I’ve recently been using VMWare ESXi 5.5 in anger – with real VM’s rather than just testing shell commands. Plus it seems the last couple of versions of VirtualBox can no longer run ESXi as a guest.

Anyway, its soooo Windows-centric vendor-locked its unbelievable. I mean you can’t even load a bunch of ISO’s on a USB stick and put them in the back of the machine, you have to transfer them using the VSphere client over the network. I’ve not tried scp but I doubt that would work due to the cut-down SSH server and shell. Seems its not even called ESXi anymore, its VSphere Hypervisor or something.

Also there’s no way to find the physical network interface name/number/ID from the virtual nics! It seems VMWare assumes everyone is either using flat networks with no vlans/subnets or only use multiple interfaces for nic teaming/bonding; and have never needed to know which ethernet cable should go to which switchport and map to which network device in the VM.

The only good point is that the vmware-tools are now in some distro’s like RHEL so you don’t need to install kernel source, gcc and make to rebuild the kernel modules every time you do an upgrade.

There’s an annoying “feature” with the console – if you click on the console tab in VSphere it shows the console, but if you click the console icon, it then shows another one, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to disconnect the tab one and you get an annoying popup telling you there’s 2 connections all the time!

It still seems a bit flaky regarding screen resizing and networking, and the whole virtual switch thing is a mess as you end up having to define one switch per interface with only that interface in it if you want your guest to have multiple network cards. It seems more like a virtual router to me.

I’ve also installed a CentOS7 virtual machine, but don’t like it much, networking seems very buggy – especially the new interface naming conventions described here, and that NetworkManager doesn’t seem to track changes made with ifconfig. Systemd is a pain and I even found that rpcbind can’t be disabled using the systemdctl command, you have to symlink rpcbind.service and rpcbind.socket to /dev/null

I’ve just soldered the pins on my Arduino Pro Mini, and found its not well documented – probably because its not an official Arduino (its kind of based on the Arduino Mini) its a SparkFun board that’s been revised and cloned a lot. I finally figured out the pinout for uploading using a CP2102 – its RX-RX, TX-TX, GND-GND, 5V-VCC, DTR-DTR and don’t connect the reset pins or use resistors or capacitors as some sites say.

The Makefile for the 5V 16MHz ATmega328p board is:

BOARD_TAG    = pro5v328
MONITOR_PORT = /dev/ttyUSB0
include /usr/share/arduino/Arduino.mk

Rather annoyingly I’d soldered the rear analogue headers on before I realised that it wouldn’t fit breadboard anymore, so I’ve removed them again and may put right-angled headers on at some point. I much prefer the Nano or even Pro Micro.

I just compiled XBMC 14a4 from git and pretty much nothing seems to have changed from 13.2 other than the Kodi name. Had to disable the Google Test Framework to get it to build as its now enabled by default.

I also upgraded the blog to WordPress 4.0