ESXi 5.1: vmsvc warning guestinfo RecordRoutingInfo: Unable to collect IPv4 routing table

I had the misfortune of stumbling across this in a vSphere 5.1 with RHEL 6.3.  This was just the icing on a hellish cake of fail that I inherited.

OK it wasn’t that bad and kind of an interesting problem, but definitely the last thing you want to see on a VM booting your central NFS server  after vmotion fails due to someone else’s host networking misconfiguration.  Fortunately it’s still in QA and not production, despite the over-reaching ambitions of technically illiterate management.

It turns out this had nothing to do with any IP routing table whatsoever, as I discovered when I kept experimenting with forcing static routes and triple-checked every network device and NIC that could be possibly be involved.  I thought maybe it was a kernel driver issue with vmnic, that some kind of nasty was introduced in either Red Hat’s vmware tools package or the ones vSphere uses.  After lots of tedious exploring with different combinations of kernel modules and versions of vmware tools I found nothing.

Well, thanks to the work of Chris Colotti and others, it turns out the problem is related to the default behavior of vmware tools to time sync with the host regardless of whether NTP is configured to do this in the OS, simply by renaming these files to something else:

/usr/lib/vmware-tools/plugins32/vmsvc/libtimeSync.so
/usr/lib/vmware-tools/plugins64/vmsvc/libtimeSync.so

It’s not clear exactly why it hangs yet, but the solution for now is to move the shared obj file vmware tools uses out of the way so it skips its timesync and doesn’t hang the entire boot process.  This incidentally highlights the need once again of a parallelized init process that replaces ye olde serialized init.

Run, Nick, Run.

Ryan Gallagher at the Guardian talks about RIOT, a sort of social network Fusion Center.  No surprises here.

Just in case we need to send a drone after you.

 

The U.S. military's real-time Google Street View: Airborne spy camera can track an entire city in 1,800MP | Mail Online

Reblogged from The Grey Enigma:

The incredible U.S. military spy drone that's so powerful it can see what type of phone you're carrying from 17,500ft.  The ARGUS-IS can view an area of 15 sq/miles in a single image...

• Its zoom capability can detect an object as small as 6in on the ground
• Developed by BAE as part of a $18million DARPA project
• System works by stringing together 368 digital camera chips

via The Mail Online.

Read more… 2 more words

Precognition? Intuition? The power of dreams.

Whilst engaging in a Saturday morning sleep-in, I had an interesting experience right before waking up to the FedEx deliveryman.  I was in a vivid REM-sleep dream where I had returned to my home and was on the bed reading when I realized someone was approaching.  I looked over my bed, which was on this like mesa pedestal sort of thing so I had to look down, and a car was driving up, vaguely Mustang-y sports car.

If your dreams are anything like mine, they are a bit elusive to describe, particularly more than a few minutes after waking.  It all seems so real in the dream, but out of its context, details are often difficult to describe in awake consciousness terms.

Anyway, right afterwards I heard my doorbell go off.  I’m in the dream going, uh, I think that’s real.  I should wake up… and realized that I was expecting a package delivery with a signature and sprung out of bed to answer the door.

The coincidence of the car driving up in my dream right before my package was delivered in “real life” struck me.  Did I just experience some kind of precognition?

Often I’ve experienced dreams where events in my immediate external world bleed in and influence my dream – for example, when I fall asleep in front of a TV or leave music/radio on.  This is a bit different, though.  It’s not like I could hear the guy pull up in front of the house, the way it is physically laid out.

Oh, and the deliveryman’s vehicle was a non-descript white van.

Half-human, half-neanderthal

The Daily Mail is reporting on a call put out by a Harvard professor for a surrogate mother to give birth to a human embryo injected with artificially created DNA based on genetic code found in the fossil remains of Neanderthals.

Whilst there are obvious legal, ethical and moral frontiers being pioneered here as well as biological ones, I have to admit my curiosity overrides any objection I might have to this experiment.

Naturally, the civil rights of the newborn, if successful, would be heavily debated.  I personally think that it should have full human rights with heavy advisory supervision by the scientific team behind this, assuming it wasn’t suffering heavily from its modified genetics and was being fostered by caring and competent parents.

Imagine disclosing their genetic background to it after it became conscious and intelligent enough to fathom it.

Brave new world indeed.

Aaron Swartz, co-founder of reddit, found dead! :-(

Sky news is reporting that 26-year old Aaron Swartz, who founded software company Infogami which eventually merged with reddit, was found dead of an apparent suicide.

What makes this very suspicious is that Swartz was in an on-going legal case involving the cracking of MIT’s document store JSTOR and was accused of stealing millions of documents from there. Also, he was an avid civil liberties advocate. Probably facing years in prison was too much for Swartz.

Regardless of that, it’s sad to see Swartz go. RIP. Also, . .

A great blog entry of Swartz’s (I’m glad to see someone else didn’t drink the Bay area kool-aid and hated it as well)
Lots and lots of expected reddit commentary

IPCC AR5 draft leaked, contains game-changing admission of enhanced solar forcing - as well as a lack of warming to match model projections, and reversal on 'extreme weather'

Reblogged from The Grey Enigma:

Also of note, some Swedish scientists are saying that CO2 emissions are the only thing keeping the Earth from descending into another ice age.