Back in January I built a VMware ESXi 5 whitebox as my home server. I updated the hypervisor today and I thought I’d record the process so that I can refer back to it later. The blog post I found most useful was from VMware Front Experience. If you’re looking for the detailed procedures, I’d suggest you look at that post. Upgrading from 5.0 to 5.1 The upgrade file can be found here on the VMware download site. For an upgrade from 5.0 to 5.1, the file to download is: VMware-ESXi-5.1.0-799733-depot.zip. After downloading the file, scp it to the ESXi host, Continue Reading
Computers & Technology
App Remote – Unleashing the Apple Remote
I’ve been using Sofa Control for my Apple Remote since I bought my Mac in 2009. I use Sofa Control pretty much every week when I volunteer with the youth ministry at my church. The Apple Remote by itself only works with certain programs that are designed to handle its input and it lacked support for other programs we were using such as OpenSong, which we use for song lyrics. So I bought a license for Sofa Control. Recently Sofa Control’s move to the App Store required all existing customers to repurchase the license. I didn’t want to shell out another Continue Reading
Saving keystrokes with a SSH client config file
I regularly have to SSH into my servers, and on most of the ones I connect to the SSH server is running on a non-standard port for obvious security reasons. I used to include the port number manually in the SSH command, for example: [shell] ssh seymour.dennistt.com -p 922 [/shell] This worked… as long as I remembered to type the port number in, which was probably less than half the time on the first go. So I finally got tired of having to retype the command with the port number in it. Luckily you can create a SSH client configuration Continue Reading
An eye for good design
What better to do on a 12-hour flight than to explore the in-flight entertainment (IFE) system looking at ways that it can be made better. Having completed CPSC 344 (Human-Computer Interaction) last term, I have an even more eager eye looking at interface usability. So here are some things I found about Air Canada’s IFE interface.
VMWare ESXi 5 Whitebox
I have 2 old computers (Pentium III and Celeron computers circa early 2000’s) that I currently use as servers for file storage, backups, and testing. I thought it was about time to consolidate these servers I had, up the performance, and set up a flexible test environment for my coding endeavours. VMWare’s free ESXi hypervisor piqued my interests earlier last year. It’s comparable to XenServer but apparently has better support for Windows virtual machines. Being a bare-metal hypervisor, it should give better performance than a usual virtual machine sitting on top of a full-blown operating system. So I set my Continue Reading