Can't boot system as genuine NUMA.

Installed ESX 4.0.0 as a virtual machine running under VMware Workstaion. After installation had completed and the ESX VM had restarted the following error was shown on the ESX console:
TSC: 54361147 cpu0:0)NUMA: 706: Can't boot system as genuine NUMA. Booting with 1 fake node(s).

Although this didn't seem to cause any issues with the VM, I don't like red error messages. Found the following solution to clear the error.

> Open vSphere Client.
> Select the ESX Server and choose the Configuration tab.
> Under Software, click Advance Settings
> Select VMkernel
> Scroll down and clear the selected option VMkernel.Boot.useNUMAInfo

The ESX server requires a restart for the change to come into play.

Enable SSH access to ESX for root user

SSH access for the root user is disabled by default in ESX 4. To allow SSH access for the root user you will need to make a change to the sshd_config file. This will need to be done via the ESX server console.

- Open the ESX Console (press Alt-F1)
- Login as root
- Edit ssh_config: nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
- Change the line: PermitRootLogin no
- to: PermitRootLogin yes
- Exit and save changes
- Restart the sshd service: service sshd restart

Restart Windows Server Remotely

Found ourselves in a situation today in that we needed to restart a remote Windows Server which wasn't accepting RDP connections and didn't have a DRAC or any other method of remote access.

Running the shutdown command from another workstation/server with the following switches did the job:
shutdown /m \\targetcomputer /r

Usage
/m \\targetcompter - specifies the target computer
/r - restarts the computer

Hardly rocket science, but a nice tip non the less.

Moving ESX Service Console using CLI

Today a NIC in one of our ESX (3.5) Servers failed. Unfortunately, the NIC that failed was running a few Virtual Machines, and the Service Console (I know, I know...) Luckily (because I wouldn't have it any other way), the server had a DRAC card and we still had access to the console, so all was not lost.
We were able to move the Service Console to the other vSwitch using the following commands:

esxcfg-vswif -d vswif0
esxcfg-vswitch -D "Service Console" vSwitch0
esxcfg-vswif -A "Service Console" vSwitch1
esxcfg-vswif -a vswif0 -p "Service Console" -i 192.168.3.53 -n 255.255.255.0

Once we had restored access to the Service Console, we could move the VM's to the other vSwitch using the viclient.

Thanks to the following websites for guidence:
http://www.petri.co.il/forums/showthread.php?t=32229
http://vmware-land.com/esxcfg-help.html

How to mount Windows (SMB/CIFS) shares in Linux (Ubuntu)

1. Install smbfs package
sudo aptitude install smbfs

2. Create the directory where you will mount the share
mkdir /mnt/share

3. Create a file to store the credentials...
nano /etc/cifspw
...and enter the username/password
username=enter_username
password=enter_password

4. Edit fstab to mount the share at startup
sudo nano /etc/fstab

//server/share /mnt/share/ cifs credentials=/etc/cifspw,domain=DOMAIN 0 0

5. Mount the share
sudo mount -a

Creating Ringtones for iPhone using iTunes

1. Select the song you want to convert to a ringtone in iTunes. Right-click and choose 'Get Info'. Click the Options tab. Set the Start and Stop time for the sample (no more than 30 seconds). Click OK.

2. Right-click the song in iTunes again and select 'Create AAC Version'. This will create a sample of the original track in iTunes to the length you set in step 1.

3. You can now set the original song's start / stop time back to how it was (undo step 1).

4. Right-click the sample track in iTunes and select 'Show in Windows Explorer'.

5. Drag the new file to your Desktop (or any other folder).

6. Delete the sampled track from iTunes (right-click, delete). The file can be moved
to the Recycle Bin.

7. Browse to the copy of the track you made in step 5. Right-click and rename. Change the extension from .m4a to .m4r.

8. Import the file back into iTunes (File -> Add File to Library) and it will be added to your library as a Ringtone.

That's it!

Adding external emails in AD Distribution Groups

Today I've been 'playing' with EventTriggers as detailed in an earlier post How to use Eventtriggers.exe to send e-mail based on Event IDs.

I'm using bmail to fire off an email when an EventID (2031) is logged (by a performance alert) in the Event Viewer.

Todays challange was that I wanted to send the resulting email notification to multiple recipients, some of which were in the format [mobilenumber]@esendex.net (which delivers the email alert as an SMS to a mobile phone).

I found the first part of the solution on the following website:
Adding external emails in AD Distribution Groups - Spiceworks Community

By creating a Distribution Group in Active Directory, and adding my contacts to that group, I could now send the alert to the email address of the distribution group and let Exchange do the rest.

The second part of the solution was to add an SMTP Connector to our Exchange server to forward emails addressed to [mobilenumber]@esendex.net through to my Esendex account which would deliver the email as an SMS to an oncall engineers mobile phone. If I wanted to be really cruel, I could address the email to [mobilenumber]@voice.esendex.net and this would deliver the email as a voice message!

(WARNING! shameless plug alert)
Take a look at these websites if you want more information on Email to SMS, configuring an SMTP Connector for Exchange, or any of Esendex's Services.