Quick Fix for “The task was canceled by a user” when deploying OVA in vCenter 6

Posted on 6th February 2016 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off on Quick Fix for “The task was canceled by a user” when deploying OVA in vCenter 6

So I came across a very odd vCenter bug today when trying to deploy an OVA file on vSphere 6.0, specifically the latest CoreOS image.

The import was repeatedly failing with the same error message.

What was more frustrating was the fact that the error message was “The task was cancelled by a user”, which it blatantly was not!

Error log example below:

OVA Import Errors

OVA Import Errors

A quick bit of testing and Googling and I came across an article by my good friend Ather Beg from the LonVMUG, who had a very simple fix for the same issue in vSphere 5.5.

  1. Install 7-zip or a similar archiving tool
  2. Extract the OVA file using 7-zip into its component parts
  3. Import into vCenter, selecting the OVF file for the import target

That’s it – simples!

Success!

Success!

What’s really weird is that after importing the OVF successfully, I then went back and imported the OVA, and it worked fine!

Very strange indeed…

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Installing Docker on Amazon AMI Quick Fix

Posted on 5th February 2016 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off on Installing Docker on Amazon AMI Quick Fix

I was installing and playing with Docker on an AWS EC2 instance this evening, using the default amazon AMI [specifically Amazon Linux AMI 2015.09.1 (HVM)] and came across a stupidly simple issue.

Docker containers would not start and were showing the following error:

Cannot connect to the Docker daemon. Is 'docker -d' running on this host?


Checking processes I don’t see docker running:

$ ps -ef | grep docker
ec2-user  2518  2485  0 22:20 pts/0    00:00:00 grep --color=auto docker


After looking at a similar issue I had with Ubuntu a year or so ago, I realised (duh!) the Docker service was simply not running, even though it had installed fine.

A quick start of the service fixed this:

$ sudo service docker start


And now…

$ ps -ef | grep docker
root      7119     1  1 22:30 pts/0    00:00:07 /usr/bin/docker daemon --default-ulimit nofile=1024:4096
ec2-user  7539  2429  0 22:41 pts/0    00:00:00 grep --color=auto docker
$ sudo docker info
Containers: 1
Images: 4
Server Version: 1.9.1
Storage Driver: devicemapper
 Pool Name: docker-202:1-263816-pool
 Pool Blocksize: 65.54 kB
 Base Device Size: 107.4 GB
 Backing Filesystem: xfs
 Data file: /dev/loop0
 Metadata file: /dev/loop1
 Data Space Used: 291.9 MB
 Data Space Total: 107.4 GB
 Data Space Available: 6.695 GB
 Metadata Space Used: 892.9 kB
 Metadata Space Total: 2.147 GB
 Metadata Space Available: 2.147 GB
 Udev Sync Supported: true
 Deferred Removal Enabled: false
 Deferred Deletion Enabled: false
 Deferred Deleted Device Count: 0
 Data loop file: /var/lib/docker/devicemapper/devicemapper/data
 Metadata loop file: /var/lib/docker/devicemapper/devicemapper/metadata
 Library Version: 1.02.93-RHEL7 (2015-01-28)
Execution Driver: native-0.2
Logging Driver: json-file
Kernel Version: 4.1.10-17.31.amzn1.x86_64
Operating System: Amazon Linux AMI 2015.09
CPUs: 1
Total Memory: 995.6 MiB

 

This has now continued to work fine through reboots, so hopefuly saves someone spending more than a few seconds troubleshooting!

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End of an Era for #LonVMUG

Posted on 5th February 2016 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off on End of an Era for #LonVMUG

I will keep this post short and to the point, and will do my best to try not to sound too sycophantic!

I just wanted to publicly thank Alaric Davies, Jane Rimmer, and Stu Thompson for their years of hard work and service to the London and UK VMUGs and all of their members (and of course, not forgetting Simon Gallagher who is staying on to steer the ship). Were it not for a chance meeting with Mr Davies at a tech event in Leeds some years ago, I personally would know a lot less, have met far fewer awesome people and be in a completely different place in my career right now.

The London and UK VMUGs have had a real impact on the careers of many people I know over the past few years and I hope they continue to do so for years to come!

So thank you very much all of you for your immense efforts and the hundreds of hours of your own time you have dedicated over the years…

Team Awesome

Lastly best of luck to the new VMUG leadership team members Linda, Dave and Chris, who along with Simon I have every confidence that the torch will be carried on without so much as a splutter!

If you want to get involved in the VMUG community as an attendee (and perhaps one day as a speaker), I strongly recommend popping along to your nearest meeting. You will definitely come away with a lot more than just the instructions on how to upgrade vSphere from 5.1 to 6.0! 😉

The next London VMUG is on the 14th of April at Tech UK, 10 Saint Bride Street, EC4A. I look forward to meeting you there!

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100th post and time for a change…

Posted on 3rd February 2016 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off on 100th post and time for a change…

Wow! Little did I think that when I posted my first couple of silly posts in May 2010, that 6 years later I would actually be doing this thing on a regular basis and that it would have given me so many amazing learning and networking opportunities!

I originally built the blog both to remind myself of stuff by blogging about it and to test out running Ubuntu in my homelab; more fool me however, I chose Joomla as my CMS platform…

I’m sure it’s a great product, but frankly as a novice blogger it was really not a friendly platform, which discouraged me from actually using it, and for the first two years I managed a sum total of three posts! Woohoo!

I then made what was in hindsight, a very sensible decision to switch to WordPress. Since then I haven’t looked back… averaging a couple of posts every month for the past 4 years.

Novice Blogger

The funny thing I have found about blogging over this time is that I do this mostly for the enjoyment of writing and sharing information etc, yet I find myself in a permanent state of mental flagellation over not producing enough content or publishing often enough.

Like everyone I have my excuses, not least my two small children and crazily busy job, but I do what I can! I am always in awe at the amount of content some bloggers manage to generate, whilst still staying sane and having a personal life!

I don’t believe I’m the only one who feels like this… Perhaps we should start a support group and give the condition a name? How about “Bloggers Contrition”?

New Post

Anyway enough jabbering…

As to the title above, if you are a regular visitor to the site you may already have noticed some small changes going on with the domain name and titles. I am not rebranding, but I felt that switching from .org to .it and dropping the www was a nice way to give the site a bit of a refresher going into 2016.

http://tekhead.it/blog

The process itself will probably take me a couple of weeks to complete as I want to make sure I have all of the right 301 redirects in place before the final switch, but I am not anticipating this being a huge issue. If for any reason you happen to spot any of the content becoming unavailable, please let me know via a wee tweet!

Anyhoo, I’ll just wrap up by saying thank you all very much for allowing me to continue ranting on this little corner of the internet and for all the positive comments and feedback over the years. I shall endeavour to keep it up – if I can think of anything to write about!

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