Friday, February 19, 2010

VM Stuck During Reset


My problem: VM stuck at 95% resetting. No actions could be performed on it and it appeared "on" but was actually "off"

My solution: Connect to the host using SSH (Telnet, SecureCRT, etc).

Check the current state of the VM by running the following: vmware-cmd /<path to VM directory>/server.vmx getstate

You will likely need to execute this next:
vmware-cmd /<path to VM directory>/server.vmx stop hard

Then check state again, it should show as "off"

Now execute: service mgmt-vmware restart (this will not require a host reboot or cause any VM downtime)

In VC the VM should now appear normally.

If it doesn't (for example it shows as "VMname (Invalid)" remove it from inventory and then re-add it.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Problems with Google Calendar Sync, Outlook 2007 and Windows 7 x64

I love google calendar, and really like the outlook sync feature but I had a hell of a time recently when, in the throes of my geekiness I decided to to install the sync feature on my new Windows 7 x64 machine running Outlook 2007, despite the lack of support and mixed results of others.

What resulted was weird and painful. What happened was, in Outlook, all meetings where I had invited anyone only gave me attendee options instead of owner options. When I looked at the attendee list it showed me twice (as both the organizer and an attendee) and my gmail email address.

Nothing I did would fix it. I tried the following:
  • Forwarding the meeting to myself (sorry you are the meeting organizer)
  • Creating a .pst and moving the meetings there then bringing them back (no change)
  • Deleting and recreating my Outlook profile (nope)
I also looked all over and couldn't find anything where anyone had experienced something similar.

In the end I just had to delete all my meetings, tell everyone I'd invited to delete their copies (since I couldn't since I was an invitee as well) and recreate them. This obviously after I'd uninstalled google calendar sync.

One other strange thing I noticed in all this was that all meetings where I had been invited that were in my calendar had the same thing happen to them (the meeting owner was duplicated as an invitee and my gmail account was added as an invitee as well). I haven't had a chance to see how that affected other users but I haven't heard anything yet so...