In my professional life we have been chasing after a longstanding issue with the bundled Tomcat server (vctomcat) included with vCenter. While its nice that VMware got around to including a JVM memory sizing option during the install we’ve found that even the “large” option doesn’t cut it for us. Along the way we’ve had a kb or two written about our troubles which begs the question of how do we monitor what is going on with Tomcat?

VMware via its SpringSource division happens to own this fantastic platform for monitoring and performance management called Hyperic. Tomcat is one of the supported technologies out of the box that Hyperic can instrument via Java Management Extensions (JMX). For some dumb reason VMware doesn’t enable JMX out of the box for the “vctomcat” Tomcat instance that is installed as part of vCenter. Fortunately enabling it isn’t too difficult once you figure out where the configuration is and what magic incantation of java options are required.

To enable JMX you need to pass the following java options:

-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=6969
-Dcom.sun.mangement.ssl=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false
-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false


The jmxremote.ssl option is necessary to make Hyperic talk to the self-signed SSL certificate that is bundled as part of the vCenter web services. Replacing the default certificates is a giant bag of hurt and for whatever reason the vCenter team can’t seem to figure out how to implement SSL support without doing stupid things like hard coding default passwords into the code. It is easier to ignore all this nonsense and to disable security.

To add those java options you simply run the helpful “Configure Tomcat” shortcut that is created as part of the vCenter install. On the “Java” tab enter them in the “Java Options” box on the page:

Once that is done apply the changes and restart the vCenter web services.

The Hyperic agent should now be able to discover the discover the bundled Tomcat process and gather metrics from it successfully.

https://myilo-address/xmldata?item=All

This will return an XML document that contains the model, serial, and firmware revision. It works with iLO, iLO2, and iLO3 adapters.

I have one that has gone through probably 4-5 in-place firmware upgrades over the last few years and somewhere along the way started to provide horrible downstream throughput to clients. No amount of troubleshooting on my part could get it to work correctly. After giving it a reset its back to working as expected – yay for WiFi faster than dial-up.

Add the following line to the .vmx file for the VM:

bios440.filename = "mycustombios.rom"

And place the rom file inside the VM folder.

It is strange to think that a pay phone is like an antique to my kids.

Posted from Portland, Oregon, United States.

Thank you for yet another free RAM increase to my VPS. I’ve been an extremely happy customer since 2006.

I upgraded my VPS earlier this evening and everything was painless.

1. stop mysql

# /etc/init.d/mysql stop

The output should look like this:

* Stopping MySQL database server mysqld

   …done.

2. restart mysql without a password

# mysqld_safe –skip-grant-tables &

The output should look like this:

[1] 28808

100222 18:32:27 mysqld_safe Logging to syslog.

100222 18:32:27 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql

3. connect to mysql using the mysql client

# mysql -u root

The output should look like this:

Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g.

Your MySQL connection id is 1

Server version: 5.1.37-1ubuntu5.1 (Ubuntu)

Type ‘help;’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the current input statement.

4. set a new mysql root user password

mysql> use mysql;

Reading table information for completion of table and column names

You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Database changed

mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD(“NEWROOTPASSWORDHERE“) where User=’root’;

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)

Rows matched: 3 Changed: 0 Warnings: 0

mysql> flush privileges;

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.09 sec)

mysql> quit

Bye

5. stop mysql

# /etc/init.d/mysql stop

The output should look like this:

* Stopping MySQL database server mysqld

100222 18:35:29 mysqld_safe mysqld from pid file /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid ended

   …done.

[1]+ Done mysqld_safe –skip-grant-tables

6. restart mysql

# /etc/init.d/mysql start

Who needs to remember passwords?

Do I want one (yet)? No; however, it seems like a pretty ideal device for someone like my wife or father-in-law. They both have pretty typical computing needs – a browser, email, iTunes for media consumption, the occasional word processing. The iPad nails all of these functions out of the box plus has the added bonus of the App Store ecosystem so there are plenty of niche specific apps and casual games to enjoy as well. It seems like a step closer to that task-centric “toaster” computing model which I think aligns well to the expectations of a large part of the population. Panic’s Steven Frank describes this personal computing evolution much more eloquently.

Right now I just want to finally ditch my current Moto dumbphone and get an iPhone. I’m not ready to make the leap to AT&T yet so I was disappointed that the end of their exclusivity for it in the US wasn’t announced this week. Oh well maybe in time for my birthday

You can grab a copy of the .dmg here.