Welcome to the blog of mechanised.com

This blog is mainly a technical repository of information on Virtualisation tools and management for our hosting service.

Also for HP's Bladesystem that we use at both our datacentres.

Other articles are also included on .Net development and MS SQL Server as well as other interesting things we come across.

Tuesday 27 July 2010

Open excel 2007 docs in multiple windows

Remove Excel 2007 annoying you by opening multiple xls files in the same window, this will open a separate instance when you double click an xls file.

My Computer
Tools
Folder Options
File Types
Choose XLS (or XLSX if you want)
Go to Advanced

Uncheck "browse in same window" in advanced window.

Then highlight Open
Edit

Make sure in the Action box it says &Open

Copy the following and paste into "application used to perform action":

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE12\EXCEL.EXE" "%1"

Check the box next to use DDE

Remove anything that is in DDE Message box and DDE Application Not Running box.

Make sure the application box says: EXCEL

And in the Topic box it says: System

Monday 19 July 2010

Quick fix for tables marked as crashed in MySQL

First off stop the MySQL database server:
/etc/init.d/mysql stop or service mysql stop
Go into the directory where the tables are stored:
cd /var/lib/mysql
Check each database for errors:
myisamchk -cs a*/*.MYI
If errors found then run the fix:
myisamchk -r a*/*.MYI
Once all checked and repaired, restart the service:
/etc/init.d/mysql start or service mysql start

Wednesday 14 July 2010

Installing VMWare open tools on RHEL5/Centos5

To install the latest VMWare open tools for RHEL5 or Centos5, first create a new file:
/etc/yum.repos.d/vmware-tools.repo
And put this in it:
[vmware-tools]
name=VMware Tools for Red Hat Enterprise Linux $releasever - $basearch
baseurl=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/[esx-version]/rhel5/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-KEY.pub
Replace [esx-version] with 3.5u2, 3.5u3, 3.5u4, 3.5u5, 4.0, 4.0u1, 4.0u2, or 4.1, depending on the ESX/ESXi version.

Then use yum to install the server version, as no gui tools needed.
yum install vmware-tools-nox
Verify installation by:
service vmware-tools status
Should be shown as running, if not then use same command above but 'start' instead of 'status'

You should be able to see for the guest that VMWare tools is shown as 'Unmanaged' so tools will need to be updated on each guest manually.