Creating Shortcuts With Different Icons for Multiple rdesktop Connections

We use rdesktop to run those few programs that we can't run on Linux on a Windows Remote Desktop Server. I like to make launchers for these, so they seem more like real applications for users. Unfortunately, when you have several rdesktop (or Wine, Java, etc.) applications, and assign an icon to them, it will choose only one icon to display in the launcher in Unity/Ubuntu. This is how you fix that.

Simple Linux Server Backups

If there is one thing I like to do it is to make my job as easy as possible. I've developed an easy method for backing up Linux servers and just thought I'd share it to help with any new Linux admins.

Running fsck on a Truecrypt Volume

We use an external hard drive encrypted with Truecrypt for backups, and I always forget how to run fsck on it, so I'm just going to document it here. It is actually really simple to do from a Linux terminal.

Error When Promoting DRBD Primary

I was having some issues today setting up DRBD on some new SANs. When I would try and promote one of the SANs to primary using this command:

sudo drbdadm -f primary r0

I would get this error:

0: State change failed: (-2) Need access to UpToDate data
Command 'drbdsetup 0 primary' terminated with exit code 17

Getting Shutdown/Reboot to Work in KVM/QEMU

I was having trouble getting shutdown/reboot in virt-manager to work with KVM/QEMU. I had to do a Force Off, which is basically like pulling the plug. It's actually pretty easy to fix.

Setting Up a Bridged Network Interface for KVM in Ubuntu

The process for setting up a network bridge for KVM in Ubuntu is actually fairly simple. For the purposes of this demo, we will assume that you already have KVM/QEMU installed from the Ubuntu Repos and that you are not using Network Manager. If you are using Network Manager, you must disable it prior to following these instructions. I am using  Ubuntu Server 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot), but this should work for 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) and 11.04 (Natty Narwhal).

check_esx3 error "Permission to perform this operation was denied"

Today I was setting up VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi 5.0) on a new server. Since I'm on the Kool-aid, the first thing I do when setting up a server is getting some kind of Nagios monitoring going. For several years, on ESXi servers, I have been using op5's check_esx3 plugin. Today was the first time I had set up an ESXi 5.0 server though, and when I first ran it after creating my Nagios user in ESXi I got the following error:

Permission to perform this operation was denied