Monthly Archives: July 2010

nmap – tool which is lacking in Windows

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Nmap is one of the most intesively used by linux admins tools. It is widely known one can check out TCP port’s state on given hosts. As far as now, I was unable to find correctly working replacement for windows. Of course, there are many of migration’s attempts based on CygWin or SFU/SUA, but they require wider permissions in contrast to those that users usually have on their machines.
That is why I want to introduce you to real Microsoft replacement of this tool: PORTQRY. This tool is as usable as nmap and I can recomend it for use in every Windows Enviroments. It has one more important advantage in comparition to nmap. It can follow dynamic RPC ports used by DCOM. RPC and DCOM are heavily used by most of Windows enviroment services such as Active Directory, Certificates Service or Exchange. These are only examples of usage this technology.
Finally I wish everyone as little as possible time with network time down in yours enviroments.

VMware ESX – failed to install Virtual Center Agent

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The error, which this post is about, can have a variety of causes. I will focus on this, which I have encountered again only because i haven’t written about it before.
The error message usually suggests improper processing of the VC Agent RPM; however, it can also signify problems running the new vpx process. vCenter reports installation success only when it receives first heartbeat from the service. It is quite possible that the service fails to start, although

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 service vmware-vpxa restart

is executed correctly. Similarly, causes suggested by

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 /var/log/messages

can be wrong.
This time, the problem was incorrect certificate file format. Unfortunately, VMware doesn’t recognize standard and widely used PEM format, which is provided by most Certification Authorities. Instead, it uses its own version of PEM format. It is the so-called, text PEM representation. To create such, you need to issue the following command:

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 openssl x509 -text -in /etc/vmware/ssl/rui.crt -out /etc/vmware/ssl/rui.crt

A chance for diagnosing this mistake is interpreting of a little known log file

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 /var/log/vmware/vpxa.log

. After experiencing this situation, the vpx agent logs there a message about impossibility of certificate file interpretation.
I think that in this log file can be helpful in other problems with vpx agent, too.