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Posts Tagged ‘Ubuntu’

VMware Ubuntu Guest Add Harddrive without Rebooting

August 27th, 2010 Comments off

Four steps to add a new hard-disk to a running Ubuntu virtualized session, using Vmware.

  1. Add the new hard-disk to the Ubuntu vmware image using Vsphere or VMWare Server.
  2. Ssh into ubuntu session and run
    “echo “- – -” > /sys/class/scsi_host/NUMBER/scan”
    NUMBER is the scsi host value.  It will not hurt rescanning a running host, so I simply keep incrementing till I reach a scsi host value that is not created in the system yet.
  3. Do an “fdisk -l” and voila your new disk should be available.
  4. Do what you want with it!  (Software Raid or create a new partition etc).
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Ubuntu Vmware Server Guest Slow Network Speeds

August 12th, 2010 Comments off

I recently setup a test VMWare server environment on my Windows 7 workstation to run Ubuntu LAMP development environments that mirror my production environments. After I install an Ubuntu (or any Nix) environment, I typically install Samba services so I can easily copy code/images back and forth from my workstation to the development box.

I noticed on my vanilla install of Ubuntu 10.04.1LTS, that I was getting horribly network transfer speeds just copying a 13.9 MB file from my workstation to my virtual machine. It was taking between 4-6 minutes for just a 13 MB file, which is utterly ridiculous!

My VMware Server said that my guest OS had the VMware Tools installed properly, so I assumed that everything was running fine. I ran tests on the cards, tweaked Win7 settings, but nothing seemed to work. I finally figured it out by chance.

Step One:
If you’re seeing this, first uninstall everything that you did previously. Something probably got messed up! Like me, I continue to compound the issue, by trying to install the Vmware tools served up by the VmwareServer. Bad mistake.

Step two:
Go here and install follow instructions:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VMware/Tools

Basically install
apt-get install –no-install-recommends open-vm-dkms
and
apt-get install open-vm-tools

After I did that, I had to reboot and eventually got everything working properly.

My Vmware Server still happily showed that I was still running Vmware guest tools in the Ubuntu guest, but my network transfer speeds were 1000x (rough guess..) better than before. Now copying that 13.9 MB files is instantaneous.

Update 9/3/2010:
One caveat is that these tools are installed linked to your current kernel version. If you ever update your system and install a new kernel, you’ll need to rebuild your openvmware drivers again. I removed/reinstalled mine and it worked:

apt-get remove open-vm-tools
apt-get remove open-vm-dkms

REBOOT!!!

apt-get install –no-install-recommends open-vm-dkms
apt-get install –no-install-recommends open-vm-tools

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Applied Avionics

August 3rd, 2009 Comments off
For this project Silva Tech helped Applied Avionics with several prototyping and software development projects to further enhance their model aircraft based UAV platform. Mr Silva architected and developed and entire service that would accept any type of streaming video feed (MOV/AVI), translate it near real-time and stream it as a flash video. This flash video would then be accessible across a network via a web browser with a flash video client plug-in Mr. Silva also created a prototype system in C# .NET, that would accept live aviation telemetry data from a web-socket connection, translate the data into Google KML entities and automatically display a model aircraft flight in near-real-time. The prototype included a sample driver program that would also replay previously collected telemetry data to review previous aircraft flights exactly as they had occurred on Google Earth. Mr. Silva was also consulted on system architecture changes to the aircraft and its ground-based processing system.
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The National Weather Station

August 3rd, 2009 Comments off
Working with meteorologists, Mr. Silva designed and developed a meteorology forecasting model capable of delivering short-term and extended reports to customers of The National Weather Station all across the United States. Mr. Silva engineered a deliver mechanism that would deliver the weather reports via email, web site, fax, or test message automatically. This single model was extended to calculate snow making conditions for ski operators, but using a proprietary algorithm based on summit / base heights and averaged weather station data. The data was used to allow ski operators to forecast ideal snow-making conditions throughout the entire winter season. The model was also adapted to calculate ideal farm spraying and drying conditions for farms across the country. The design was extremely flexible and allowed the client to run it from older equipment that ran on any type of operating system.
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Everything Freight LLC

August 3rd, 2009 Comments off

Silva Tech Solutions was the complete technology consultant on the “over-the-road” based freight start-up company called EverythingFreight LLC. We managed and provided all of the IT services, from building a custom “Smarty Template” freight auction website to building a highly complicated system of web crawling agents that continuously crawled and updated data from the Department of Transportation. We collected and maintained the records on one of the nations leading databases of freight and freight broker information.

The system was built on a very tight budget and was specially crafted to minimize the cost of server hosting and bandwidth. The system was segmented in two tiers, a subscription website system with a minimal database architecture and the corporate data-center with the full freight database and associated statistical systems. The data-center system would upload refreshed data to the public side only as requested. This ensured that the data-center’s core product was very secure, and any (unlikely) breach of the public website would yield very little data loss.

Silva Tech Solution’s data crawlers would regularly monitor and notify a customer, if their record at the Department of Transportation had changed. The intricate data crawlers also monitored the Department of Transportation site for newer registered companies and then provided the data to enterprise customers who where in the freight broker or freight sales industries. Some of the custom data feed reports were based on a circular radius around the customer’s zip-code, ensuring that the customer would only receive sales leads within their geographic area.

Silva Tech Solutions created a massive array of in memory statistical models that could quickly calculate industry wide accident and safety statistics for like sized freight companies. The system would automatically detect changed company data in the master database and reload only the affected nodes back into the memory model. The models were tied to a custom graphing and reporting system, that was able to trend growth rates or trends of freight company and broker safety issues throughout the entire US.

Custom PDF reports containing all of the available data on a freight company were automatically generated and stored at the data center. Customers could then search the basic subscription front end database, and then request full reports on any freight broker or hauler from the main segmented data-center database.

Silva Tech Solutions was also responsible for the development of all corporate branding graphics and logos, as well as building the corporate website. We monitored all of the network traffic and were responsible for all SEO efforts to boost traffic and revenue.
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