Install Open-VM-tools on Debian 6 squeeze

Installing Open Virtual Machine Tools is a nice alternative to managing and installing the vmware tools package that comes with Vmware's hypervisor products.  It allows you to use APT to manage all the dependencies and updates. Module assistant will recompile the kernel modules for you automatically when you update kernels …

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Tar extract destination folder

Tar can redirect extracted files to a different folder. This can be handy if you want to unpack a tar archive stored on a cd or other read-only media and want to eliminate the step of first copying the archive, extracting it, then deleting the extra tar.  All you have …

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Brasero, no option for creating ISO

I love Brasero. It's simple, lightweight, and comes with Ubuntu. Recently, when I wanted to back up a disk, ISO was not on the list of formats. As is usual, the issue was a missing package: brasero-cdrkit.

apt-get install brasero-cdrkit

Now, .ISO (ISO9960) will be an available disk format for …

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Tandberg endpoints cannot establish calls over Juniper Routers

This is a nasty little issue. On my private network, suddenly some endpoints would refuse to establish calls made over SIP or H323. Error codes would be:

channel unacceptable
487 / Request Terminated
480 / Temporarily Not Available

Not particularly helpful information. After all the packet sniffing and diagnostic checks, it appeared …

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Monitoring Flexlm usage with Zabbix

Flexlm license usage can be a hard thing to accurately measure and monitor. Luckily, the output from lmutil can be used to display license usage. First thing to do is locate the lmutil binary and try to get it to run. I use Flexlm for autodesk on Windows and ESRI …

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View string including special characters like newlines in Python

After spending a frustrating hour or two trying to format a string, i stumbled on python's repr() funcion. repr() allows you to inspect a string object when you're troubleshooting your code. For example:

I was trying to understand a string that was shown in the terminal like this:

print mystring …
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'Pstools: Access Denied in a Domain Environment'

After upgrading to a windows 7 VM at work, I was having trouble getting pstools commands to authenticate on remote machines. After much trial and error, I realized some curious behaviour with psexec. Obviously, when connecting to a remote machine, I would try to use the '-u' switch to specify …

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ntpq timed out on freeBSD

I was running ntpd locally on a server and wanted to check in on ntpd's status. ntpq -p was not producing any output even though ntpd was running.

# ntpq -p
localhost: timed out, nothing received
***Request timed out

This is because I had the option "restrict default ignore" set in …

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Cannot delete ZFS snapshot

While Deleting to delete a snapshot, i typed:

zpool destroy zfsdiskpool@Sat

and got:

cannot open 'zfsdiskpool@Sat': invalid character '@' in pool name

This is because to delete snapshots in ZFS, you should use 'zfs destroy' instead of 'zpool destroy'. DOH!

zfs destroy zfsdiskpool@Sat
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Script to run handbrake recursively through a folder tree

Handbrake is a fantastic tool for (among other uses), converting videos into mobile formats. It is extremely easy to use and can usually get a video properly converted in just a few clicks. To get Videos encoded for use on my phone, I use the "iPhone & iPod Touch" preset. It …

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