04 August 2009

Installing ESX 4 from USB Flash

The target server had a CD drive and I only had a DVD .iso file that was about 835Mb. I discovered that the server's BIOS would allow me to boot from a USB flash drive. I used unetbootin to burn the .iso file to my USB drive. Next, and this is the important part, I booted from the USB drive and pressed the Tab key when presented with the boot options for ESX. That then brings up the standard line of options to pass into the kernel. I appended askmedia to that line. The askmedia option allows one to specify that the install media is hosted and available elsewhere, for example, HTTP, FTP, NFS, or USB. Of course, I selected USB when prompted and the rest of the install proceeded automatically with no problems.

03 August 2009

stackoverflow.com is the best thing since sliced bread

I love stackoverflow.com. If you do any programming at all you must check it out. I had a really tough programming bug last Friday and posted a question on stackoverflow with the appropriate tags to help with classifying the questions. Within an hour I had two excellent responses one of which was from Python luminary, Alex Martelli. (His answer turned out to be correct -- no surpise there.)

A feature that I particularly like about stackoverflow is that I can use my OpenID credentials to authenticate. Beyond that, I can link my accounts to their sister site at serverfault.com.

These sites are always the ones that I look at first now for answers even before google! Well done!