can then cancel that tools install:

/usr/bin/vmware-vim-cmd vmsvc/tools.cancelinstall

Voila! No more tools install, and migration should work normally. Huge thanks, again, to Bob over at The Lone Sysadmin!

This, my friends, is what true stardom should mean:

This is the multifaceted tale of Bill Caswell, a man who bought a crapcan off Craigslist to run against the $400,000-plus rally cars in a World Rally Championship race. It is a tale of a guy who had a welder, a bunch of credit cards, and a lot of free time but no real backing or funds. It is a story of a dude who taught himself how to build an FIA-legal roll cage because he wanted to spend the fabrication fee on race tires instead. It’s the story of a gearhead who drove a rustbucket to a third-place finish in an FIA-sanctioned race.

Most of all, it is a story of hoonage.

I’m somewhat speechless:

Slocum and I were estimating.¬†I signed autographs for three hours straight on Sunday alone. He thinks it might be close to 1500 or 2000 autographs and maybe 1000-1500 pictures.¬†A couple hundred people were screaming “Caswell! Caswell!” at one point. But I guess the fact that Ken Block and I are the only Americans that came down makes me legit or something?¬†We finished third in class. Don’t know how I got here. Nuts.

Just read it. Nuts, indeed.

If you end up using VMware’s VI Client to connect to multiple vCenter servers or ESX/ESXi hosts, you might find yourself a little annoyed at how many saved connections show up when you go to launch a new connection. This becomes ever more annoying when you’re connecting to multiple servers named somewhat the same as the client will start auto-completing your selections. This has reached it’s pain point this week as we transition to similarly-named vCenter servers and I keep fat-fingering what I’m typing.

If you want to clear that saved connections dialog, it’s a simple registry edit in XP. Navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware\VMWare Infrastructure Client\Preferences\RecentConnections

and simply delete the connections you don’t want (DO NOT delete the entire key, just the connections in that reg key). Enjoy your clutter-free VI Client…