Specifying screen resolution for VMware machines

Today, I was installing ubuntu 9.10 as a VM in VMware ESX. Unfortunately, the resolution available on my Vsphere client (1280×800) was unknown to the VM, I could not choose the same resolution. The solution is to power off the VM and open the vmx file for the VM. The following 2 lines should be added:

svga.maxWidth = "1280"
svga.maxHeight = "800"

When the VM is powered up again, the resolution is known to the system and can be configured.

E-mail an attachment from linux cli

Here’s something I occasionally use on linux PBX’s:

cat body.txt | mutt user{a}example.com -a example.txt -s “Yoursubject”

Where:

• body.txt contains the message body
• user{a}example.com is the recipient e-mail address
• example.txt is file to attach
• Yoursubject is the subject of the message

It requires mutt to be installed, but this is often the case, even on servers with a minimal install.

CCM 6 backups

To be able to create CCM 6 backups, you need a SFTP server. The easiest way to accomplish this (assumed you have some experience with managing *NIX systems and you have linux system at your disposal) is to create an extra account like ‘ccmbackup’ on a running Linux system:

adduser ccmbackup -s /bin/bash

Next, configure the backup settings on the CCM environment and perform a backup. Expect the backup to be around 300MB in size, depending on the information stored in your environment. YMMV.