ali aboos

“df -l” returned an error: “df: cannot read table of mounted file systems”. I looked at my “/etc/mtab” file – empty! I did a “fdisk -l” and saw my partitions there, then proceeded to create a new mtab from my /proc/mount:
grep -v rootfs /proc/mounts > /etc/mtab

Error message: no space left on the device!

Ran out of room… my SQL dumps are taking a lot of space 🙁 Freed up some space and executed the command again – df is now returning what it’s supposed to return.

This happened when I created a SLES 11 VM with VMware Workstation and then moved to to ESX for production. Problem was that VMware Workstation used LSILogic SCSI drives to emulate my disks, but for some reason it wasn’t made clear to ESX by VMware Converter during conversion.

To fix this browse to your datastore and download your guest’s configuration file <vmname>.vmx to your desktop (or use your root access and open it in vi through ssh). Open it with a text editor and add the following line above your SCSI devices:
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"

So the whole SCSI device section should look like this:
scsi0.present = "true"
scsi0.sharedBus = "none"
scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic"
scsi0:0.present = "true"
scsi0:0.fileName = "disk1.vmdk"
scsi0:0.deviceType = "scsi-hardDisk"
scsi0:1.present = "true"
scsi0:1.fileName = "disk2.vmdk"
scsi0:1.deviceType = "scsi-hardDisk"

Copy the config back to your datastore and start guest OS. You will be asked to confirm changes during post – answer yes to changes.

Disclaimer: Make sure you have a backup before making any change.

It’s past 3 AM and I finally found out why after stopping my Tomcat server I’m unable to successfully start it again. It seem like Java process won’t go away. To get around that I added the following line to my Tomcat shutdown.sh script:
killall -9 java
and all is well now. Still unorthodox, but works for me. I will write a script to find the process and kill it properly later on.

To install NX server, download nxclient, nxnode and nxserver rpm packages from NoMachine website. I factored out versions from these instructions and refered to packages by names. Install in the following order:
rpm -iv nxclient
rpm -iv nxnode
rpm -iv nxserver
Now run the install script:
/usr/NX/scripts/setup/nxserver --install
NX server package should be ready to go.

To view all options:
/usr/NX/scripts/setup/nxserver --help

6 million dollar question… want to ifdown/ifup but don’t have physical access to your server? you can ifdown and ifup in one command:
ifdown eth0 && ifup eth0

That’s how you combine more than one command in one line!