A Portal to a Portal

Following on from my earlier post about improving portal startup performance, via lazy loading, one of our customers has located an almost identical mechanism to achieve a similar outcome, as documented here: -

Whilst reviewing my notes from my recent PC build, I found a scrawled error message that I was seeing not long after I first powered up the new box: -

A salutory lesson from a friend and customer of ours, Andrew Frayling, that might you avoid the recent performance challenges that he's been seeing with his implementation of WebSphere Portal: -

For some reason, my VPN connection doesn't always want to work when I wake up my Macbook, even if I wasn't  actually using it. As an example, I was working in the office today on a fixed Ethernet connection, with no need to run the VPN and the AirPort wireless adapter turned off.

I was also seeing the exception: -

Error: The virtual machine cannot be found

when using the VMRUN command ( I'm running VMware Server 2.0 on Ubuntu 9.0.4 64-bit ) as follows: -

vmrun -t server -h https://hostname.domainname.com:8333/sdk -u root -p passw0rd register "/vmwares/domino/Virtual\ Machine.vmx"

Having validated the path to the .VMX file ( /vmwares is a mount point for a 1 TB drive formatted as EXT4 ), I was also baffled.

The syntax of the VMRUN command does imply a logical/physical path to the VM: -

"[storage1] vm/myVM.vmx"

and I was missing the obvious - the phrase [storage1].

I followed the advice given here to start a VM from the Web UI and then issue the command: -

vmrun -t server -h https://hostname.domainname.com:8333/sdk -u root -p passw0rd list

which showed the running VM as: -

[VMwares on Samsung] domino/Virtual\ Machine.vmx

Once I had this ( slightly strange ) "path", I was good to go.

I can now start my VM as follows: -

vmrun -t server -h https://hostname.domainname.com:8333/sdk -u root -p passw0rd start "[VMwares on Samsung] domino/Virtual\ Machine.vmx"

and, if I want to be mean, stop it as follows: -

vmrun -t server -h https://hostname.domainname.com:8333/sdk -u root -p passw0rd stop "[VMwares on Samsung] domino/Virtual\ Machine.vmx"

Simple :-)

Thanks to the VMware Communities folks here

Had missed this Technote from earlier in the year, but it came into a client conversation about reducing the amount of portal applications being loaded when WebSphere Portal first starts up.

Following on from the experiences of Mr Scoot here, I have decided to build my first PC from scratch ( well, I'm not actually going to start soldering pins and joining up NAND gates but you get my point ).

I haven't yet placed the order, but this is what I'm considering component-wise: -










This is going to be a server rather than a gamer's rig, hence why I'm going for 8 GB RAM and 1 TB storage.

I recently found an old invoice from the mid-90s for the first full-size PC that I ever bought ( thanks, Vee Patel ) which came in at over 1.5 grand. Pentium Pro and 32 MB RAM iirc.

The new baby ? Less than five hundred notes - is that a result or what ?