I needed to use an Apple Time Capsule (actually backing up our home Macs) to share some files. The issue here is that Time Machine (OSX’s backup program) might use up all the space on the disk: there is no way to tell Time Machine to stop at a certain quota. Workarounds are known like [...]

I had some time to finally test JoliCloud, the Netbook OS that promises seamless integration between end-user and… Guess who? The Cloud. JoliCloud is a decent attempt to void the space between desktop computing and online applications and it does it pretty efficiently despite some quirks I am going to mention later. JoliCloud tries hard [...]

VMware VCB works by creating snapshots of VMs in quiescing state. If, while attempting to backup a VM, the following error shows up: ..  ‘vcbMounter’ 3076465472 error] Error: Backup snapshot already exists. ..  ‘vcbMounter’ 3076465472 error] An error occurred, cleaning up… There are probably some hanging snapshots of the VM that need to go. It [...]

Cannot Power xxxx. host on: Invalid virtual machine configuration. This error is a nice “catch all” and leads to configuration files corruption, improper snapshotting of VMs and other horror stories. My case is just one of “administration sloppiness”.. Indeed it’s worth to be mentioned to avoid some body’s else scratch their heads and think being [...]

Sometimes you just want to prove yourself it might work. Just that. While configuring two Solaris nodes to build a “sort of a cluster” (we called it “Moulinette”, the name should say all), I figured out how to avoid the unbearably slow Solaris 10 install: my imaginative solution is: create a ZFS mirrored pool on [...]