This is a well thought out post regarding "Assault Weapons" bans:

Why Not Renew The Assault Weapons Ban? Well I'll Tell You

Here I am, at the 11th hour scrambling to pack to go to VMworld 2010 in San Francisco tomorrow! It has been an extremely busy week but I am so pumped at the opportunity to go! I have to thank Stephen Foskett over at GestaltIT.com and John Troyer for making it possible for me to attend!

I am looking forward to actually meeting and putting a face to the tweets and blogs that I have followed for so long!  I've got my netbook and my Droid X, and am ready to soak up the labs and sessions!

Building an installable ESXi USB drive

On a recent project, I had to install ESXi onto an HP DL380 G6.  This chassis is decidedly non-optical drive friendly, as previous chassis would allow you to just snap a DVD drive into it.  The G6 now requires you to disassemble a fair portion of it to install a drive.  I had 140 servers to do, so installing DVD drives wasn’t an option (plus it saved me $14,000 in my budget).  So, after fiddling around a bit, this is what I came up with. 

All you need for an ESXi install is:

A thumb drive of at least 512 megabytes
A copy of UNetbootin
The ISO for ESXi

Download UNetbootin for Windows.  I had used v3.77 originally, and it looks like it is up to v4.71 now.


Run UNetbootin.  Check off Distribution, and select FreeBSD from the dropdown.  For version, select 7.0.  Under Type, select USB Drive, and the current Drive letter of your USB drive.  Click OK.


UNetbootin will them go out to Sourceforge.net and grab the needed files from the FreeBSD ISO.


UNetbootin will then go about its business extracting the files and installing the Bootloader.  Click Exit.


Now, copy the files from the ISO image onto the USB drive.  I like to use WinRAR.


Now, rename the original syslinux.cfg to something else, like syslinux.cfg.esxi, and make a copy of the ISOLINUX.CFG file as syslinux.cfg in its place.

Plug in the drive, make sure the server is set to boot from USB, and away you go!

So, What’s up with that title?

It was very, very late at night.  Hours before I had read an article about how you should stake your internet brand and control what Google has to say about you.  Seemed like a good idea, so after some googling I had picked up a vanity domain, grabbed all of the com, net, org and info variations and decided to try a free blog with Google. 

 

After setting everything up, I hit the wall … what to name the blog?  I knew that the blog would be about technology and virtualization, but I could not come up with a good name!  As I checked a large number of random blogs, I realized I was not the only person with this issue.  So, I just typed in ‘Some Clever Title Goes Here’ as a placeholder, and headed for bed.

 

Most of my friends who checked out my blog thought the name was pretty funny, so I thought I would stick with it for a while.  I was having some personal business cards made up, so I incorporated the name into the card:

9 out of 10 people I’ve given the card to have loved it!  Every so often someone looks puzzled as they read it, but most laugh and make a comment about it.  For networking, it has been a great icebreaker!  It gives both parties something in common (humor) and lends itself to further conversation!