I don't normally listen to podcasts...

But when I do it's from Red Hat.

I stumbled across this series on Reddit last week, I've listened to 4 so far and I really like it.  Maybe you will too.

https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes

The series starts off in the 80s/90s back during the OS wars, and the beginning of Linux.  My era, and I remember a number of things mentioned.

If you are interested in IT on an industry scale then you will enjoy this.

Unable to consolidate guest, Vcenter 5.5U3

Forgive me but this was a week ago so I don;t have copies of the actual error messages.

So I logged into Vcenter last Monday and found two of my guests needed to have their snapshots consolidated.  Except looking under Snapshot manager neither guest had any listed!

So long story short: I contacted Vmware support and learned that since we use Veeam to backup our vm guests.. that Veeam proxy machines actually mount the VMDK's of my target guests as RO then backs them up.  Well turns out that for whatever reason one of my proxies did not un-mount a couple of guests VMDK files once the backup job was complete.

So if you run into this where you tell a guest to consolidate snapshots and it fails, *AND* you use Veeam then check your proxy machines to verify they have no disks mounted that do not normally belong to it.

It's been quite a while

So it's been a while since I last posted here. It's easy sometimes to forget this site and why I started this blog in the first place.

So I am a manager now! An IT Manager for a manufacturer back here in the great state of Michigan. Granted it's not Montana but nowhere except Montana is.. Montana.

I miss MT a lot! Like as much as one would miss a beloved pet or a dead family member. Seriously.  There is no place like the 406. Why did I leave you might ask?  It's expensive as hell!

For what I paid for the house and land here in Michigan I would have gotten a 3/2 inside city limits on a city lot. No thank you ma'am.


Anyway the jobs going ok.. there's a few things that are concerning, a few things that make me wonder "What did I get into?".  I have high hopes but I'm not stupid and I will hedge my bets if at all possible.

Speaking of Michigan man the weather this summer has been brutal. Like Mississippi type of brutal. Humid and hot.. sticky, the likes of which we haven't seen in 10 years.  It definitely makes us question the move and why we didn't finally go to Alaska.

Exchange 2013: A Reboot is Required...

So today while installing the management tools on my localhost I ran into this issue of the repeating reboot request. The url linked in the install window specifically mentions how it's unsafe to try to work around this issue by modifying registry entries... oh really? lol.

Located here:

Computer\HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager

I deleted the DWORD value PendingFileRenameOperations, then hit re-try on the installer and boom.  Done.

Grep returning if results were found or not

Today I needed a one-liner like this to help with with an Ansible playbook, storing here for posterity:

rpm -qa | grep -q "rhn" && echo 'is installed' || echo 'not installed'