technology, internet oddities & other random stuff
Archive for April, 2008
Seize drunk drivers cars
Apr 18th
VMware Server on Debian Etch 64 bit
Apr 7th
Once I got Debian installed it was time to install VMware Server on the box. There’s two gotchas however.
- While the application is fully 64 bit, the installer isn’t quite, and the error it throws isn’t the most illuminating. You need to install 32 bit support by running “apt-get install ia32-utils”
- You can’t connect to your freshly minted VMware server with the VMware Server Console. You get the error “There was a problem connecting: Cannot connect to host X.X.X.X: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it”. It’s because VMware-mui hooks into inetd, which doesn’t get installed in More >
Intel 64 bit CPUs and Debian
Apr 7th
I’m repurposing an old-ish Dell PowerEdge 850 as a VMware Server development & test box at the moment. It’ll be replacing an even older PowerEdge SC400 (where “SC” stands for “super cheap”). It was running Windows 2003 Web Edition quite happily, but I’d rather stick a stripped out Linux distro on it to get the last bit of performance out of it.
The server originally came practically free with some disk arrays we bought a while back so I wasn’t expecting the best, but was still slightly peeved when I saw it only had a CD-ROM drive, so my copious quantities More >
Gmail on mobile phones
Apr 6th
The company’s Google apps deployment went mostly fine. The one pain in the ass is with our smartphones. We all still use Nokia e61 phones and used to rely on push IMAP for email on the go. You’d connect once and stay connected all day. The Blackberry platform is great if you need centralised management and control, but total overkill on a small technology company where there’s a reasonable technical competence across the board.
While push IMAP worked perfectly fine with our previous service, it’s a bit flaky on Gmail. We tend to see random disconnections without warning and the phone’s More >
