VM-Aware » Linux

Strange Xubuntu 8.10/VMware Server Keymapping Issue

Paul Shannon — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:46:08 +0000

I have run a variety of VMware desktop applications on a multitude of hosts, but recently I settled on Xubuntu with VMware Server for my work Windows XP instance.

Everything ran fine for a long time until all of a sudden keymappings went up the spout. End did nothing, the keypad didn’t behave as expected, but worst of all the Windows Start key stopped working. The last one was the worst, because I couldn’t get to use any keyboard shortcuts and I like keyboard shortcuts.

I fixed it using the following command:

echo ‘xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true’ > ~/.vmware/config

Everything is now working fine and I can only assume that a Xubuntu update caused an error/corruption somewhere.

Linux Networking Performance Throughput Testing Tool

Paul Shannon — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:35:01 +0000

IPerf is a free Linux tool that can be used to test throughput of network devices. It comes into its own if you plan to test maximum bandwidth performance for TCP & UDP.

On its own it is great, but when used in conjunction with JPerf it is even better. JPerf is a simple to use GUI front-end to IPerf.

Fantastic tools, all for free!

How To: Linux LVM

Paul Shannon — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 22:34:56 +0000

I have been meaning to spend some quality time with Linux LVM. Some of the features that Linux Volume Manager offers (according to Wikipedia) are:

Resize volume groups online by absorbing new physical volumes (PV) or ejecting existing ones
Resize logical volumes (LV) online by concatenating extents onto them or truncating extents from them
Create read-only snapshots of logical volumes (LVM1)
Create read-write snapshots of logical volumes (LVM2)
Stripe whole or parts of logical volumes across multiple PVs, in a fashion similar to RAID0
Mirror whole or parts of logical volumes, in a fashion similar to RAID1
Move online logical volumes between PVs

You can see why learning this might be attractive, especially for someone that runs Linux in Virtual Machines under VMware. I say especially in this scenario, because with the advent of ESX 3.5 Update 2 it is now so easy to expand virtual disks.

I found two great articles that helped me out no end in getting a better grip on LVMs. The first is an incredible article that talks about many different ways of managing disks in Linux, but specifically LVMs and can be found here. The second is tutorial style article that even has a downloadable VM that relates to the tutorial. The downloadable VM is a debian distribution that comes with disks that will be manipulated throughout the tutorial, truly excellent.