SVN blues – committing a file that doesn’t appear to have changed

So recently I had an issue where I needed to commit a Truecrypt file in SVN, but as you probably already know, when you save content in Truecrypt, the file appears to be untouched to SVN. The modified date doesn’t change, nor does the size of the file. So, how to we check-in our changes?

A co-worker generously gave me this tip, so I’m passing it on to you:

from the CLI

#svn propset dummyproperty 1
#svn commit

By changing the properties of the file with useless info we can fool SVN into letting us check-in our file!

Hooray!

Using sips on Mac OSX for cli image manipulation

So in my last post I on the Cisco ASA I wanted to insert a screen shot I had taken on my Mac. The problem was that capture saves images as .tiff And, I know you can change this default from the cli, but there are other times when I really just need to convert an image from one format to the next quickly.

Sips lets you do that. So, that unhelpful .tiff file can become a jpeg or png file in a jiffy. Also, this works on PDFs.

Here’s the magic:
mbp$ sips -s format jpeg .tiff –out .jpeg

Specify your desired file format after format. That’s it kids! Good to go. If you want to be really fancy, you can make a cronjob or automator job to do this every so often against the directory you keep your screen shots in.

How to Download ASDM from an Cisco ASA firewall

So, I’m a system guy that’s getting tossed some networking task from time to time. Most recently, I was tasked with adding a rule to an ASA firewall. Being a Cisco noob, I didn’t have the knowledge or time to figure this out from the cli, but I had seen someone use an ASA to configure a firewall once.

Problem was, I didn’t have the tool I needed, ASDM. So, here’s how you get it.

You’ll need the username and password for your ASA device to in order access it.

open a connection, ssh is fine to your ASA.
ssh admin@myASA-IP
password:
myASA> en
myASA#

great, now we need to enable http server on 443

myASA# conf t
myASA(config)# http server enable

the default port is 443, if you need it to be something else just put the port number at the end of that string

awesome, we can exit the shell now

Open a web browser to https://myASA-IP/admin
Accept the *scary* ssl cert warning message and you’ll get a lovely page that looks like so:

Just click on ASDM launcher and enjoy! Keep in mind you’ll need java installed to use this tool.

VMware ESXi 4.1 and the lost host

So, came in today, and fire alarms are going off, people are planning evacuations, ‘VMware is down’ I hear someone mutter as a enter the room.

Sure enough, last night at some point one of my ESXi 4.1 boxes lost it’s mind and disconnected from vSphere. Several hours later I got it back and here is what I learned:

I logged into vCenter and one of the boxes was connected, the other was not. I tried to reconnect it from vCenter, and that failed. So began the process ever system admin goes though when stuff is broke, we go to our hierarchy of problems, I think most of us have this stored in our brains.

• Can I ping it? Yes
• Can I ssh to it? Yes
• Can I log into it vSphere Client? No Hum…
• Are servers on that box still running? Unknown (I couldn’t get this work from the cli: vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms )
• Can I ping servers that where on that box running? No

So off to Google I went and I’ll leave links below for the pages that help me get to the solution.

First Error Message: Call “Datacenter.QueryConnectionInfo” for object “<DataCenter name>” on vCenter Server “<vCenter name>” failed.

 

Ok, so at this point we can probably assume the box is jacked up really good. But, we don’t know if the VMs are running, rebooting the box would be rude for the guest.
We could try restarting the management agents >  /sbin/services.sh restart
Ok, still can’t connect, someone else mentions starting > /etc/opt/init.d/vmware-vpxa restart
Still no dice, getting frustrated didn’t work and says something about like “Failed to login” when I run vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms or any other commands

Finally came across some things to test:

ls -l /etc/vmware/hostd/proxy.xml if this returns 0 for the file size, that’s your problem. Replace this file from another ESX server and you should be good.

 

Shoe Drop:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1018212

Other Links:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1003490
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1010837
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/311675?start=0&tstart=0
http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/power-on-vms-from-esxi-command-line/
http://deinfotech.blogspot.com/2013/01/error-adding-esxi-host-to-vcenter.html

 

 

 

scanning for scsi devices in CentOS 6

 

 

 

Recently I ran into a situation where passing the “- – -” values to iscsi_host/host#/scan didn’t work for me. I was sure that I had run this before on CentOS6, but to no avail I could not find a value in the /host portion.

 

So, this what I discovered! The friendly folks at Red Hat have created a script for dealing with this.

 

Do this:

 

1. yum install sg3_utils
2. run rescan-scsi-bus.sh (they added it to the path 😉 booyah!)

 

Now you should have your drive all discovered and ready for fdisk!

 

Here’s the original link for this info: https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Storage_Administration_Guide/rescan-scsi-bus.html

 

e2fsck guide

This is a quick little guide to using e2fsck to check a Linux ext2/ext3/ext4 file system:

1. First, unmount your disk with umount.
2. Run e2fsck -y -v -f against the partion.

-y say yes to any prompts
-v verbose
-f force check even if the system seems clean