Systems Administration Problem Solvers

Enable RDP on Windows 8 Home or Windows 10 Home

Jul

16

2020

You have a need to enable RDP on an old machine running Windows 8 Home and discover that only Windows 8 PRO has RDP abilities. The solution is to install RDPWrap created by these fine individuals: https://github.com/stascorp/rdpwrap “The goal of this project is to enable Remote Desktop Host support and concurrent RDP sessions on reduced ...

vSphere Replication Appliance won’t reconnect to vCenter

Mar

8

2020

For a multitude of reasons your VR appliance is not connected to vCenter, such as: You updated the SSL certificateYou disconnected the ESXi host that had the vSphere Replication applianceYou rolled back vCenter from a backup or snapshot Login to the VMware vSphere Replication appliance. Identify the password of your keystore. To do this, type ...

FSCK LVM on CentOS Won’t Boot

Mar

4

2020

Your VM won’t boot. FSCK needed on an LVM. You don’t have root and are screwed. Boot the rescue disk. Scan all disks for partiitions: lvm pvscan Scan all disks for volume groups and build /etc/lvmtab and /etc/lvmtab.d/* which are the database for all other lvm commands: lvm vgscan Change attributes of a logical volume lvm lvchange -ay VolGroup00 ...

zfs: cannot import : I/O error Destroy and re-create the pool from a backup source

Nov

16

2019

Your FreeNAS, or FreeBSD, ZFS zpool lost power and can’t be accessed. Boot the machine and enter the boot loader menu and set these: set vfs.zfs.debug=1set vfs.zfs.recover=1set debug.bootverbose=1 boot -s <enter> to start the machine in single user mode. Once booted: zpool import -fFX -o readonly=on -R /mnt tank (or whatever the name of your ...

Update vCenter VAMI 5480 SSL Certificate

Feb

17

2019

You have updated the SSL certificate on your Platform Service Controller (PSC) and you probably went through a further nightmare of update the SSL certificates on a bunch of other services. After all of the above was completed, you realized that none of this tediosity updated the VAMI SSL certificate on port 5480. Login to ...

Process Sendmail clientmqueue

Sep

3

2017

You have emails stuck in clientmqueue that are stuck because of a prior sendmail issue. To process all e-mails in the clientmqueue: sendmail -Ac -q -v Manually flush clientmqueue: sendmail -Ac -q -v

00:0c:29:4c:6f:70 is not an allowed static Ethernet address. It conflicts with VMware reserved MACs.

Aug

21

2017

You are attempting to manually assign a MAC to a vSphere VM in the 00:0c:29:xxx range. You receive this error: Module DevicePowerOn power on failed. Could not set up “macAddress” for ethernet0. Invalid MAC address specified. 00:0c:29:4c:6f:70 is not an allowed static Ethernet address. It conflicts with VMware reserved MACs. Solution: Edit the .vmx file ...

vCSA Postgres Database Repair – PANIC: checksum mismatch

Aug

21

2017

You are confronted with various database errors in the /var/log/vmware/vpx/vpxd.log and you also have various errors in /storage/db/vpostgres/pg_log Similar in theme to: error ‘Default’ opID=HB-host-8637@82541-3778684f] [VdbStatement] SQLError was thrown: “ODBC error: (00000) – ” is returned when executing SQL statement error ‘Default’ opID=HB-host-8637@82541-3778684f] An unrecoverable problem has occurred, stopping the VMware VirtualCenter service. Error: Error[VdbODBCError] ...

Acronis True Image TIB to VMware VM

Feb

25

2017

How to convert an Acronis True Image TIB backup file to a VMware VM. Create a VM with the same OS as the backup with a larger disk than the backup. How much bigger does not matter. Boot the VM with the Acronis True Image recovery ISO. If you do not have this, it is ...

Japan Rail Pass – How to Buy – Should I buy

Nov

20

2016

You are planning a trip to Japan and wondering about the Japan Rail Pass. Should I buy the Japan Rail Pass? The quick and easy answer is likely: NO The rail pass is expensive and restrictive. It is HIGHLY doubtful you would use its full value unless you plan on going to a bunch of ...