H's Blog A good shell is the best user interface.

19Jan/120

Open-iSCSI Interface by libvirt

While I was introducing an iSCSI pool to libvirt/kvm, a new interface was introduced to Open-iSCSI called libvirt-iface-*, with the effect that LUNs were no longer detected after target login.

It took nearly an hour to detect the reason for this failure, but since the initiator ID changed and the default CHAP login was not set for this interface, the iSCSI LUNs failed.

The following steps solved the problem on each KVM host:

  • Remove the interface definition from /etc/iscsi.
  • Remove all node and target definitions containing the libvirt device name from /etc/iscsi.
  • Reboot
  • Introduce the iSCSI targets before binding them to a pool in libvirt.
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27Feb/092

Enable Time Synchronisation in VMWare Guest

Instead of editing your .vmx file, you can use VMWare Tools to enable/disable synchronisation of the time with the server:

Linux

vmware-guestd --cmd "vmx.set_option synctime 0 1" # Enable
vmware-guestd --cmd "vmx.set_option synctime 1 0" # Disable

Windows

vmwareservice --cmd "vmx.set_option synctime 0 1" # Enable
vmwareservice --cmd "vmx.set_option synctime 1 0" # Disable

You will get a warning/error like Invalid old value in case you want to enable the synchronisation and it's already activated. That's not critical.

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1Feb/0922

VMWare Server 2.0 Console Failure

The latest VMWare Server is only supporting Web Access for configuration including console access to a Virtual Machine.
There is a Firefox Plugin for the remote console, but that did not work in my setup. The Web Access will no longer complain about a missing plugin after installation, but the console will not start either.
While searching for a fix, I also found instructions to run the remote console in the command line. Combining this with an environment setting for GTK, I am now able to run a remote console.

My solution is starting with the normal installation of the Firefox Plugin. If that's available the following script should start a remote console from command line:

#!/bin/bash
################################################################################
# Call VMWare Server's Remote Console in a clean GTK setup.
################################################################################

# Clean GTK setup for VMWare
export VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes

# Find console executable in Firefox plugins.
vmrc="$(find "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox" -name vmware-vmrc -type f -perm -111 | tail -1)"
[ -x "$vmrc" ] || exit 1

set -x
cd "$(dirname "$vmrc")" && "$vmrc" -h 127.0.0.1:8333

It should also be possible to run Firefox by VMWARE_USE_SHIPPED_GTK=yes firefox in your Linux command line to fix the GTK issue.