dlamblin's questions

Specifically I'm trying to track a portable device by MAC; it may be participating in either an open 802.11b network or one with WPA. Is it possible to monitor these networks for the presence of the device? What software would be recommended in this application?

Alternatively the device has an open bluetooth ID. Here the range is a bigger issue; Is there some portable way of scanning for the name or mac of the bluetooth and would it be advisable to attempt this as opposed to the 802.11 scanning?

EDIT: What if I didn't join the networks in question?

If you're not running your own dns server (or if you must run your own to do this assume you are) how would you measure how many DNS queries per second you get for your domain?
Is there anyway to tell if a web request came using your DNS server as the authoritative source or a cached result?

The idea is to be able to tell if you are adequately able to meet demand with your existing DNS server.

Whether I get prompted for a password or not, it hangs between accepting the authentication and executing what I asked for. In other words sudo ls will hang for about 60 seconds.

I'm confused about what might be causing this. This is on Centos 5, and I've looked at selinux and set it both to disabled and enabled, but it doesn't seem to have any effect.

Has anyone had a case where connecting to the ESX HyperVisor with VMWare Infrastructure Client would time out, despite the valid credentials being given? The message I received was: response from HOSTNAME timed out.

On the box, two of three VMWare Images had stopped responding to pings, and inspecting the logs showed that apache 2.2 httpd had segfaulted all it's child processes (it was running Drupal 6) the other image was running MySql, which again wasn't responding. Only a reverse proxy image was still running and responding to pings and http requests (503s).

Being unable to connect to the VMW ESX console, we ended up having to hard reboot the machine, which when it came up had the 2 images that had not been responding in a stopped state that should have started automatically but didn't.

All of this was very frustrating, and actually leads to two questions, first does this mean something is wrong with ESX and how could it be prevented? second why would httpd have segfaulted (is it because of something that occurred in ESX?) and the separate mysql machine have gone down as well (or did that cause the http segfault)?

I was trying to shrink a vmdk (VMWare disk image) file to be as small as possible, and found two recommendations. The first is to cat /dev/zero into the fs then delete it, and run VMWare tools' shrink. This works okay. The second is to copy everything into a new vmdk. I went the second route. I did not use dd because I actaully want to use as few blocks as possible, instead of having a block-by-clok copy. Any unlinked files will still have blocks that aren't zeroed out. Secondly the centos image was mostly lvm, except for the boot partition, and my target was going to be 4gb instead of 8gb.

I did use dd for the first 40mb to get the boot blocks and partition copied. I then used parted to create an identical primary boot, and smaller primary lvm. Then I used pvcreate on that device sdb2, vgcreate, and lvcreate to create a root and swap. I used mkfs.ext3fs on the root partition and then rsync -av / /2root excluding /proc /sys /2root /dev. So far everything went fine.

My problem is that:

1. The result is 2.7 GB while the source was 2.1 GB. This is weird to me.
2. The second vgroup is called VolGroup01, while the original was called VolGroup00.

How can I rename the VolGroup01 to VolGroup00 and swap it out after all this?

I don't know how many people are familiar with fon (this is totally not a plug, because it basically doesn't work ever) but I've been using a WRT54G router from fon with the final fon firmware for 4 years now, and a Fonera (1) for 3 years. I never used to get anyone using my Fon router, and I thought the Fonera would solve this, as it auto updates itself and apparently there were quirks frequently.

My fonera has never had a paying user nor a free user, but it's not because people don't connect to it. I've tried connecting to it myself, and the problem seems to be that the DHCP server is acting badly. Shortly after my first request and redirection, I get messages like:

IP 192.168.187.71 is in use by 00:0c:29:mac:address.

But my wireless mac address is 00:25:00:something. Does this happen to anyone else? How would I solve this issue?

Perhaps there's a way I could use a custom OpenWRT firmware to enable people to use my fon gateway while retaining better control over the actual behavior. This is something I'd love to have working right.

I know it'd likely be more cost effective to buy a new system with AMD-V or Intel VT-x, but to prove it, I need to know if there are any 939 socket chips that feature AMD-V and if so what they are. This would allow one to run a windows server guest under Xen.

Update
This question will likely be of little use three years on, when you can't even reliably buy 393 socket chips. But I thought I'd mention that yes, the context was that I owned a socket 939 system and wanted to start running linux primarily with a Xen guest hosted Windows. For that I needed AMD-V, but it language on AMD's site was that all their chps support it, which it's clear from these answers that "ALL" wasn't including 939 chips.

I've gotten quite used to typing compmgnt.msc or similar commands to bring up certain dialogs faster than it would take me to navigate to them. For this one in particular I just tap Start then r enter c o down-arrow enter. There's others I use too, but I wish there were a centralized compendium of commands for the like this for the command line or run... field. At least for Windows Sever 2003. And it certainly would be nice if it were a brief but complete description in the table/list that was searchable or filterable.

Has anyone seen a list like this that you could link to in your answer? Perhaps with a sample in the answer of what it would describe compmgngt.msc as for find usage.

(Aside (not part of the question) by find I mean whatever you use to jump through a long webpage. For me it's Control-F, but I'm trying not to exclude people who'd use F3 or '/' or Alt-E-F or any method not called find etc etc. depending on your browser.)