IP

[W3WN]

Those of you with a Network or System Admin background will appreciate this one...

As many of you know, I work at an airport now.

I was contacted by a manager for one of the... well, it's a company that contracts out to airlines that only run a handful of flights a week, or charters. So one day, this company's agent will be operating, as, say, Braniff; later that day or the next day, the same agents will be TWA, PanAm, Northwest Orient, or People's Express... you get the idea. (Obviously, airline names changed to defunct ones for the purpose of the story). Ahem.

So one of the charters will be starting up again for flights in a few weeks. She goes to test the machines...

...our shared ticket counters and gates have a menu, you select the airline you want, it brings up a Virtual Machine that emulates a physical PC for said airline with all of their software, that connects to their network, and so forth. That's my job, maintaining the hardware and the software/SQL data behind the menu...

...for this charter, and they won't connect to the internet, which means that can't connect to the parent airline's system. (IE, who they charter the actual aircraft from) That's why she got me involved.

Long and short of it, I find that the 8 VMs for this charter don't have IP addresses. They're supposed to have fixed one. How'd that happen? No idea, and since they haven't flown for almost a year, it must have been done by the parent airline's IT folks.

So I get ahold of my contact with said parent airline. Well, guess what? They switched everything over to DHCP several months ago. So long as the DHCP assignment didn't expire, shouldn't be a problem, address renews when the image is next logged into.

See the problem? No? Keep in mind that DHCP addresses rarely last more than a few days until being renewed.

So the images can't renew their DHCP addresses, because... the DHCP server is at the parent airline's location, somewhere out in never never land. Which they can't reach without an IP address, which they can't get until the DHCP address is renewed...

Oh, I'm sure someone there told someone here that they might have to log in once or twice a week to keep things "live." Said someone certainly didn't pass the word on to me... or anyone else... or just forgot about it.

Self inflicted wound.

I've requested that they switch these 8 machines back to fixed IP addresses. No response yet. We'll see.

(The things we do to earn a living...)

[N8YX]

VMs are fun. Hypervisors are even more fun.

I need serial support for Win 3.11, XP and Win7 VMs to run various radio-control programs that simply won't install or work in later versions of Windows, and support for serial devices is questionable in WINE else I'd run the programs in Mint that way.

On the one hand...we have a vendor whose latest hypervisor underwent a re-write of the serial IO routines and COM device support is currently broken, though it worked fine in previous releases. Said previous releases aren't supported on my current Linux version, however.

On the other hand...another vendor's "Player" offering works smashingly in terms of VM serial IO...as long as the COM ports in question aren't on a PCI bus. Which ttyS4-S7 in this system are. I have one usable "physical" port when run under that hypervisor, and five which immediately throw an IO Open error on the other - even though they're successfully recognized by the hypervisor itself.

ESXi supposedly has PCI support, though the bare-metal hypervisor I'm building is a ways out until completion so I can't try that option just yet. I bought a 7-port PCIE USB card to use with serial-to-USB adapters. This might do the trick, as USB support is fairly mainstream.

[W3WN]

I found out a short time ago that the situation turned out to be a lot more... interesting.

Seems that there are a lot more moving parts than I was first led to believe. The charter airline had contracted with the main airline to be their ISP and provide tech support... almost 10 years ago. But, things have changed. There's still a connection, but there's another player or two now involved, who should have told me (or my predecessor) a few things.. and didn't...

But the good news is, they just went through all this with a few other airports, so my contact knows who to call and what needs to be done to get this little disaster straightened out. We still have almost 2 weeks. Now, let's see if it all gets pulled together in time.