Sunday 18 July 2010

Can't Run VMWare Server 2 Management Interface

I filled the disk on my VMWare Server 2 host, which caused all sorts of grief. Part of the grief was that I couldn't get to the management interface at https://vmhost:8333/ui. I solved that problem by killing the VMWare hostd process (after freeing up some space on the disk):
  1. Look up the process ID: ps -ea | grep hostd
  2. Kill the process: sudo kill pid 
  3. Remove the old lock file: sudo rm /var/run/vmware/vmware-hostd.PID
  4. Restart VMWare management: sudo /etc/init.d/vmware-mgmt restart

Saturday 17 July 2010

Why Can't We All Be Nice to Each Other

Wouldn't technical forums, technical blogs, etc. be nicer to read if people restricted their value judgements and opinions to their own behaviour, rather than other people's behaviour? Doing so might eliminate a lot of unnecessary flaming.

To be really clear, I'm not saying there's no place for opinions on the Internet. I'm just saying technical forums aren't the place for me to express my opinions about what someone else is doing. If someone wants help with an old version of the Linux kernel, I should either help or shut up. There's no need for me to give my own opinions on the wisdom of using old kernels.

Wednesday 7 July 2010

Scanning with Ubuntu 10.04

I have an HP CM1312nfi MFP multi-function colour printer, fax and scanner. xsane worked fine in 9.04. The first time I tried to scan after upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 it didn't work anymore. (Breaking it may have been something I did, rather than the upgrade itself.)

First xsane told me that it couldn't find any devices. I reinstalled all the hplip and xsane packages, and that got me a message that xsane couldn't open the device -- giving a name that was obvious that it knew about my scanner.

I found a message in /var/log/syslog that xsane couldn't find the file "/usr/share/hplip/scan/plugins/bb_soapht.so". So I ran:
sudo hp-plugin
and answered the question about license. Then xsane (and the new Simple Scan) worked.