November 2010 will definitely be known in my books as a month of Change with a capital “C”. First I was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. Not completely shocking (with both parents having Type II as well), but still quite a wake-up call. Although I have been improving my diet over the past few years and attempting to excercise a bit, heredity has caught up with me, clamoring “too little, too late.”

Now I live a regulated life. No more late-night or all-night programming/gaming/surfing sessions, no more living on impulse and eating whenever my stomach rumbles, none of that. Up on time, pills on time, food on time, to bed on time. God it’s boring, but it’s good for me. I know very well that Diabetes can be quite manageable as long as you lead a healthy life, but I’ve always balked somewhat against outside force on my life. Yet now I must accept the new regulations on bended knee. I’ll be okay, just like the 171 million other diabetics.

The other shock to the system, but most definitely a very good one, is my new job.
As of February 1st I’ll be joining the Grafisch Lyceum Rotterdam (GLR), the largest specialised vocational college in the field of media, design and technique in the Netherlands, as an instructor. Starting at the bottom rung in the teaching profession at this level I’ll also finally start work towards my college degree, something I foolishly skipped when I was younger and a whole lot dumber more inexperienced. Loads of work, new experiences and without doubt countless gaffs and blunders await me, but I am very, very, very excited to finally get to be a teacher after all. I love teaching, and pray that I can live up to the expectations. I will absolutely give it my best.

The site uses a basic blogzine format and will contain articles on PHP, XHTML/CSS, and basically anything to do with web development and design I come up with.

I do realise that I have published on this subject here before, but this blog is moving more towards general IT infrastructure business and a lot of personal stuff, so I thought it’d be a fun idea to build a blog separately just for web work.

The content is somewhat limited right now, but will steadily grow as time goes on. Why not have a browse?

# Set the field separator to a line break to correctly process VM names with spaces
OLDIFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'

# Read the list of VMs
VMLIST=`/usr/bin/vmware-cmd -l`

# Cycle through the list of VMs
for VM in $VMLIST
do

  # Read the power state of the VM
  VMSTATE=`/usr/bin/vmware-cmd "$VM" getstate -q`

  # If the VM is powered on, try a soft stop
  if [ "$VMSTATE" == "on" ]
  then
    /usr/bin/vmware-cmd "$VM" stop trysoft

    # Wait a bit for the command to process before moving on
    sleep 5
  fi
done

# Wait for 2 minutes to give the VMs time to shut down
sleep 120

# Read the list of VMs again (to account for possibly moved VMs)
VMLIST=`/usr/bin/vmware-cmd -l`

# Cycle through the list of VMs
for VM in $VMLIST
do

  # Read the power state of the VM
  VMSTATE=`/usr/bin/vmware-cmd "$VM" getstate -q`

  # If the VM is powered on, try a hard stop (poweroff)
  if [ "$VMSTATE" == "on" ]
  then
    /usr/bin/vmware-cmd "$VM" stop hard

    # Wait a bit for the command to process before moving on
    sleep 5
  fi
done

# Reset the field separator to its old value
IFS=$OLDIFS

My favorite two places for watching presenters at work are TED and Ignite.

TED is a non-profit organisation dedicated to spread “ideas worth spreading”, which is very, very broad but their conferences host some of the best and most original minds (and speakers) on the planet. Their basic format is a talk of no more than 18 minutes, sometimes shorter, on original ideas and experiences that help and inspire others. Some deep, some awe-inspiring and some funny, the site has a shedload of different presentations available unde a CC license, so share and enjoy.

Ignite‘s formula is somewhat different: Ignite organises geek events in over 100 cities worldwide, where speakers get 5 minutes to talk on their professions or passions and show 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds, which makes for very concise and quite lively presentations (their tagline: “Enlighten us, but make it quick”).

Granted, not all the speakers on TED or Ignite are brilliant or well-versed in the Art of Gab (or public speaking to you and me), but there are some great gems in there.

The attached ZIP file includes three files:

An example from the past: I’d been managing Windows networks and servers since 1995-ish but never got any sort of certification, until I got my MCSA and MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator and -Engineer respectively) in 2002, basically because my employer demanded it of me. Not a problem, hit the books at home, do some test exams followed by the actual exam and hey presto, certified. In 2007 my current employer asked me to upgrade my Windows 2000 MCSA and MCSE to Windows 2003. Once again, books – test exam – exam – bingo.
In both of these cases the books and exams tought me nothing new, nor showed me any aspect of the OS and its functions that surprised me or that I hadn’t worked with before, so the certifications at the time felt like ‘an extra piece of paper’.

The big question that arises of course is: are these certifications of any real use? In my opinion, if the exams (or the books prepping you for the exams) teach you anything really new you’re not really ready to be a certified anything. On the other hand, if it’s all easy and old hat for you, what is the point of getting the certification aside from adding to your C.V., as you’re already fully versed in the actual subject matter?
Most of the time IT geeks must pass certain exams to keep their employers on a certain partnership level with the company in question, for example Microsoft demands (among other things) a certain number of certified engineers at a company for them to accept your company as a “Microsoft Certified Partner” at any particular level (which, to be honest, does have some advantages such as access to NFR software to play around with, extra internal-use licenses, some business tools for selling and marketing their stuff and of course a slightly lower purchase price for their products, increasing revenue).

All well and good, but what’s in it for me? Do my certifications really make my C.V. stand out in the crowd when looking for a job? Or is it just a minimum-level-marker so the prospective employer is assured he’s not getting a complete dolt? I personally think it depends on the actual certifications, and (prospective) employers should be aware of what is actually demanded from people to get certain certifications. Example: Microsoft’s MCSA, and in some cases MCSE, exams could have been passed by someone with a good memory for test questions but with no actual work experience with the prodcuts, whereas Cisco’s exams try to weed out the ‘book smart’ people by posing actual issues to solve. Thus, just relying on a person’s list of acronyms is not enough, you do have to invest some time in figuring out what the certifications really mean, and in any case: there is never any substitution for actual work experience.

For me, I’ll probably stick with the way I’ve been doing it now. Really get to know the products and technologies I work with, and take the exam when I feel comfortable I could pass it without opening a single book beforehand, with the possible exception of an exam guide to prep me for the exam itself.

Here’s a quick tip to keep an eye on the snapshot deletion: Once you’ve given the command to delete a snapshot, go to the CLI (i.e.: log in to the ESX server that the VM is on), then cd to the directory where the VM is located:

cd /vmfs/volumes/DatastoreName/VMname

Once in the directory use the command:

file *

This will give you an extended list of the files in that directory. The files that the snapshot process is working on will be listed as ‘can’t read ‘diskfilename.vmdk’ (Device or resource busy)‘. Now you can check that these are both the snapshots and the main disks that the snapshot data is to be committed to. To see if the process is actually writing to the target disk file, just ls it every so often and keen an eye on the date and time, it should update to indicate that the disk image is being written to.

A short example: Say the VM is called ‘VMSERVER01′ and it’s on a datastore called ‘SANvolume1′. You use the Snapshot Manager in the VI Client to delete a snapshot, then SSH to the ESX server.

cd /vmfs/volumes/SANvolume1/VMSERVER01
file *

The result would look something like this:

VMSERVER01-flat.vmdk: can't read 'VMSERVER01-flat.vmdk' (Device or resource busy).
VMSERVER01.vmdk: ASCII English text
VMSERVER01-d1e733fe.hlog: ASCII text
VMSERVER01-d1e733fe.vswp: empty
VMSERVER01-000001-delta.vmdk: can't read 'VMSERVER01-000001-delta.vmdk' (Device or resource busy).
VMSERVER01-000001.vmdk: ASCII English text
VMSERVER01.nvram: VMware nvram
VMSERVER01.vmsd: ASCII text
VMSERVER01.vmx: a /usr/bin/vmware script text executable
VMSERVER01.vmxf: XML document text
vmware.log: ASCII C++ program text, with very long lines

This shows you that the server is busy committing the data from the snapshot file (VMSERVER01-000001-delta.vmdk) to the main disk file (VMSERVER01-flat.vmdk). Now you know which disk file should be the one being written to so you can just use ls every once in a while, while the server is still busily chewing on the snapshot, to see the time on the main disk file change to confirm that is is still being written to:

ls -l VMSERVER01-flat.vmdk

Every once in a while also run the file command again to se whether or not the snapshot files have disappeared, confirming that the snapshot has indeed been deleted.

Hope this helps, it did for me