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SFlanders Posts

Phantom VM

Published by Steve Flanders on February 5, 2010

For those of you who do not know, I am a VMware fanatic. From time to time, I will be posting blog entries on discoveries I have made, problems I have resolved, and general knowledge I would like to share. Last week, an interesting problem was brought to my attention.
A colleague called me who was in the process of rebuilding an environment after a RAID crashed due to multiple failed drives .This was a testing environment so no monitoring was in place and no backups were kept. At the time, my colleague was redeploying software firewalls and ran into an issue of the firewalls refusing to cluster together. After investigating the logs, it appeared that a duplicate IP was causing the problem. A network engineer traced the MAC address through the switch fabric and found the duplicate IP coming from a VM port group NIC on one of the ESX servers. All VMs were checked on that host, but none of them had the IP address in question. So where was the phantom VM?

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The Joomla Transition

Published by Steve Flanders on February 1, 2010

I would like to start by thanking everyone for the feedback on the new site! I have taken your comments, questions, and suggestions and made several modifications. One common problem appeared to be the use of the comment feature and as such I have switched to a different application and welcome any feedback on its functionality. I have been doing extensive testing on multiple browsers to ensure that everything is working properly and it this point I believe the only outstanding issues are the voting AJAX functionality on IE6 and the mobile browser layout of the site.
I decided it would be a good idea to start my blogging experience by talking about my website transition. Over the years, my site has changed from HTML+CSS to PHP then into a wiki and now a CMS. PmWiki was my favorite type of website to deploy, but I wanted to try something new. The main reasons for this include the ease of installation, the ability to edit pages through the web browser, the wide range of scripts (called cookbooks), and the functionality to write code in order to overcome limitations of the system. A couple drawbacks to PmWiki included the “hacks” needed to get some features to work (i.e. SSL for edit and login functions only), the need to learn or constantly look up the wiki syntax (problem of every wiki), and the non-Web 2.0 look and feel. With over five years of experience in PmWiki, I feel I have mastered it and while I will likely continue to use this product for side projects I wanted to try something new that is hopefully easier to use for advanced functions.

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