admin's blog

So, I've been trying out various virtualisation options on an old Dell 9150 tower I have. Firstly I tried VmWare ESXi which was ok but didn't support software RAID on the disks. So I got an Adaptec 3405 hardware RAID card off Ebay which was apparently supported by ESXi. Which it was except for the fact that there was no support for any monitoring at all. Essentially if you lost a disk the only way you'd know is by watching the console on a reboot.

Since moving up to Fedora 12 (and now 13) on my main dev server I have been struggling for months with trying to get vmware server working on it with no joy for one reason or another. Today I think I have finally cracked it!

I've long been a fan of site specific apache config files for virtual hosts. Well today I learned something very useful.

I'm always forgetting how to do what with ffmpeg. This (http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/19-ffmpeg-commands-for-all-needs) is a really handy summary.

I have had problems before with the ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.org/) libraries assuming that file descriptor 2 is standard error, causing all sorts of strange errors when actually it is pointing to something else. In my case it was in use as mapped memory so ffmpeg ended up writing diagnostic messages directly over my memory blocks.