Putty – Terminal “halts/freezes” after CTRL+S

Did you ever work with vi/nano (whatever)  and wanted to save a file?
If you are not that hardcore a linux person who does everything on a terminal and also works with Windows, you know that it is always a good idea to press CTRL+S once in a while to save your progress.

I press this shortcut automatically and it even happens to me while working on a putty session, which results in a “freezed” terminal session.
The reason for this behavior is that ctrl+s sends “XOFF” and putty stopps displaying any output, but still accepts keystrokes.

But its also easy to disable XOFF again – just press CTRL+Q and putty will continue to show your output on the screen. 🙂

VMware JRE update fails

While I was trying to update a VMware vCenter 6 to 6u1 today I had the problem, that the upgrade failed permanently, because of the following error:
Installation of component VMware JRE standalone installer failed with error code ‘3010’. Check the logs for more details.

 

Searching on the net did not bring up any results regarding this error, so I had to debug it myself. I tried to call the vmware-jre.msi directly from the DVD-ISO, and at first it seemd to run through, but, after some minutes of waiting, the MSI opened a pop up and asked for the installation-CD for vmware-jre.msi. It seemd that the new MSI wanted to uninstall the old msi-package and when trying to uninstall the old package the problem with the installation-media-dialoge popped up.

Trying to install the old version from the already installed vCenter also ended up in asking for an installation media.

At the end I started an administrative cmd-window and ran “msiexec /uninstall vmware-jre.msi” which uninstalled the old JRE and afterwards an update-process of the vCenter was possible.

Dump from the Error-Log:

 

[pastacode lang=”bash” message=”VMware JRE – Installation – Error log” highlight=”” provider=”manual”]

Stage: install stage: install-packages / vmware-jre.msi
2015-12-17 13:53:07.820Z| vcsInstUtil-3018519| I: LaunchPkgMgr: Telling child to install "X:\vCenter-Server\Packages\vmware-jre.msi" with "INSTALLPATH="C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\" VM_UPDATE=1" details 0
2015-12-17 13:53:07.820Z| vcsInstUtil-3018519| I: wWinMain: Exe is told to run "X:\vCenter-Server\Packages\vmware-jre.msi" with "INSTALLPATH="C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\" VM_UPDATE=1" details 0
2015-12-17 13:53:18.882Z| vcsInstUtil-3018519| E: wWinMain: MSI result of install of "X:\vCenter-Server\Packages\vmware-jre.msi" may have failed: 3010 (0x00000bc2)
2015-12-17 13:53:18.882Z| vcsInstUtil-3018519| E: LaunchPkgMgr: Operation on vmware-jre.msi appears to have failed: 3010 (0x00000bc2)
2015-12-17 13:53:18.882Z| vcsInstUtil-3018519| I: PitCA_MessageBox: Displaying message: "Installation of component VMware JRE standalone installer failed with error code '3010'. Check the logs for more details."
2015-12-17 13:59:25.191Z| vcsInstUtil-3018519| I: LaunchPkgMgr: Telling child to revert transaction

[/pastacode]

UPDATE:
The MSI-packages are located on the vCenter installation disk. The iso can be downloaded from: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?productId=491&downloadGroup=VC600U1 (VMware Account needed)
Once the ISO is downloaded it can be mounted/opened (eg. 7zip) and the MSI-Packages are located at: \vCenter-Server\Packages\

vCetnerDiskContent

Mounting the ISO and chaning with an administrative commandline to the above path is the easiest way to uninstall the file. Otherwise the DVD-content could also be extracted to any directory.

Zabbix interface status – Error reset procedure

Zabbix is quite cool, but there are still some minor problems which make life a littel bit harder (or just do not look too good).

One of this little bugs it, that if you add the wrong interface to your host and try to query it (and an error is returend) – results in an red icon for the corresponding intrface in the hosts-overview.

zbx-if-error

The only way (I know) to reset those interface is to delete the host and create it new, or the easier way would be to clone the host and delte the old one. To be honest – I don’t like any of those two possiblities, so i decided to find another way.

As a matter of fact, the info is stored in the database so we could reset the icon in the DB:  herefor we need to log in to the database and find the correct table. I assume you know hot wo log in to your DB 😉
The table which stores the infor about the interfaces would be the “hosts”-table. Ths table contains a column called “available” which indicates the interface status. For the zabbix agent it’s just called available, for snmp, ipmi, jmx, you alway the the type as a prefix – so snmp: snmp_available. the column stores an integer from 0 to 3 with:
0=if not in use (gray)
1=if in use and everything is fine =green
2=if in use and an error occured=red
so by updating the DB-entry we could reset the icon-indicator for a specific host.

UPDATE hosts SET available=0 WHERE hostid=12345;

… would set the icon for the Agent to gray for the host 12345. The host-id could be obtained by hovering over the link to the host or opening the host and afertwards it’s displayed in the address bar.

 

 

VMware 6.0 vCenter Webclient blank section in the middle (blank middle frame) – VSAN Health Plugin

It seems that the VSAN Health Plugin could break the vCenter webclient if it’s not installed correctly. After installing the MSI-Packge on the Windows vCenter server and logging in via the web client everything seemed ok at the begining, but after selectin the datacenter, a cluster or a host/vm the middle section whoich sould display dietalled informatons about the selected property did not load and stayed blank.

After some searching I found an interssting VMware KB-article which described my problem. My vCenter looked like the screenshoot in the below article.

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/510468?start=0&tstart=0

It seems that I made the mistake and installed the VSAN health plugin as a domain admin – and that just does not work.  After uninstalling the plugin, restarting the vCenter, logging in as a local admin, starting a command prompt with admin priviliged and restarting the installation again, it woked fine.

 

BTW. in the new VSAN health plugin releases VMware fixed the DRS-dependency and now its possible to also install the plugin without activated DRS.  🙂

Before you had to install the Plugin while your system had the evaluation licens where you could activate DRS. If you use a license like  Essentials Plus + VSAN that could be a real problem.