Author Archives: Artur

The ballooning daemon is not running

Posted by on February 4, 2012 No comments

That’s the funniest err I’ve seen so far in XenServer. But here’s how to fix it.

When you try to start vm you get this:

user@computer:$ xe vm-start name-label=vm1
The server failed to handle your request, due to an internal error. The given message may give details useful for debugging the problem.
message: Failure("The ballooning daemon is not running")

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How to install Etherpad on Debian

Posted by on January 18, 2012 No comments

Etherpad is a hosted web service that allows really real-time document collaboration for groups of users. It’s like Google Docs, or perhaps Google Docs is like Etherpad on steroids ? Anyway, if you’re looking for a secure real-time document sharing tool (unfortunately Etherpad is only able to server text documents with very basic formatting) here’s how to deploy it on Debian (Squeeze). Read more »

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Load balanced puppet dashboard

Posted by on December 9, 2011 No comments

Puppet dashboard is a useful tool in terms of reporting and actually seeing what’s going on with your puppets. The things get a bit tricky when you have hundreds of nodes reporting every 5 minutes or so and running dashboard on a single host.

I assume you are using dashboard already and you looking into scaling it, although I’ll describe how to install it from scratch. This post will help you set up 2+ dashboard nodes with one node running MySQL db and shared spool/ directory.
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How to make mission control faster

Posted by on November 11, 2011 No comments

Yes Apple, all those animations in Lion are awesome but do they have to take so long ? If You prefer the Mission Control (btw, Expose was way better) to ‘animate’ faster:

Enable faster animation

user@computer:$ defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -int 0; killall Dock

Disable faster animation

user@computer:$ defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.3; killall Dock

-float 0.3 controls animation speed, put -int 1 here and it’ll be painfully slow.

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XBMC + MediaPortal TV Server

Posted by on July 9, 2011 3 comments

I’m working on adding TV support and making my XBMC installation a true Media Centre (including PVR support). The thing about XBMC is that sadly it doesn’t support Live TV features by default but there are ways to get live tv support. Here’s my journey to get UK FTA channels working with XBMC using:

- Windows 7 64bit
- Hauppauge WinTV NOVA-HD-S2 DVB-S2 TV Card
- Sky dish
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