I’m a bit late on posting to the blog, but I can explain! I took a vacation to Sedona, AZ last week (reason: here!) and didn’t have too much time to get online between marathon mountain-biking and hiking trips. I am planning some new posts for later this week, though.

In the mean time, I can show you a few pictures from the Sedona area. If you get a chance, definitely put this place on the list to visit. It is simply awe-inspiring!

Here’s a nice shot of the unnamed butte next to Soldier Pass that was lit with the evening sun as we climbed up to Devil’s Bridge:

(Topo map reference)

Hiking to the summit of Bear Mountain is an absolute must if you visit Sedona. This trip is the longest 5 mile hike I think I’ve ever been on. Bring tons of water and sunscreen, and make absolutely sure you follow the trail closely on the way down. Luckily, if you do get off-trail, it’s fairly easy to see where you should be going, i.e. not along the edge of Fay Canyon!

(Topo map reference)

Keep in touch,
Greg

Here’s a little trick I’ve been using for quick deployment of additional virtual disk space to the VMware VMs that comprise the SourceHosting.net service. The VMware Server installation includes the vmware-vdiskmanager tool for creating, renaming, expanding and generally messing about with virtual hard drives.

However, I don’t like running this tool to create a new 50Gb virtual disk in the middle of the day because it just slams the disk I/O channel. To get around the problem, I’ve created several disks of different sizes during off-hours and compressed them down for easy storage. Then when I need to provision a disk, I expand it, rename it and hook it to the virtual machine in Virtual Center:

So here are some compressed disk images for you (SCSI format):

• 10Gb (8391 byte download)
• 20Gb (16415 byte download)
• 50Gb (40373 byte download)
• 100Gb (80373 byte download)

Once downloaded, extract them as follows:

CAUTION: The resulting extracted files will be the actual size represented in the filename. They compress down so well because they are mostly empty space until they are hooked to a VM and a filesystem is created.

After I extract the files, I typically rename the virtual disk to something more meaningful, like the name of the mount point in my VM. This way, I can easily tell which virtual disk is used for what without consulting the VM config file. The disk rename command looks like this:

Simple!

Keep in touch,
Greg