Up to version 5.5 a vCenter appliance was usually deployed by importing the corresponding ovf template that could be downloaded from the VMware website. That process changed with version 6.0 since there is no longer an ovf template. Instead, VMWare provides and ISO image that contains the necessary data and tools to deploy a vCenter appliance, even directly from the… Read more »
It can be very handy sometimes to tunnel your browser’s traffic through a secure channel, for example when you are on an insecure or unknown network like a hotel, cafe or airport etc. To open up a SOCKS proxy on port 8080, run To configure Firefox to use the proxy go to Edit → Preferences → Advanced → Network →… Read more »
Sometimes it is a good idea or even necessary to have a local mirror of OmniOS available, i.e. if you do not want to allow your severs direct access to the outside world. Setting up a local OmniOS repository is rather simple. 1. Create a local package repo To create an empty repo, run pkgrepo: 2. Grab packages from remote… Read more »
Just a quick memory hook on how to update an OmniOS release… Update the publisher to point to the new release, r151014 being the release version to update to in this case: To update the client’s list of available packages and publisher metadata, run The actual update process is invoked with If you happen to have use zones, the process… Read more »
If you try to start a graphical application on a minimal Fedora or CentOS setup, e.g. via ssh -X, you might face the situation that the program actually starts up, but no font appears (or a weird one, or only squares where the letters are supposed to be). If you start a program that uses Pango, like firefox, you get… Read more »
GNU screen has builtin multiuser support that let’s you share a screen session with another user. First, create a screen session named with an arbitrary name, e.g. ‘shared’, and attach to it: To allow other users to use the session, you need to enable multiuser support (Ctrl-a :multiuser on) and add the specific user(s) you want to share your session… Read more »
Running PulseAudio in system mode is usually a bad idea. There are use cases however, where PulseAudio’s system mode is a great tool, e.g. for building a PulseAudio streaming target to stream audio from multiple clients to speakers. First, install PulseAudio, avahi (a free implementation of zeroconf) to publish the service throughout the network and the corresponding PulseAudio module: Since… Read more »
There’s a bug in Fedora 20 and RHEL 7, where the legacy network service does not set the default route properly. This is due to the fact, that the network service does not evaluate the GATEWAY0 directive in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ethX that is used by NetworkManager. To set the default route with the legacy network service, simply change GATEWAY0 to GATEWAY: Of… Read more »
Link aggregation is a method of bundling interfaces together to act as one for increased bandwith and/or failover. One of most used protocols, next to a couple of proprietary ones, for controlling such a channel bond is LACP, the Link Aggregation Control Protocol. 1. Configuring LACP on Dell S4810 Let’s assume, we want to bond two 10G Ethernet ports together,… Read more »
While the squid proxy server has quite a few different flavours of authentication available, one of the most basic ones, pam_auth, is also one of the most useful ones to get you started quickly. pam_auth let’s anyone who has a local account access the squid proxy. In large environments you probably want to use ldap authentication eventually, but pam_auth is… Read more »