Web service fave of mine Mint.com just released a pretty nifty update this morning in the form of Goals – although there is a curious lack of that news on the update blog at mint.com. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge fan of Mint – I would go so far as to say that I’ve never really gotten more control over my finances until I surrendered them to a service like Mint, which tracks our finances automagically and cleanly. I definitely know I’ve gained more ground on expenses and trimming the fat over the last year as a direct result. Well, Mint.com just quietly gave me one more, very important dashboard item to help get more enjoyable control of where our money’s going: Goals.
This post by Marcel van den Berg just saved my sanity today since I could not make heads or tails of what my beloved Platespin server was trying to tell me:
Preparing <servername> (under PlateSpin control) For Synchronization
No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 127.0.0.1:5036
Description:
several one time synchronizations jobs fails at Step 3 “Take control of virtual machine”. Before this kind of job performed well.
Solution:
reboot the Platespin server and re-run the job. It will most likely run successfully.
Platespin: the Cadillac of physical-to-virtual migrations (or Porsche, or WRX STi, what have you) but decidedly not the best-documented solution on the planet. You’ll find that the errors that are thrown link you to expired or nonexistent knowledge base articles…
Yeah, so the new iOS 4 brought my iPhone 3G to a crawl. Turns out, more than a few other people out there have been having the same problems. The unified Inbox and folders for my apps are really not worth the extreme slowness that I’ve been seeing, so it was on to try and find a way to restore my iPhone to 3.1.3, or the latest version of iPhone OS before iOS showed up.
Turns out, just as I was sitting down to really dig into how to do this Lifehacker posts up the exact process.
A word of warning: I attempted this on a Windows 7 machine and couldn’t get RecBoot to work. Luckily, I was able to download the Intel Mac version of it and kick my iPhone out of recovery mode using the Mac version of RecBoot. My phone was then seen as a new phone, I chose to restore from a backup I’d made back in April, and finally sync’d it up with iTunes (making sure to opt out of the iOS4 upgrade again!).
Way to go, guys! :thumbsup:
If you haven’t heard about disk alignment and you’re using virtual machines, you owe it to yourself and your most-likely-growing infrastructure to understand what alignment is all about. On a small scale it’s almost unnoticeable. But I can tell you that on a large scale it becomes a major pain for you or your storage infrastructure team.
One quick tip: to check your disk offset on Windows systems, simply launch msinfo32.exe from the Run menu. See the thumbnail of this post for a screenshot.
From VirtualGeek’s excellent post:
The purpose of alignment is to minimize extraneous internal array operations. All arrays have internal constructs that are generally a function of the RAID model (and also the filesystem alignment, and in some cases logical page table constructs in virtually provisioned models).
<snip>
All the funky goodness is done via either filesystem or another (pages commonly) abstraction on TOP of the RAID abstraction. Think of a 4K NTFS IO operation in a Guest making it’s way down to the array. Once it gets there, let’s say the array has a 64K stripe, but a 1MB “page” used for these fancy features. Falling into two 1MB logical memory pages as an example – where statistically it’s much more likely to land on a boundary if the volume is aligned on a 4K boundary.
It’s very worth your time to delve into this article and find out how your environment is set up, like right now. You might find your templates are mis-aligned, or in our case, that VMware Converter does not properly align disks on conversion (wonder-app Platespin Migrate does, in fact, give you properly-aligned disks).
So some interesting stuff has fallen out of the investigation we’ve done regarding how VMware High Availability handled five of our hosts falling off the network last week. In speaking with VMware’s support staff I’ve learned a few things to keep in mind when planning architecture, as well as how to respond to something like this in the future (hint: don’t panic). Turns out, ESX didn’t really fail as much as it politely gave up, opting to take the route that seems to be the least harmful to our guest VMs’ operating systems. Admit it, we’ve all been there: you’re working on a Windows machine, it’s not responding, and you get to the point where you just hit the reset button. Well, VMware will let you – and only you – take that final step towards OS recovery during an event like this.
continue reading…
So we ran into this last night and are trying to work through why things happened the way they did – which is to say, why we had some support personnel on the phone who said “it shouldn’t do that.” The long and short of what a split-brain scenario is this:
You have two hosts with VMs running in an HA cluster. Host 1 gets completely isolated from the network – no service console, no guest net connections, nothing – but the VMs are still running on it. If you have your HA settings set up to not power down those virtual machines on isolation, HA has already started up those VMs on Host 2 – and when Host 1 reconnects to the network (with it’s never-shut-down-VMs) you’ve now got two VMX processes running in memory on two hosts. This is not good.
Looks like Mark “Dumb F***s” Zuckerberg is attempting to save some face (pun intended) on Facebook’s privacy issues as of late. After a month of getting slammed by pretty much every major media outlet and their own users, the powers-that-be at FB are going to be rolling out new privacy controls that should allow you to set them and forget them. Until, of course, they change their privacy settings again. Don’tcha just love being a test subject in a massive open beta project? via Lifehacker:
After a months-long privacy fiasco, Facebook has taken it upon themselves to revamp the privacy settings to make them simpler and quicker to set and forget. While the new settings are definitely easier to use, Facebook has thrown in a few surprises that the privacy-conscious may not be too happy with. Unfortunately—in some ways—with simplicity comes a lack of control, and Facebook has made sure that the control you don’t have is over information that is made public.
Still holding out for social networking alternatives, I tell you…
My favorite hypervisor just received some much-needed updates that really bring it into striking range of VMware’s Workstation or Parallels. Among the most notable additions to the best-priced (free!) product in desktop/workstation virtualization are:
- Support for deleting snapshots while the VM is running
- Support for multi-monitor guest setups in the GUI for Windows guests
- RDP video acceleration
- Memory ballooning to dynamically in- or decrease the amount of RAM used by a VM (64-bit hosts only)
As you might already know, VirtualBox is my favorite virtualization product for the desktop because of it’s rich feature set and support for both Windows and Mac. I recently scored over a 90% on my VCP exam in no small part to the ability to run a Windows VM on my Mac, allowing me to mobilize my study environment with ease. If you’re looking to simply get into virtualization with ease, and for free, VirtualBox is definitely worth the download and minimal install footprint.
I’ll have to wait for the paperwork to come through in a bit, but I nailed my VCP410 exam this morning. Ah, the load off my chest at the moment…
– mike
Facebook really is becoming the most popular way to experience a large portion of the Web – I think distressingly so. With every new “feature” release comes another modification and revisit of my security settings, and I’ve already reacted by removing a significant amount of info from my profile. Turns out some kids – I use that term loosely, mind you – have reacted to this privacy-invasion-creep with what I think is a solid, wonderful attempt at a solution named diaspora. I really think this is an idea that will take off, and take off in a very large way:
What is it?
Enter your Diaspora “seed,” a personal web server that stores all of your information and shares it with your friends. Diaspora knows how to securely share (using GPG) your pictures, videos, and more. When you have a Diaspora seed of your own, you own your social graph, you have access to your information however you want, whenever you want, and you have full control of your online identity. Once we have built a solid foundation, we will make Diaspora easy to extend to facilitate any type of communication, and the possibilities will be endless.
The project is receiving funding using Kickstarter.com, and will most likely be getting some of my coffee money shortly…
via The New York Times, which should say something
Recent Albums
Recent photos from my Picasa Web Albums.
- Royal Gorge Motorbike Ride
- Seattle for the Weekend
- Wheelin' Coney Flats
- 2009 NYC Trip
- April Skiing in Colorado
- Honeymoon in Costa Rica
- Wedding Photos
- Black Canyon of the Gunnison
