Customizing ESXi ISO for RTL drivers

Since I had a laptop lying around with a broken video card and needed to do some VM experiments on it, I tried to deploy a recent VMware ESXi image on it but... ran into issues with the network card, a Realtek 8111/8168/8411 series, which the installer does not detect and thus is blocking.

So then I dug up a bit and found out that until ESXi 7.0 (which  you still have a change to inject a community-supported driver and produce a custom ISO from it. Normally there is an ESXi Customizer PS script that can help with it but, what do you know, you can't use unsigned PS files on some corporate laptops...

So then I turned back to this very targeted blog article and took the hard way, luckly still having the VMware PowerCLI at hand, to do it by hand in the PS shell.

The first hurdle to stumble over was fetching the VMware bundle files -- apparently VMware only offers the ISO images for "free" usage and the bundle files are kept for "licensed" users. Nevertheless, I was able to download the "security patches" bundle via the VMware Product patches page.

Then I had to work around some quirks about acceptance levels (VMware is serious about supported configurations both in hardware and in software) and some weird signature checks -- here is the "adapted" list of commands:

> Add-EsxSoftwareDepot "C:\...\esxi-customizer\drivers\net55-r8168-8.045a-napi-offline_bundle.zip", "C:\...\esxi-customizer\ESXi670-202004002.zip"
> Get-EsxImageProfile
Name                           Vendor          Last Modified   Acceptance Level
----                           ------          -------------   ----------------
ESXi-6.7.0-20200401001s-no-... VMware, Inc.    21-Apr-20 6:... PartnerSupported
ESXi-6.7.0-20200404001-stan... VMware, Inc.    21-Apr-20 6:... PartnerSupported
ESXi-6.7.0-20200401001s-sta... VMware, Inc.    21-Apr-20 6:... PartnerSupported
ESXi-6.7.0-20200404001-no-t... VMware, Inc.    21-Apr-20 6:... PartnerSupported
> New-EsxImageProfile -CloneProfile ESXi-6.7.0-20200404001-standard -name ESXi-6.7.0-20200404001-standard-RTL8111 -Vendor Custom
> Set-EsxImageProfile -ImageProfile ESXi-6.7.0-20200404001-standard-RTL8111 -AcceptanceLevel CommunitySupported
> Get-EsxSoftwarePackage | Where {$_.Vendor -eq "Realtek" }
Name                     Version                        Vendor     Creation Date
----                     -------                        ------     -------------
net55-r8168              8.045a-napi                    Realtek    16-Apr-18 9:2...

> Add-EsxSoftwarePackage -ImageProfile ESXi-6.7.0-20200404001-standard-RTL8111 -SoftwarePackage net55-r8168 -Force
> Export-EsxImageProfile -ImageProfile ESXi-6.7.0-20200404001-standard-RTL8111 -ExportToIso -filepath C:\...\esxi-customizer\VMware-ESXi-6.7.0-20200404001-RTL8111.iso -NoSignatureCheck

Everybody needs a ... Doug Richard !

Not sure how many people may remember the name of a song by Fatboy Slim called "Everybody needs a 303", but today I surely found a good paraphrase for it: "Everybody needs a Doug Richard !"

Doug is one of the sharpest people I have got the chance to see and I think that's what it makes him best suited at what he does: teaching entrepreneurship and reviewing business cases. And we get a pretty good number of chances seeing that during the School for Startups program. He slices through your business plans like bread and challenges your (preconceived) ideas with the sharpness of a cold blooded shark — all that while putting a big smile on his face. And, boy, by the end of the ordeal, do the "full stop" sentences fall with the weight of a thousand pounds hammer. And that's exactly what you need if you want to take your business for a reality check tour. One can only wish to take his chances with him once in a while — I know I do. On the other hand, now I understand what kind of horrors the unprepared entrepreneurs might go through when pitching to him.

That's why I think every business would make good use of such a presence in their company, to take the pulse whenever things appear to go slippery. Just like the TB-303 was an unmissable tool for the dance scene of the 90's, a reference presence like Doug would be invaluable for every business, hence the title of the post.

Now if only we could clone Doug...

Love to "Listen"

Every now and then I have the chance to sample Google's (or rather the Google Engineers') thinking style and, although not consistently all the time, I must admit I like it — that's why I have been "subdued" to use their services for a lot of my personal/business needs. The latest occasion for such "tasting" has been Listen, a fairly obscure Android application for searching and listening to podcasts.

As with other Google products, one can immediately recognize the "minimalistic yet functional" style — the views are elegantly clean pertaining a minimum amount of controls (only the really necessary ones), integration with Google Reader (a new Listen Subscriptions tag category will appear), quick view/access/control to the current podcast in status bar, ease of browsing the (searched) subscriptions and, the cherry on top, keeping tabs of your progress for each podcast (e.g. you resume from the last listening position for whatever previously opened podcast). Oh, did I mention it's quite lightweight ? :)...

So if I managed to get you interested by now go ahead and try it on your Android-powered phone (yep, it's Android only). For the IT oriented people I highly recommend the TWIT podcast series...

Tip: the subscriptions search is English-only; if you cannot find a certain podcast, you might as well directly add its XML/Atom feed URL via My Subscriptions / Add a subscription.

FOSDEM 2010

This weekend I have participated at the FOSDEM 2010 open source event, annually held in Brussels at the ULB (Universite Libre de Bruxelles). It's a free-entrance conference with talks ranging from (Linux) distribution-related stuff and up to new trends in the OSS programming community. The nice part is that one can get a glimpse of the current status of the major projects and also hear about what's new and hot in the OSS domain.

The major themes that the sessions were grouped around were Distributions, Embedded, Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, Mono, Drupal, GNUstep, NoSQL, MySQL, Openmoko, X.org, Java, BSD. Since my interests revolve around FreeBSD and cross-distribution cooperation I have been attending mostly these two session groups. The general picture that I could gather is that better cooperation and integration (especially when it comes to packaging software) is desired but my feeling is that not too many people are yet ready to commit to such ideals. Things like openSUSE's Build Service and the shared dependency solver (CUDF) bring in nice touches but I believe more standardization and commitment are needed before something viable will be rolling out. Of course, it's hard to set on a commitment when one is not forced to but rather even lured to diverge inside this free (OSS) ecosystem. That's why I think it's worth paying attention to people like Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu's "angel investor") when they are preaching for synchronizing the efforts. Variety has its value, but so does consistency among various OS'es.

The talks were complemented by the booths outside the lecture rooms, most of the big distributions being present there. In the BSD camp I have seen FreeBSD/PC-BSD, NetBSD and, bit of a surprise, MirBSD (MirOS) sharing the desk with FreeBSD. Not too many BSD personalities around, only Brooks Davis that I could count from the FreeBSD core team.

As usual the O'Reilly books booth was pretty busy with interested people (yours included) and outside the halls you could opt for a treat of "frites" (french fries) or you could sample a few Belgian beers (it's quite a pity to miss that being in the famous country of a thousand beers).

All in all, this was an interesting experience, at least to see what the other camps are showing off or working on. You can see here a few pictures I made from the conference and around (also some slides from the presentations here). The organizers have promised the presentations video recordings in about a week.

Mute your PC speaker (bell) under FreeBSD / VMware

If your daily job is taking place in an open-space shared office then most likely you will want your laptop/PC to be as quiet as possible in order not to disturb your co-workers. Unfortunately the FreeBSD console does employ quite a loud bell signal (beep) and lots of operations in the terminal are prone to trigger it (especially if you are accustomed to TAB completion).

To disable generating the bell sound in FreeBSD at the console you can set the following sysctl in /etc/sysctl.conf:

hw.syscons.bell=0

Unfortunately it does not work to set it in the bootloader (/etc/boot/loader.conf). However, if you're running under VMware there is another trick — add the following line to the .vmx configuration file of the VM in question:

mks.noBeep="TRUE"

Alternatively you can add it to on of the following configuration files to make the change global for all your VM's:

• Linux: ~/.vmware/config
• Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini

PS: to disable the bell in the X interface you need to run "xset b off".

Photos from SNW Europe 2009 conference

Here are a few pictures I made while participating at the SNW Europe 2009 conference:

• The conference (held at the Congress Frankfurt, Germany)
• Some slides from the conference

The conference gathered topics such as Storage, Cloud Storage and Services, Virtualization, Solid Storage, IT Management, etc.

Installing Linux kernel headers for Amazon EC2 Ubuntu instances

When you play around with Ubuntu EC2 instances on AWS you might, at one point, stumble upon needing to install the Linux kernel headers to build some kernel module(s) from source. However, the standard Ubuntu repositories do not offer the -xen images used to build those AMI's:

# apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package linux-headers-2.6.27-23-xen

You should try to use the Ubuntu EC2 PPA packages for the Xen kernels — e.g.  you may use the following:

# echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-on-ec2/ppa/ubuntu YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE main" >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu-on-ec2.list
# apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 9EE6D873
# apt-get update
# apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

Don't forget to replace "YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE" with your own Ubuntu flavour (hardy/intrepid).

Slides and Audio from EuroBSDCon 2009

For those of you who missed the talks or want to remember some of the things said, the slides and some audio recordings (only Stream A sessions) have been made available on the EuroBSDCon 2009 website.

While at it you may want to check out the EnterpriseBSD introduction slides that I presented in the Works-In-Progess session -- see my blog post on enterprisebsd.com.

Photos from EuroBSDCon 2009

Here are some pictures I made at EuroBSDCon 2009:

• The conference (held at the Robinson College, Cambridge, UK)
• Some slides from the conference (only "Stream A")
• Walking around the parks (near the Robinson College) and London

And a lot more pictures made by Rodrigo Osorio (?).

EuroBSDCon 2009 is over

Yes, the last day of the eighth edition of EuroBSDCon just passed. Nevertheless it was yet another interesting day which brought up to the stage interesting talks -- among them the "accf_smtp" filters built by Martin Blapp (and the small SMTP architecture war started with the OpenBSD "aussies"), the network stack tunings done by Henning Brauner in OpenBSD, the gory details in (correctly) implementing the SMB/SMB2 stack for FreeBSD presented by Zach Loafman and Brooks Davis' porting efforts for the major HPC (High Perfomance Cluster) packages (Ganglia, Sun Grid Engine, [Open]MPI). The "Stream A" took the spot again thought I kind of missed attending the PC-BSD presentation...

Then I took some time to walk a bit around the parks and came back just in time to catch the "State of BSD" session: Alistair Crooks presented NetBSD's advancements, Owain Ainsworth and Henning Brauner (as the "slides bitch") spoke for OpenBSD and George V. Neville-Neil took the stage for FreeBSD (and even beat the records for the presentation timing). Then the Work-In-Progress session: each speaker had exactly 3 minutes (strictly observed by Robert Watson :) ) to present his work or project. During this session I had the chance to introduce the new (unborn) kid on the block named EnterpriseBSD and make a short statement about what it wants to be and what help it needs from the community (e.g. we want your feedback!). Besides that we had on the stage the syadmins taking care of the internal network of machines that makes the FreeBSD project's wheels turn, 64bit quotas, FreeBSD on ARM plaform, mmap() improvements in FreeBSD, Luigi Rizzo's (continued) work on Dummynet and pluggable disk schedulers, ZFS gone production in 8.0, DHCPv6 (IPv6 support in DHCP 4.x), new NTP package and configuration in FreeBSD, NanoBSD on big servers.

During Robert's introductory speech it was announced that the next EuroBSDCon will be held in Karlsruhe (again, after 5 years) in October 2010. Hope I can be back there next year.

I still got pictures to be posted and more impressions to be shared — stay tuned...

A full first day at EuroBSDCon 2009

The first day of the conference was really a full one. I decided to follow all the "Stream A" talk sessions and I could say it's been the best for my research related to the EnterpriseBSD project — e.g. feedback on usage of FreeBSD in the enterprise/business environments.

Harrison Grundy brought up a nice insight on the oil & gas industry and their use of FreeBSD on staggering levels of storage and processing sizes. Then Konrad Heuer unveiled some details about what makes the gwdg.de network tick and the problems they encountered on their heterogeneous setup. And that brought up an interesting discussion about IBM TSM backup support issues on FreeBSD.

After a first tea & biscuit break Peter Losher entertained us about what ISC is doing (like, say, DNS root servers and mozilla.org/kernel.org/*BSD mirrors) and their help with testing the FreeBSD releases — you might be surprised to know that some root servers may be sometimes running a -BETA or similar snapshots (of course under the protection of anycast balancing and failback). Then came the lunch in the nice restaurant of the Robinson College.

Then almighty Kirk McKusick stepped up to speak about superpages in FreeBSD 8.0 under the close scrutiny of front-row phk@ (Poul-Henning Kamp) and John Baldwin. Hacker galore!

Afterwards, Zach Loafman unveiled some of the "secrets" under the hood of OneFS from Isilon — their clustered filesystem product. Hope they will succeed in releasing their mods to FreeBSD (especially Infiniband). And an amazing trip with Sam Leffler on the top of the Chile mountains where he helped installing a wireless link between two astronomical observatories found ~2,4km above the sea...

Then came Robert Watson with a short update session and then introduced one interesting security expert fellow (think prof. Dumbledore) who showed us what tricks the 'net gangsters are using nowadays. Quite a bit of laughs...

Then came the famous "Conference Dinner in the Great Hall at Clare College"; luckily I've been able to trade a place with someone else. Wouldn't have been surprised if Harry Potter shared the table with us... Lucky enough to get a place right next to George V. Neville-Neil, Poul-Henning Kamp (say "beerware license"!) and Brooks Davis. Robert Watson was just around, too. Quite a lively bunch they are...

Lots of pictures for today, unfortunately I forgot to bring an USB cable with me so it'll have to wait until I get back in Brussels. Until then... there is one more day. And possibly a surprise, if Robert W. will be kind enough to approve my WIP proposal on EnterpriseBSD.

EuroBSDCon 2009 has started

Day one of EuroBSDCon 2009 is already over — it was the tutorials session day. Tomorrow the talks session will start and probably it will be the peak of the conference.

I'm eagerly waiting for some of the talks tomorrow. Especially that some of them are from the enterprise/business perspective that I'm researching now for the EnterpriseBSD project. Like, say, "How FreeBSD finds oil" and quite a lot of the rest of the talks in "Stream A". Too bad I won't be able to join the Conference Dinner (booked out).

Will be posting more news tomorrow evening...

Running oldie VMware Server 1.0.x on latest Ubuntu

If you're like me and hate to get along with the VMware Server 2.x resource hog then you will want to go for the older and more streamlined VMware Server 1.0.x (you will also get a real console client too).
Now if you do that on the modern Ubuntu distros then you will step into some troubles (Server 1.0.x shows its age). Most of them can be solved following the tips here (performance tips included!). However here are some more hidden gems:

• The latest 2.6.27 kernels have some changes which break the building of the VMware kernel modules (stub sources are really old anyway); use the patcher here (yes, it works for Server too).
• At least the MUI component assumes that /bin/sh is Bash, which on Ubuntu is really dash — this in turn will break setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment and apache will complain for missing libraries; correct the shebang magig at the top of the initialisation file /etc/init.d/httpd.vmware.

Good luck. And don't forget that 1.0.x is really old and already obsoleted by VMware in favor of 2.0.x...

Network messup in Ubuntu Jaunty when using VMware

While I was testing a brand new Ubuntu Jaunty (9.10 alpha) installation on my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop to checkout whether it better reacts to the suspend issue, I stumbled over another problem: after installing VMware Workstation the network setup would get messed up at every boot requiring manual tweaking.

It turns out that the NetworkManager service, in its great wisdom, was trying to automatically initialize the vmnet1/vmnet8 virtual interfaces created by VMware (it's using them as network injection points for the VM machines and they are managed by the vmware startup script). That means running the DHCP client over them and acquiring some garbage IP settings (these settings are supposed to be acquired by the contained VMware virtual machines, not by the physical box!). Subsequently this was installing a phoney VMware default route and DNS server entries, overriding the expected wireless settings, which in turn renders networking useless.

It seems this new behavior may have been triggered by a change in the [un]managed mode of the NetworkManager service in Ubuntu Jaunty. However, trying to change the managed=true/false statement in /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf yielded no results.

Luckily you can easily fix this by adding specific configuration files in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/ to prevent NetworkManager from touching the VMware network interfaces. You can use the following commands (assuming you kept the default interface numbering):

cat > /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/vmnet1 << EOF
[connection]
id=vmnet1
autoconnect=false
EOF

cat > /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/vmnet8 << EOF
[connection]
id=vmnet8
autoconnect=false
EOF

RF Kill switch, Suspend and other demons on Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Li 2735

Some time ago I have bought a cheap Fujitsu-Siemens (AMILO Li 2735 model) laptop on a refurbish sale. I don't know whether it was the smartest idea, it looks like the guys at Fujitsu Siemens had nothing else but Windows Vista in mind when they designed this spartan model :-/ ...

My first problem was the software wireless/RF killswitch which works with Vista after installing Fujitsu-Simenes drivers (you need to press Fn+F1), but not out of the box on Linux/others OS'es. The not-so-obvious solution to this problem was to use the acerhk module.

The second problem was that the CPU (T5450 1.66Ghz): while it's a Core 2 Duo CPU, it lacks the virtualization support needed to run 64bit OS'es under VMware (among the last ones not supporting Intel VT). Well, I guess it's just my bad luck for this one...

Now the third problem that I'm struggling with is that suspending in Ubuntu is broken, and I have tried both 8.10 and 9.04 alpha. The weird thing is that if I boot from the LiveCD suspending works (although not too many times, SquashFS errors keep accumulating), but if I boot from an installation made from the very same LiveCD then I have no chance to correctly resume from suspend — it's doing a weird "powerup/powerdown/powerup/hang" cycle. There is a bug filed for the (similar) Li 2732 model which was at one point closed as fixed in the Jaunty alpha versions when tested from the LiveCD but I had to reopen it since it doesn't work from an HDD install...

If any of you has some ideas for this issue please leave me a comment. Thanks.

Using EPEL repositories in CentOS (and spinoffs alike)

If you are looking for various popular packages to install in CentOS (and for that matter also RHEL) but you do not find them in the default installed yum repositories, then you can add the Fedora EPEL repositories. For CentOS 5.3 you should be running something like this under root:

rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

If you were wondering, EPEL stands for "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux" and, quoting their FAQ, this is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages that complement the Fedora-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its compatible spinoffs, such as CentOS and Scientific Linux.

Linus got his own blog...

Well, the man behind the Linux kernel (I was prepared to say "the Linux prima donna") has given up into blogging recently. You can find his blog here.

Personally I hope there will be more technical bits than kids and dogs pictures, but hey, it's his blog. Maybe this will render him (and all nerds alike) a bit more human ? :-)

Ubuntu Heyron: i810 beats intel driver ?

I'm not sure why, but ever since I upgraded my x86-64 installation to Ubuntu 8.04, all applications (but especially Firefox in particular) would spot a dramatical display slowdown, although CPU was not loaded.

Well, ever since switching from the default "intel" video driver to the "i810" driver, things have gone back to normal. This makes me think that the new/official "intel" driver is yet to become
what the old i810 one has still to offer...

Resolving video play issues with Intel video cards in Ubuntu

Yet another hack to take into account when dealing with a laptop having an integrated Intel video card (e.g. Intel 945GM in my case): if you have problems playing video clips with the 3D accelerated desktop (Beryl or Compiz powered), then you may be running with a buggy driver.

There seem to exist a problem (see bug reports here, here and here) with XV support when using AIGLX so all media players using the default "xv" video output will fail or crash (including Totem and VLC). This is a big problem for the Gutsy users since Compiz Fusion is enabled by default.

The easy fix is to change the video driver from "intel" to "i810" — you can do that either manualy changing the "Device" section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf or, in Gutsy, from System / Administration / Screens and Graphics / Graphics Card / Choose driver by name.

Cisco VPN Client on Ubuntu (Gutsy)

I recently have been endowed with a company laptop and as such I was in a hurry to install Ubuntu Gutsy besides the usual suspect (read Windows). Good news is that everything has gone smoothly (or almost); bad news was that I couldn't install Cisco VPN Client, having the same issue as VMware Workstation — kernel module building was breaking due to changes in the latest Linux 2.6.22 kernels.

So after some googling around I found the solution — a neat patch which allows compiling Cisco VPN Client. Thank god the guys at Cisco were kind smart enough to give object/source code for their IPsec kernel module and not binary modules.