VMWare: Unable to load the BIOS due to the VMWare Splash screen not showing

After upgrading my version of VMWare from VMWare 1.6 to VMWare 2.0, and then installing and updating the VMWare Infrastructure Client, I had a new issue; accessing the BIOS from the VMWare splash startup screen. Before the upgrade, VMWare would display the VMWare splash screen as it loaded the NVRAM (I believe), and had a section that said “Press F2 to enter setup”; it went by fast, but it was at least there. After fiddling around with VMWare for a few minutes, I found a way around this temporarily, and is actually a neat little feature. Continue reading VMWare: Unable to load the BIOS due to the VMWare Splash screen not showing

Record Cell Phone Calls with Drop.io Service (free)

This was a pretty cool find, that was merely an accident. I joined the Drop.io service due to trying to find a decent, free AJAX upload script, since I didn’t have the time to write something basic myself. I never actually found one, however, I decided that Drop.io was the closest thing to a solution. Basically, I needed to upload a few files, quickly, so that I could download them on a remote system (without using rsync or scp). If you have a chance to check out Drop.io, please do, then have so many services within the actual Drop.io service, one of them being a voicemail box. Continue reading Record Cell Phone Calls with Drop.io Service (free)

Clearing (but not deleting) log files

Sometimes, as a Systems Administrator, or SysAdmin, there are times we need to clear out the log files, without actually deleting them. As a smart Sys Admin, you normally wouldn’t need to do this, but as I am currently involved in supporting customers and their Linux machines, I run into some pretty neat stuff (neat as in special). I’ve had a few issues where someone actually runs out of disk space on / (root filesystem) due to the /var/log directory being full.

First off, you might run the df command only to realize that, maybe, you have used 97% of the partition up, in this case / (root filesystem). More times than not, this is usually due to your /var/log directory. Make sure though, I’m presuming that you already know that your /var/log directory is full. To find out what is taking up the most space (you should already know why, and thus you are viewing this possibly because you are having issues with a full filesystem), you would need to run the df command. Continue reading Clearing (but not deleting) log files

Windows Fix: “Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API”

Ugh. Another Windows error. Another Windows error that really doesn’t tell you what is really wrong; some (most) people aren’t nerds. Don’t worry, I’ve got your fix right here. This has to do with memory on your Windows XP system. Have you tried Hibernating or putting your system into standby after upgrading your RAM? If you have, keep on reading. Continue reading Windows Fix: “Insufficient system resources exist to complete the API”

VMWare: “Failed to create named-pipe directory” error

Have you ever received the Failed to create named-pipe directory error message via the vmware-mui error log files, and not able to access the VMWare Management Interface? If so, here’s the fix. Continue reading VMWare: “Failed to create named-pipe directory” error

Installing Habari 0.1.1 (finally)

Well, after the initial repository builds and a crappy 0.1 release, I have successfully been able to install Habari onto my server. Do I use it? No, but I do like to test out other software in my free time, heh. Seriously, though, installing Habari has been quite lame, and I’m happy to say that I have figured out how to get it installed on a server, with no error messages. Continue reading Installing Habari 0.1.1 (finally)

/bin/rm: Argument list too long

While at work, I had a customer ask me how to, one time, delete all the mail in his /home/[account-name]/mail/cur directory.

So, first off, I wanted him to just take a look at that directory, get to know it (figuratively speaking). So I had him run the du command on it; wow, you wouldn’t imaging how much mail was in there!

The actual command I had him run was:

BASH

cd /home/[account-name]/mail/cur
du -h ./

The output was 1.3GB. Yes, that’s right, he had 1.3GB of mail files. Some people are unaware of what exactly the difference is between the /new directory and the /cur. The difference is simply that the /cur directory is full of email messages that the user has already viewed somehow, whether by webmail, Outlook, Thunderbird, etc, they have viewed it, and the mail is now officially not exactly new. The /new directory is a directory that has mail that has not yet been opened by the user yet.

So, the customer asked me a simple question, “How do I go about just deleting this data?”. From a user’s point of view, the command would be:

BASH

cd /home/[account-name]/mail/cur
rm -r ./*

Then the customer would have received the error: /bin/rm: Argument list too long. I have found a workaround though. I have asked a few people around what they use the find command for. All of there answers where pretty much the same, “They help you find files”. That’s all they could really tell me what find does. This isn’t all true. find can help us defeat the /bin/rm: Argument list too long error. So, I had the customer run the following:

BASH

cd /home/[account-name]/mail/cur
find . -name '11*' -exec rm "{}" \;

It worked for him, and it can work for you. Let me dissect this command real quick for you, so that you aren’t completely lost. find is the actual command, followed by a period; this means you are going to be searching the current directory (at this time /home/[account-name]/mail/cur). Next you supply the -name switch to tell the find command that you want the pattern (coming next) to match the name of the file. You then give it a search pattern, and in this case all his files started with eleven (11) and everything after that was different, so the pattern would be 11*; make sure the search pattern is in single quotes. Next you supply the -exec command, which will execute any Linux command you want (as long as it is installed on your system). In this case we used the rm command. The quoted curly braces tell it to run rm on each file that matches the pattern supplied. That’s it. Simple command turns to be a very helpful utility.

Hope this helps someone in the future, as I had to figure it out on my own.