Month: September 2009

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Linksys WAP54G died after 10 months.

I bought my first wireless access point a few years ago – a Linksys WAP54G (v 1.0). It lasted 2-3 years. When it died I bought another WAP54G – version 3.1. This one just died tonight. I was sitting here and I noticed that the wireless was down. I moved the plug to another outlet and it came back up for about 20 minutes. It’s now completely dead. I bought this one on 12/3/08 from Amazon and it died on 9/28/09. What a piece of crap. Guess I’m done with Linksys now. For $65 it should last longer than 10 months.

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More fun with ovftool

I tried restoring my .ova into vCenter and it failed. It said something like “Device ‘virtual disk’ uses a controller that is not supported. this is a general limitation of the virtual hardware version.” This kind of pissed me off, especially when I couldn’t really find anything in Google about what the error meant, but it turned out to be pretty easy to fix – I just clicked “upgrade virtual hardware” in VMWare Server to upgrade the hardware version from 4 to 7. I then created another .ova, uploaded it to the datacenter and successfully deployed it in vCenter in its own resource pool. Yay!

I think the real problem was that some of our VMs were created with the BusLogic driver rather than the LSI Logic driver (which is recommended for Linux guests).

Ovftool also turned out to be a pretty sweet way to backup VMs. Once in .ova format you can use ovftool to convert back to .vmx just by specifying the .ova file as the source and something .vmx as the target. Because it so nicely shrinks the .vmdk (my 20 gig VM became a 2.5 gig .ova) and is pretty quick to run (seemed like < 10 minutes per 20-gig VM) it seems like a decent choice for backing up VMs.