How to enable SSH on ESX 3.5i

1. At the console of the ESXi host, press ALT-F1 to access the console window.
2. Enter unsupported in the console and then press Enter. You will not see the text you type in.
3. If you typed in unsupported correctly, you will see the Tech Support Mode warning and a password prompt. Enter the password for the root login.
4. You should then see the prompt of ~ #. Edit the file inetd.conf (enter the command vi /etc/inetd.conf).
5. Find the line that begins with #ssh and remove the #. Then save the file. If you’re new to using vi, then move the cursor down to #ssh line and then press the Insert key. Move the cursor over one space and then hit backspace to delete the #. Then press ESC and type in :wq to save the file and exit vi. If you make a mistake, you can press the ESC key and then type it :q! to quit vi without saving the file.
6. Once you’ve closed the vi editor, run the command /sbin/services.sh restart to restart the management services. You’ll now be able to connect to the ESXi host with a SSH client.

Update for ESXi 3.5 Update 2 – With Update 2 the service.sh command no longer restarts the inetd process which enables SSH access. You can either restart your host or run ps | grep inetd to determine the process ID for the inetd process. The output of the command will be something like 1299 1299 busybox      inetd, and the process ID is 1299. Then run kill -HUP <process_id> (kill -HUP 1299 in this example) and you’ll then be able to access the host via SSH.

Administrating Groupwise from a NCP share

This has been covered many times, so this is a note for myself.
If you want to use ConsoleOne on your Windows PC and you have Groupwise on a EXT3/ReiserFS partition. You can access the Groupwise database through a NCP share. But to prevent database corruption you have to make the following changes to you Novell Client for Windows.

Recommended settings for the Novell client:

1. Right-click on red N letter in a right corner of the system tray and select “Novell Client properties …”

   VOLUME MAIL /opt/novell/groupwise/mail Inherit_POSIX_Permissions

2. Click on Advance settings.
3. Scroll down and find “File Caching” item -> set it to Off.
4. Scroll down and find “File Caching on Exclusively opened files” -> set it to Off.
5. Scroll down and find “File Commit” -> set it to On
6. If asked, reboot the workstation.

When GroupWise is located on OES Linux server and volumes are NCP aware, then it is advisable to:

1. type ncpcon inside a terminal window
2. type set cross_protocol_locks = 1 … this settings enables OES Linux to honor advisory locks across different protocols
3. edit the ncpserv.conf file located in /etc/opt/novell directory and add similar statement like in following example for each NCP volume:

This is the TID that covers it.

No update channel for OES2 SP1

I found a great TID to add a update channel for OES2 SP1.

This is a short version of it:

1. Check with the command “/usr/lib/zmd/query-pool products” the installed products. You will see something like:
   

   noes7:~ # /usr/lib/zmd/query-pool products
   |product|OPEN_ENTERPRISE_SERVER_SP1|2.0.1-0|i686
   |product|SUSE_SLES_SP2|10.2-0|i686
   i|product|SUSE_SLES_SP2|10.2-0|i686

   Notice the “i” before SUSE_SLES_SP2|10.2-0|i686. This means that the products SLES10SP2 is installed. There is no “i” before

   product|OPEN_ENTERPRISE_SERVER_SP1|2.0.1-0|i686.
   

2. Give the command
   

   zypper install –type=product OPEN_ENTERPRISE_SERVER_SP1

   mark OES2 as installed. You should get a question to add OES2 as a product.
   Afterwords you can check by repeating step 1

3. Check with
   

   rug sl

   the rule number for nu.novell.com. First we will remove this channel to add it again later on. To remove the channel enter

   rug sd [channel nr]

4. Stop ZMD en remove the database:
   

   rczmd stop
   rm /etc/zmd/secret /etc/zmd/deviceid
   rczmd start

5. Remove the Suse Register information

   
   

   rm /var/cache/SuseRegister/lastzmdconfig.cache

   and re-run Suse Register

   
   suse_register -a regcode-sles=SLES_ACTIVATIONCODE -a regcode-oes=OES_ACTIVATIONCODE -a email=EMAILADDRESS"
   
   

6. Check with
   

   rug sl

   if the update channel is added.

Thats all!

Installing VMI Kernel SLES10 SP2

In recent post, I talk about the VMI kernel and how it benefits CPU load. But I never blog how to install this Kernel. So here we go.

On the Vmware site you can find a PDF called  VMware_VMI_performance.pdf. This document contains a link to Novell to manually download the VMI kernel because it isn’t include on the SLES10SP2 DVD. I find it easier to get the kernel through the online update channel. Register your machine at Novell Customer Center (In Yast: Software | Novell Customer Center Configuration), start Software Management and search for VMI. Select the ‘standard’ VMI kernel or the PAE kernel (This kernel is used if you want to use more than 4 GB of memory) and click Accept. If IRQBalancer is not installed, you will be prompted for this.
The Kernel is installed, but if we reboot the system with this kernel, the VMware-tools will fail to start and will need to be recompiled. For this we have to to a online update of the system to get the new kernel sources for the VMI kernel. So in Yast goto Software | Online Update and select to refresh the Kernel Sources.

Now that the VMI kernel is installed, we have to configure our bootloader (mostly Grub) to start the VMI kernel.
In Yast goto System | Bootloader. Select the entry Vmi — SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 and click Set as Default.
Now click Finish and shutdown the Virtual Machine. Do not reboot, because VMI is not enabled at this time in the Virtual Machine. The configuration file (VMX file) of the Virtual Machine is read during the startup of the Virtual Machine. So if you enable VMI support for the Virtual Machine while the machine is running. This setting won’t be read.
After the machine is down go to your VI client, select the Virtual Machine and select Edit Setting | Options | Paravirtualization and select Support VMI Paravirtualization and save the settings.
Now you can bootup your Virtual Machine with VMI support!

To check if our SLES10 has VMI enabled, give the following commond on the console prompt: dmesg | grep VMI
If VMI is enabled you will see the following:

Dectected VMI ROM version 3.0
VMI Timer active.
VMI Timer cycles/sec =

After starting SLES10 it can be that some services will not start anymore after the installation of the VMI kernel. In my case this was: ACPID, VMware-tools, Microcode and Network.
ACPID and Mircocode is no more necessary so we can disable these services by giving the following command:
insserv -r /etc/init.d/microcode
insserv -r /etc/init.d/acpid
insserv -r /etc/init.d/powersaved (Because we disabled acpid we’re going to disable Powersaved also.)
By reconfiguring the VMware tools, network should be working also. So give the command vmware-config-tools.pl and rebuild the necessary modules.

Reboot the machine ones more and check if everything is alright.

Now you have a VMI enabled SLES10 machine!!

Install ESX 3.5i U3 on a USB Memory Stick running linux

Many people have write about it, but I found it hard to find the procedure on the internet. So considder this as a note to myself.

Most post are about installing ESX 3.5i on a USB memory stick running Windows. They can run Winzip or something like that. But wat about us Linux guy’s. Here is what to do:

1. Make sure you USB memery stick is empty (non partitions at all, you can use fdisk to delete all the partitions).
2. Mount the downloaded iso file to /mnt
   mount -o loop VMware-VMvisor-InstallerCD-3.5.0_Update_3-123629.i386.iso /mnt
3. Extract the install.gz (ESX kernel) to /tmp
   tar zxf /mnt/install.tgz -C /tmp
4. Put the image on your USB Memory stick (in my example /dev/sdb)
   bzcat VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_3-123629.i386.dd.bz2 | dd of=/dev/sdb

Don’t forget to remove the VMWare-VMvisor* file from /tmp