Tuesday, August 31, 2010

VMware converter p2v from IDE to SCSI

My attempt to convert and old physical machine to an ESX environment was involving more work than I thought. Here is how I got it to boot after a number of kernel panics:

Old physical machine: IDE (hda1, hda2, hda3)
VM (converted): SCSI (sda1, sda2, sda3)

1 - I had to boot into rescue mode and edit /etc/modules.conf and add:  alias  scsi_hostadapter BusLogic
2 - Re-create initrd with: mkinitrd -v -f initrd-xxxx.img  xxxx (you should now what xxx stands for)
3 - Of course, re-install grub with grub-install
4 - Make sure grub.conf match the current hdd config (sda)
5 - Make sure my /etc/fstab converted to sda instead of sda stuff
6 - Modify ESX virtual hard disk to use BusLogic. VMware does not like this but it's the only way that I know the VM will boot.


Friday, August 6, 2010

Enable sendxmpp to alert load average

I thought this might be useful to have in addition to your monitoring system.


sendxmpp: You'll have to learn how to install this yourself :) I only tell you when you got it running. Here are some errors I had when I started:
ERROR: Authorization failed: error - not-authorized
Fix:  

Modifying the Protocol.pm of Net::XMPP (line ~1800). Mine is located at ./site_perl/5.8.8/Net/XMPP/Protocol.pm
Comment these lines out.
if($self->{STREAM}->GetStreamFeature($self->GetStreamID(),"xmpp-sasl"))
{
return $self->AuthSASL(%args);
}

Then use: echo "load is high"|sendxmpp -j 10.10.10.222:5222 -u foobar -p ###### -r home  recipient@domain