A geek's comments (review?) about the Amazon Fire Phone - It's actually pretty good!

I've owned this phone since February. I've been using it as my spare phone at home only. But I've grown to really like this phone. That's possibly because I'm also heavily invested into the Amazon eco-system. :) I've got the Amazon Echo, several kindles (The Kindle HDX 8.9 is my favorite device)

Anyhow, now that SwiftKey and Google Play services are successfully installed on my Amazon Fire Phone, I can honestly say this is the best value phone you can get on the market. For less than 300 bucks, 32GB storage, quad core. It's got good heft and excellent build quality. Anyone wants to get a feel of it? So far all my tech colleagues whom have handled it all like it. Pity Amazon didn't get a fair chance.

Excellent screen, excellent fonts. Excellent sound processing. There is a noticeable difference in audio quality compared to my Xperia Z2 when streaming to a Bluetooth speaker. The sound is warm and fuller. I don't know. I'm just growing to enjoy this phone the more I use it. Am typing this review on this phone right now.

I'm still using the default Amazon UI. The gesture controls grow on you. So much so that I even ended up mistakenly swiping up on my Xperia Z2.

What I don't like: The default keyboard. That's probably because I'm too used to the auto correct and prediction functionality of SwiftKey. I don't use flow. I'm used to back swiping for deleting. I also can't seem to find where the context switching button is. I'm used to quickly switch applications but on the fire phone... Where the hell is that?

Long live VMFS3! VAAI enabled storage, ESXi 5.x and above, thin VMDK files = Not able to recover unused (null) space.

Basically we still need a VMFS3 datastore as a "AUX" to shrink disks.

This is interesting! Basically, logically, in plain English.. what happens is since the VAAI datamover used is not at the ESXi layer, the storage doesn't know what is on the VMDK and _has-to_ copy everything. There is no chance for ESXi layer to figure out which blocks to drop!

The conditions - ESXi 5.x onwards (VMFS5) + VAAI capable/enabled storage, Thin Provisioned VMs

"...When the source filesystem uses a different  blocksize from the destination filesystem, the legacy datamover (FSDM) is used. When the blocksizes of source and destination are equal, the new datamover (FS3DM) is used. FS3DM decides if it will use VAAI or just the software component. In either case, null blocks are not reclaimed"

Thanks to Boon Hong​ for highlighting this.

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2004155

Temporarily disabling password complexity on hardened CentOS 6.5

Navigate to etc/pam.d
(system-auth is symbolic link to system-auth-ac)

Rename original file:
"mv system-auth-ac system-auth-ac-backup"

Create a new file
"cp system-auth-ac-backup system-auth-ac"

Edit "system-auth-ac"
Look for line that starts with "password required pam_cracklib.so"
Change parameters "minlen=1", "dcredit=0", "ucredit=0", "ocredit=0", "lcredit=0"
Save the file (No reboot is required)
Change password with "passwd"

Revert original file:
"cp system-auth-ac-backup system-auth-ac"

Remove bash history
make sure you're in your "profile" directory
"rm .bash_history" - you will be prompted if you want to delete the file.

Patching CentOS 6.5 on VMware

Just a quick and dirty post for my future reference.

Sometimes, the OS gets confused. Especially if there are additional lines for VMXNET.
When you run "system-config-network", eth0 should show the VMware NIC type, for example "VMXNET3"

Otherwise;
1. Remove the unnecessary lines from /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
2. Make sure the MAC address matches matches the ESXi assigned
3. Restart the services "service network restart"
4. "yum clean all" (in case cache is pointing to dead update locations)
4. yum update

Location of network configuration file: (assumption for 1st network adapter)
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

vSphere Web Client Abobe Flash Offline Installer

Just a very quick post for future reference:

Platform to install on: Windows 2008 R2 Server, IE.

See this URL from Adobe Forum:
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/889580

Direct download of IE active-x installer (Version 13 extended support):
http://download.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/licensing/win/install_flash_player_13_active_x.exe

Insomniac Ramblings is now Midus Renaissance.

This is not a technical post.

However I feel that this will be useful for people with problems sleeping.

As I'm no longer having sleep issues, I thought maybe it's time to update the name of this blog.

The "solution" I found in the end for this disorder was through the holistic path.

In short, I finally consulted with a Tradition Chinese doctor and "resetting" my internal flow has allowed me to sleep well at night after years of battling.

I think Insomnia is prevalent among many in our times - it detracts from the overall quality of life and can inadvertently, insidiously affect other aspects of one's life.

As this is an update and not a technical post (yet) I'd like to leave the topic open and hoping maybe someone else can be helped.

Looking forward to robust discussions (if any)

Advantages of using VMware PVSCSI interface vs LSI SAS and it's caveats

Updated (again) 1330hrs:
Appended some other interesting information from the discussion resulting from that Facebook post.
Thanks guys!

LSI SAS by defaults supports only queue depth of 25. (needs further confirmation) vs PVSCSI.

Original Post:-

While there are host OS (HOS) and guest OS (GOS) optimizations that will increase performance, there are caveats to note.

My recommendation would be to follow VMwares' best practice (gleaned from various forum posts and blogs - not sure if there are any such official articles/KBs) and do not configure your OS disk/partition with PVSCSI especially in a production environment where you may have a few other VMware administrators.

However, for a controlled test environment like home labs, by all means try it. All my home lab VMs are running PVSCSI on OS disks too. ;)

The details of why "don't do that" follow:

This is a reply to a post on Facebook's VMUG ASEAN to a question on how to configure PVSCSI replacement interface.

(Don't know if this hotlink to the post on VMUG  ASEAN will work. If anyone knows a sure-fire way to link Facebook posts let me know in the comments below :D )

Here's my 2 cents.  I did some deep dive research on PVSCSI and there are caveats. Some OS may have issues with it. Particularly VMware View. For PVSCSI to work, VMtools has to be installed and functional. There may be some situations where when you update or lose the VMtools you might lose connectivity to the disks connected using the PVSCSI device. I had considered using PVSCSI as the OS boot interface (after switching the vNIC using the article Lalit Sharma mentioned. However, if you get into a situation where you need to boot the OS (Windows in this case, Linux I don't have enough experience) to repair the OS, you will have to reconfigure the interface back to LSI or the default Windows boot media won't be able to access the OS disk. So take these things into consideration. Anyhow for my home lab, everything is on PVSCSI. Just it may not be wise in production environment especially if you have other vSphere admins that may not be as familiar.

Appends:-

Roshan Jha: Posted a recent VMware blog article (which I did not see earlier). 
It's VSAN related but relevant.

Which vSCSI controller should I choose for performance?  - Mark Achtemichuk

Kasim Hansia: "LSI only supports 32 queue depth and PVSCSI queue depth default values are 64 (device) and 254 (adapter). You can increase PVSCSI queue depths to 256 (device) and 1024 (adapter) inside a Windows or Linux Virtual Machine. "

Tan Wee Kiong - thanks for the correction of the initial assumption and the following KB article:

"Large-scale workloads with intensive I/O patterns might require queue depths significantly greater than Paravirtual SCSI default values (2053145)"

"The large-scale workloads with intensive I/O patterns require adapter queue depths greater than the Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) default values. Current PVSCSI queue depth default values are 64 (for device) and 254 (for adapter). You can increase PVSCSI queue depths to 256 (for device) and 1024 (for adapter) inside a Windows virtual machine or Linux Virtual Machine."

Note that the article has made a distinction between a "device" and the "adapter".