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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘*nix-tools’ Category

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When Ctrl-Alt-Del fails on Linux: Fix a Frozen System with the Magic SysRq Keys (via FOSSwire)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/04/26

Ctrl-Alt-Del will not safely reboot all systems under all circumstances.

If you run Linux, your keyboard has a magic RysRq key (sometimes not marked, but its the same key as the Print-Scrn key) and the Linux kernel is still running not all is lost.

Due to link rot, the archived links are the most recent that have all the comments for [Wayback/Archive] Fix a Frozen System with the Magic SysRq Keys | FOSSwire which amend

You finally got your Linux environment to crash. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace does nothing, nor do the F-keys. You know you shouldn’t have installed that bad driver, but you did it anyway.
So you reach for the power button.
Stop.
Mashing in the power button to reboot could cause a problem if your hard drive is still being written to, and usually causes more problems than it solves. The Linux kernel includes a secret method of restarting your PC should it ever stop doing its job.
  1. Hold down the Alt and SysRq (Print Screen) keys.
  2. While holding those down, type the following in order. Nothing will appear to happen until the last letter is pressed: REISUB
  3. Watch your computer reboot magically.

This 2007 comment makes it easier to remember: REISUB is the reverse of BUSIER:

R E I S U B – is just the word busier in reverse.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Hardware, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, KVM keyboard/video/mouse, LifeHacker, Linux, Power User | Leave a Comment »

Some links to investigate a Raspberry Pi system failing on an SD card that got bad

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/03/22

–jeroen

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Development, Hardware Development, Power User, Raspberry Pi | Leave a Comment »

ShellCheck – shell script analysis tool

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/02/22

Cool: [Wayback] ShellCheck – shell script analysis tool

ShellCheck finds bugs in your shell scripts

It needs a shebang at the start of a script (like #!/usr/bin/env bash) to recognise the kind of shell, then does amazing analysis.

It is open source at [Wayback/Archive.is] koalaman/shellcheck: ShellCheck, a static analysis tool for shell scripts with excellent documentation including explaining screenshots like

It’s not just available on-line or on the command-line, but also integrates with many code editors (like [Wayback/Archive.is] ShellCheck – Visual Studio Marketplace: Integrates ShellCheck into VS Code, a linter for Shell scripts.) and CI/CD pipelines.

Via: [Wayback] bash – error conditional binary operator expected in compound branch – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange (thanks [Wayback] Cyrus!)

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ash/dash, ash/dash development, bash, bash, Development, Power User, Scripting, Software Development | Leave a Comment »

Preventing to eject/unmount a MacOS drive (opposite of figuring out what prevents the unmount)

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/02/01

Not long after Figuring out which processes are preventing to eject/unmount my MacOS Time Machine backup USB drive, I wanted to do the opposite: prevent /Volumes/Sandisk1TB from being ejected, as this is the “built-in” MicroSD card I use to store large or infrequently used files on (ISO and other disk images, drivers, hardware and software documentation, stuff to be installed on a fresh machine).

The opposite is straightforward: have a process keep at least one handle open on the Volume as per [Wayback] macos – How do I not accidentally eject external drives? – Ask Different (thanks [Wayback] kLy, [Wayback] dan and [Wayback] gerlos):

If your important external drive is mounted on the following mount point:

/Volumes/important_disk

Then you can protect it against an accidental removal by locking this mount point as opened. For this one very simple method consists in opening Terminal and doing this basic command:

$ cd /Volumes/important_disk

To get rid of this locking, you might type within the same Terminal window:

$ cd /

or you might as well just close this Terminal window ($ exit, or ⌃+D, or ⌘+W).

…

An even more elegant way to do it is open a screen session (just type screen in Terminal) and open the mount point from that session. This way you can even close Terminal, since the session will keep running in the background, until you reattach it and stop it (so there’s no need to keep a window open if you don’t need it). I guess you can even create an Automator action for it. For tips on screen see: [Wayback] kinnetica.com/2011/05/29/using-screen-on-mac-os-x

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, screen, Terminal | Leave a Comment »

Script to rename a virtual machine in ESXi 6

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/01/10

I bumped into [Wayback/Archive] Script to rename a virtual machine in ESXi 6: gist.github.com/Gremgoll/8bd91258d71fe895c0d416e2543ca2dc.

Then I forked it with the intent to make usage more clear, as the current usage on my ESXi rig (which has mos VMs not in the root of data stores) is like the bold italic portion here:

[root@X9SRI3F-ESXi:/vmfs/volumes/608be754-f21556ad-1082-0025907d9d5c/VM] vm-rename.sh NVMe980PRO_1TB/VM X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE
VOLNAME=NVMe980PRO_1TB/VM
DIRNAME=X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE
OLDNAME=X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL
NEWNAME=X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE
VM_DIRPATH=/vmfs/volumes/NVMe980PRO_1TB/VM/X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE
NW_DIRPATH=/vmfs/volumes/NVMe980PRO_1TB/VM/X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE
Failed to rename './X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-flat.vmdk' to './X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE-flat.vmdk': The file specified is not a virtual disk (15)
renaming ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-41260b40.vmem to ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE-41260b40.vmem
renaming ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-41260b40.vmss to ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE-41260b40.vmss
renaming ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-6a4b8f29.hlog to ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE-6a4b8f29.hlog
renaming ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL.nvram to ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE.nvram
renaming ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL.vmsd to ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE.vmsd
renaming ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL.vmx to ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE.vmx
renaming ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL.vmx.backup to ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE.vmx.backup
renaming ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL.vmxf to ./X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE.vmxf
renaming ./vmx-X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-1093012288-1.vswp to ./vmx-X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE-1093012288-1.vswp
All Done. You now need to register X9SRI-3F-W10P-NL-OFFICE to the inventory.

There also was a renaming bug (see the italic line).

I managed to fix both that and added more documentation plus output.

Repositories and code

  1. Original:
  2. Fork with added VSAN functionality (see [Wayback/Archive] Revisions · Script to rename a virtual machine in ESXi 6):
  3. My fork of 2:
  4. My fix:

Code before modifying: [Wayback/Archive] gist.githubusercontent.com/jpluimers/fcc601dd41ac89f601a5174be92c841c/raw/e3683fbb6bdf1e73d65d2b784027c70cf42a5512/vm-rename

Code after modifying: [Wayback/Archive] raw.githubusercontent.com/jpluimers/vm-rename/master/vm-rename.sh.

Yes, that is not in a gist any more (see below why), it is now part of [Wayback/Archive] jpluimers/vm-rename: Script to rename a virtual machine in ESXi 6; fork from https://gist.github.com/jpluimers/fcc601dd41ac89f601a5174be92c841c as [Wayback/Archive] vm-rename/vm-rename.sh at master · jpluimers/vm-rename.

The reason was

Yesterday I described the workaround in Fork Gist to Repo on GitHub – Stack Overflow.

Queries

I found the original via [Wayback/Archive] script esxi rename vmx vmxf and related files – Google Search.

My start was [Wayback/Archive] script esxi duplicate vm and rename vmdk – Google Search which found:

  1. [Wayback/Archive] Renaming a virtual machine and its files in VMware ESXi (1029513) which has a PowerCLI script (that requires Windows to run PowerCLI on)
  2. [Wayback/Archive] Solved: How to clone a VM on a ESXI 6.5 server? – VMware Technology Network VMTN which pointed me to the next Google Search result :
  3. [Wayback/Archive] VMware esxi – Script to clone a VM without vSphere or vCenter. | GrangerX which I put in this gist:
  4. [Wayback/Archive] Script to create Linked Clones on ESXi | RedNectar’s Blog which is great, but way to complicate for my use case. It references a few other cool scripts though, and shows how to use Resource Pools in ESXi (which the Web-UI does not seem to support):
  5. [Wayback/Archive] [script] Cloning VMs using ESXi shell/admin console – Virtualizing Unraid – Unraid
  6. [Wayback/Archive] Script to clone a VM with free VMware ESXi – Rob Pomeroy (again: PowerCLI)

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, ash/dash, ash/dash development, Development, ESXi6, ESXi6.5, ESXi6.7, Power User, PowerCLI, Scripting, Software Development, Virtualization, VMware, VMware ESXi | Leave a Comment »

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