Aaron K's questions

So from my understanding, VMWare can let various VM's have shares, reservations, and limits on how much CPU they get. My question is, how does this actually work on the host server CPU?

For example, there is a VM Server X, which has a single 1 GHz CPU. Now it is running two VM's A and B. A is given 300 MHz and B is given 700 MHz. How does the base Server X CPU actually share the Hz processing power? Does it time share the CPU much like an OS task thread? Or can it actually split the power concurrently?

So I have a Windows XP SP 3 machine which is running Outlook 2007. When I search in Outlook for an email that exists using a basic keyword, like say "MySQL", I get no results. However, Outlook gives me the following message:

Search results may be incomplete because items are still being indexed. Click here for more details.

When I click, I get the following:

Outlook is currently indexing your items.
Search results may be incomplete because items are still being indexed.
8783 items remaining in "Mailbox - USER"
8812 items remaining across all open mailboxes.

The thing is, these are the numbers it has been reporting for several days, and Outlook is open for 8 hours a day. It does not seem like the index is working. As best I can tell, the index seemed to stop about 3 weeks ago.

How can I force Outlook 2007 to re-index everything and start working properly again?

I have some software running on a Windows virtual machine. I am using VMWare as the virtualization technology. The problem comes in with the software's activation / registration. The company who created the software is using the machine's MAC address to uniquely identify the machine during the process.

Whenever I reboot the VM image I get a new dynamic MAC address, which then causes the software to de-activate itself. Is there a way I can setup the VM image so that it will always use the same static MAC address?

I hear that you can now create soft links in Vista too. So, what is the difference between a soft (symbolic) link and a hard link on UNIX/Linux/Vista?

Are there advantages of using one over the other? Or do they just serve two distinct purposes?

What is the sticky bit in a UNIX file system?

As an admin when and how would you use it?

This question may vary between distros but, in general, what are the advantages/disadvantages of using a hard or soft mount in the UNIX world?

Are there certain situations where one is more beneficial or are the uses fairly universal?

I have a relatively small home Red Hat Linux server (about 8 GB RAM). I don't use it for much other than running some home grown apps to keep track of various things. The only real things running on the box are a database and a web server.

I've noticed that when checking system counters using tools like NMON and TOP that the total system free memory is relatively low (on the order of a few hundred MB), while the active memory for the database and web server is still low (only consuming a combined 3 GB). Even when including all other running processes the total consumed memory is less than 4 GB.

Why does Red Hat Linux report less free memory than the total memory minus the sum total of used memory of running processes?