Speeddymon's questions

This is a question regarding technical feasibility, and not a real-world scenario.

The question is NOT regarding how to access the "hidden" console of the ESX/ESXi HOST OS running on the bare metal.

That being said, I'll outline this question with an example.

On Dell and HP servers, it is possible to enable SSH to the DRAC/iLO console so that you can keep logs of what transpires on those consoles respectively, provided you are either using a jump host that logs all ssh connections out, or your SAs have logging enabled in PuTTY, or whatever ssh client they are using.

The console has a separate IP from the OS (the DRAC/iLO IP usually), that is typically allocated on a non-routed subnet and VLAN.

The question I have is: Is it possible to enable this same sort of IP address assignment and ssh functionality to the console of a guest VM, provided that the guest is running some variant of unix/linux/bsd with a text console?

I did try to google for this but all of the results I got were regarding how to access (and enable) the host's text service console.

I have 3 servers configured to run syslog-ng.

We'll call the servers web, jump, and client.

Web is CentOS 6
Jump and Client are CentOS 7

Jump is an OpenVPN server
Client is an OpenVPN client
Web is on the same private network as Jump

Connectivity is working fine between all 3 servers.
I can SSH and ping directly from Client to either Jump or Web, and vice versa.

I have Syslog-NG configured on Client and Web to log to Jump, and Jump is configured to receive logs from both Web and Client on tcp port 514.

Client is able to log to Jump without issues. Web, however, does not seem to want to log to Jump.

For testing purposes, I disabled the firewall temporarily on Jump.

I also stopped syslog-ng on Web and ran it in debug mode. There were no errors related to connecting to Jump.

I also am able to telnet from Web to Jump on port 514, so I know there is no routing issue or firewall issues with it, and I know the configuration is good.

Given that the only difference between Client and Web is the OS version, is Syslog-NG in CentOS 6 just not compatible with Syslog-NG in CentOS 7? I mean has the syslog protocol changed that much that the older version of Syslog-NG won't work with the newer version?

Client: syslog-ng-3.5.6-3.el7.x86_64
Jump: syslog-ng-3.5.6-3.el7.x86_64
Web: syslog-ng-3.2.5-4.el6.x86_64

I have a RHEL5 Amazon cloud instance that I need to image to another instance in order to setup a test environment for some upcoming patching I'm doing. The server to be imaged is a production server.

The server has a single disk (xvda1, and yes the actual disk is xvda1, not xvda like it should be).

I thought I would use dd, piped to gzip, to make the image of the disk. But then I realized that there would be a problem with recursion. Because dd was reading from the disk that the gzip was being written to, the image would include a corrupted copy of the gzip file, meaning that the image itself was taking up more space than it needed to because of the partial copy of the gzip file, and thusly there would be more transfer time between the machines required.

Getting to the point, what options are there for backing up the entirety of the disk as a single block dump, the same way dd does, but that would not include the gzip file that is being written to on the same disk being read from?

Yes, I could rsync individual files, but for the purposes of this question, let's say that's not an option. Let's also say asking Amazon to add a second disk to the instance is not an option, nor are remote filesystems like NFS/SSHFS/etc, nor is LVM.

Reference:
How do I do Multihop SCP transfers?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/732039/rsyncing-files-between-two-remote-servers-get-errors-stating-rsync-command-not
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=748431

I have a situation that I really hope there is a solution for, although I've found nothing yet over the last couple of hours.

I have two servers that cannot talk to each other that I need to transfer data between. That's a fairly common situation that is easily overcome with some scp trickery. Here is the gotcha.

One server is accessed over a VPN, vpnserver the other server targetserver is accessed via a jump host jumphostserver.

I have ProxyCommand setup to allow me to proxy connections through jumphostserver to targetserver and I'm using the SSH Mux stuff (ControlMaster/ControlPersist/ControlPath) to allow connection sharing for all connections that are open.

My local machine can properly scp things between the two servers using the following command:

scp -3 vpnserver:/path/to/file targetserver:/path/to/destination

I can also rsync things directly from vpnserver to my local machine and from my local machine to targetserver (using the ssh proxy that goes through jumphostserver)

What I need to do is make my machine act as an intermediary the way that scp -3 allows it to, but do so using rsync, so that permissions, ownership, and (more importantly) the ACLs are properly copied to targetserver.

I had thought about trying to NFS export the filesystem of vpnserver and targetserver (re-exported through jumphostserver), but I don't have control over jumphostserver, only over vpnserver and targetserver.

I have a set of ESX 3.5 servers in 2 different datacenters. One is DR, one is production. They are on the same vlan and so I can access any of them on the private network from my vCenter server. Last month, as a learning experience (I hadn't dealt with ESX much before), I updated the DR server.

Other than finding out that a couple of bundles had to be installed manually in order to get the rest to install from vCenter, it went off without a hitch.

Now, I'm trying to do the same for our production servers and it is not working. I've googled around for the error I get during scan, and investigate loads of different solutions (editing the integrity file, checking DNS, etc) -- I did install the 2 bundles that had to be installed manually already -- but scan from vCenter is just not working.

Side note: I did just scan the DR server again and that scan works fine so shouldn't be a problem with vCenter that has cropped up recently -- it has to be something else.

The error I get is:

Patch metadata for (servername) missing. Please download updates metadata first.
Failed to scan (servername) for updates.

I'm all out of ideas on how to make this work, so any help would be hugely appreciated.