Welcome to BAFM#
This blog is a collection of thoughts, experiences, and technical insights from a sysadmin’s perspective. Here you’ll find posts about system administration, infrastructure challenges, troubleshooting adventures, and the occasional philosophical rambling about technology and its role in our daily work.
Whether you’re a fellow sysadmin looking for solutions, someone curious about the behind-the-scenes work that keeps systems running, or just stumbled upon this corner of the internet – welcome! Feel free to explore, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions or want to share your own experiences.
Follow me through my journey through life with all it’s neat little tricks, caveats and side-quests.
Quick Links#
Last updated: January 2026
Well, today the support request came back. Seems one of the originally linked VMTN dicussions really is the only way:
Export the customization specification Edit the XML file Import it again The related part inside the customization specification should then look like this:
1 2 3 4 <type>vim.vm.customization.Password</type> <plainText>true</plainText> <value>Password01</value> </password> So if you ever think about switching the default VirtualCenter certificate (for whatever reason), make sure you use the above workaround. Otherwise VirtualCenter is gonna fail miserably during the customization phase of the cloning process.
As I pointed out in my past posts, I was having some weird errors with SLES10 regarding mounting CD images inside the guest (as well, as it turned out, on the physical hardware).
Now, finally, after about a week or so Novell finally released an updated kernel package today. So the error per se is fixed, I can use my CD drives again, as well as update my virtual machines by means of virtual center, without the trickery of copying the linux.iso from /vmimages/tools to the guest and mount it by means of mount -o loop.
Today I was moving a pretty standard SLES10 virtual machine to another host, when the migration dialog showed me this:
fault.MemorySizeNotRecommended
And if you now think, the virtual machine is something special take a look at those settings:
Virtual machine configuration
I don’t know what to think about that error message. Googling for it doesn’t reveal that much about it. If anyone out there got an idea, I’m open for suggestions.
Since I do happen to be in the situation pretty often where the kernel inside a VM is newer than what VMware currently has in their tools (as in the SUSE kernel is newer than the binary modules built by VMware), here’s a quick reminder for myself on how to to fix the .ko symlinks.
1 2 3 4 5 for file in /lib/modules/$( uname -r )/misc/*.ko ; do rm $file && ln -s /lib/modules/$( uname -r )/misc/${file/.ko/.o} $file done
There I was, enjoying our new patio and trying to get a tan outside (we had plenty great weather during the weekend).
The new patio
Now, all of the sudden there was this weird noise I couldn’t classify (which I heard while listening to my iPod completely cranked up …), so I stood up.
Combine harvester mowing down rape
They were finally mowing the rape field behind our house … hah!
If you think back, I talked about my problems with MSCS while utilizing the IBM RDAC Multipath driver for Windows.
Everyone I talked to about this, including our IBM business partner and it’s systems engineers; as well as some IBM systems engineer (who in fact was an freelance guy hired by IBM), told me it had to do with how we did the zoning (stuffing every controller into a single zone), and that would be the reason why the x3650 was seeing that many drives.
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Well, as one can read in about every damn post you can find for that topic, the /console switch is now silently ignored, as well as the rdp file option " connect to console:i:1".
Now, what you don’t find anywhere (only in some scenario explanation), that it is allowed to specify the mode (ie /console previously and now /admin) within the full address parameter.
Scenario: In the RDC client UI, you specify Computer_name /console in the Computer box (where Computer_name represents the name of the remote computer to which you want to connect), and then click Connect.
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Well, it turns out that my thought was ultimativly flawed. When defining the hostgroup_members in the lower tiers, nagios is association the checks from the lower tier with the upper tiers. Thus propagandating all checks upwards, and me ending up with ~250 checks instead of ~150.
Gonna have to try to define the dependency backwards, maybe that’ll help. But that’s a topic for Monday. Guess I’ll finish viewing Ghost in the Shell - Stand Alone Complex first.
Remember my last post about cpu masking ? Well, turns out that you can do it to a “template”.
The only point you don’t need to do, is to mark the VM as a " template". You still can clone it and move it around and all that other stuff, but the good part is, that the cloned VM keeps the cpu mask set to the " template" 🤷
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Well, it seems to be getting a “trend” for me, to integrate stuff into our Active Directory. Now that I know why, and how easy that is, I expect to add more stuff. The good thing about the integration is, that you only need to maintain a single source for authorization.
The bad thing about that is, that stuff becomes dependent on the Active Directory (we do have four domain controllers, so that should be fine).
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