Tag Archives: how-to

Realtek network cards and VMware ESXi 5.5

Yesterday I decided to upgrade my two ESXi servers from ESXi 5.1 to ESXi 5.5 since the update came out some time ago.
The upgrade from ESXi 5.0 to ESXi 5.1 went great, without any problems. But this time, that is not the case.
My two ESXi servers are white boxes made of the following hardware:

  • Motherboard: MSI Z87-G43 (http://www.msi.com/product/mb/Z87-G43.html)
  • CPU: i5-4670K (http://ark.intel.com/products/75048/)
  • RAM: Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600MHz, 8Gb * 2(16GB total) (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104173)

The problem was the motherboard that ships with an onboard Realtek 8111E network adapter.
This problem has been verified to be the same with Realtek 8168 and Realtek 8169.
The reason for this, is that VMware removed the drivers from the new ESXi 5.5 iso.
In this post I will show you how to get ESXi 5.5 working with the Realtek network adapters.
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Open PDF with Chromium in Linux using the in-browser PDF viewer

Chromium is the open source version of Google Chrome.
There are some none-open source stuff in it that has been left out, a good example is the Chrome in-browser PDF viewer.

I needed this back, since I like it. so I did some googling around. I found lots a lots of posts, and none of them worked. But when I finally got it working, I decided to make this post hoping it will help others like me!

So this will be a short post on how to enable the in-browser PDF viewer in Chromium.

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How to install a CentOS 6 64Bit Server

CentOS 7 has been released. I have made an updated guide for installing that too, you can find it here: How to install a CentOS 7 64Bit server
Now that CentOS 6 has been released, I though I should make a quick step-by-step guide on how to set up a CentOS server yourself!

Download the iso

Download the netinstall iso: http://mirror.1000mbps.com/centos/6.6/isos/x86_64/CentOS-6.6-x86_64-netinstall.iso

Burn or mount and boot the iso

Burn iso, or mount it in your virtual machine and boot the system up. You will get following screen:
centos_boot
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Set up your own Mumble server for speaking with your friends while gaming

Sometimes I game with some friends. For the time we are playing Payday2 which requires a lot of teamwork. Chatting using the ingame chat system is not the best or fastest way, there is simply no time for it. That’s why I decided to make a Mumble server.

What is Mumble?

Mumble is like teamspeak, ventrilo or skype. It is a online “chat room” but with microphones instead of keyboards (VoIP, Voice Over IP), It’s like a conference call on the phone, but over the internet so it’s free. This makes it good for gaming, since you can speak about what to do in-game without having to use time typing and reading.

Why Mumble and not the other softwares

Some say, Mumble is the best.. But actually they are all great, exept Skype (It uses up all your internet connection so there is nothing left for the game).
I choose mumble personally because it’s open source, and the server can run on Linux.
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How to configure a distributed file system with replication using GlusterFS

Distributed file system between multiple servers is a thing I have planned for a long time, but I never got around to it because I first had to find the right filesystem for it.
After a lot of research, I found that GlusterFS was the right file system for me.
My plan was to use a distributed filesystem to share the content of my webservers to make sure all my webservers had the same content on their pages at all time and using some sort of high availability to make sure the content was always there.
To this I used a tool in Linux called Lsyncd before I set up my GlusterFS cluster, this worked well and did live syncing of all the servers using rsync. But there was one problem with it.
If I uploaded a lot of files (20+) to one webserver, and it started to sync to the other webserver before I was finished copying, the result would be that some of the files ended up corrupt, and this was a problem for me!

My distributed file system overview

Here is the overview of the setup I am making, it’s not pretty but I’m sure it’s a lot more easy to explain the setup using a simple mspaint drawing than with text!
GlusterFS distributed file system overview
As you can see in the picture above, I have build this with high availability in mind, since I want my websites to always be up and running!
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Upgrading Debian Squeeze server to Debian Wheezy server

My web and others servers was set up on Debian Squeeze about a year ago. and they have been working great. But it thought it was about time to upgrade all my Debian servers to Wheezy instead so I could get some newer updates for packages and in general be up-to-date.
Here is the simple, fast and trouble free way I did it.
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D-link DP-101 or other print server IP reset

So you found an old D-link DP-101 or other printer server that you need to use, but don’t know what static IP address you gave it years ago?
The solution is simple.
This also on other D-link print server models, if you did this on models that are not listed below, please leave a comment so i can add them.
Verified to work with:

  • DP-101
  • DP-101P+
  • DP-300U

The D-link Dp-101 is a stable parallel to network print server, but it does not have the feature of a “Reset to default settings” hardware button anywhere. If you want to reset the device to default, or change the IP address without knowing what it is now, you have to do it with D-link’s tool, and it only works on 32Bit computers!
Here is how you do it, with link to the software
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Belkin F5U103V serial to USB converter on Windows 7 64Bit

Update: I have not tested this on Windows 8, but it should work. If anyone does this on Windows 8 (i don’t have a Windows 8 machine laying around), please leave a comment to verify if it works or not.
Yes, this post is about Windows!
I had a problem yesterday, and thought I should post my solution since I had a hard time getting it to work and it might help others.
I have a D-link DGS-3324SR rack switch for my servers, and it had some random IP address on the configuration interface that I was not able to find, and I needed to get into the switch to configure some vlans.
I thought “That’s easy, just connect to the console port and thats it”, but then i came home to notice that none of my computers have a serial (RS323) port!
I then found a serial (RS323) to USB converter at work, the Belkin F5U103V and borrowed it for the day, but when i got home and plugged it into a Windows 7 64Bit laptop I noticed that there was no driver found for the device.
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Convert multiple JPG or PNG to PDF in Linux

I think we all have been in the situation before, you have some scanned documents in JPG or PNG format that you need to convert into a PDF file.
There are many solutions for this on the internet, including free sites that just does it for you if you upload your images, but they almost always put some kind of watermark on the pages if you don’t pay them.
There are also a bunch of Windows applications that do this, but they are often complicated or full of ads.
This guide show you a free solution on Linux, that just works, is fast, and does not add any crap to the PDF.
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