Author Archives: Vahan

Easy and fast update ESXi 5.0 to 5.1

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This is the fastest method of updating ESXi 5.0 to 5.1 without using vSphere Update Manager.

Note that the commands below work for vanilla ESXi 5.0 installation, if you have added any custom drivers, DO NOT continue or risk losing connectivity to your ESXi server.

1. Enter Maintenance mode.

2. SSH into ESXi host server.

3. Allow HTTP downloads in Firewall rules:

esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpClient

4. View available profiles:

esxcli software sources profile list -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml

5. Choose the latest standard Image Profile version available, f.e.:

esxcli software profile install -d https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/vmw-depot-index.xml -p ESXi-5.1.0-20121201001s-standard --ok-to-remove

6. After the update successfully completes, reboot the ESXi host server.

Clear DNS cache on OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

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Historically, the Directory Services were responsible for DNS queries and caching on Mac OS X 10.5 and earlier. Back then, to clear the DNS cache one would issue the “dscacheutil -flushcache” command. With the further development of various services based on the multicast DNS a mDNS service fully took over both unicast and multicast DNS queries and response caching on later OS X versions.

While the “dscacheutil” is still there even on OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, it won’t reset the caches properly. The correct method to clear DNS cache on 10.7 and 10.8 is to restart the mDNS service, “mDNSResponder”:

sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

If this doesn’t seem to help, try reloading the service:

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist
sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

Moving Apple Mail settings from computer to computer on OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

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The location has changed since Mountain Lion is out, now the Apple Mail settings reside in:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Mail.plist

The Mail messages, rules and Notes are still in the old location:

~/Library/Mail

Just copy the contents to your new computer, and you are done!

FFMPEG settings for maximum quality h.264 video on AppleTV Gen 3

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AppleTV Gen 3I believe I’m not the only person who has bought AppleTV Gen 3 and been pondering about the best way to convert the existing media collection to a format acceptable by the AppleTV. After some research & experimentation, here are my findings:

Video: AppleTV Gen 3 claims to support H.264 video bitrates of up to 25Mbits. My findings: While it has no problem playing back videos with bitrates up to 40Mbits (even encoded with the ffmpeg’s highest quality setting  of -crf 1), the buffering of the iTunes Home Sharing stream wasn’t adequate and the buffer was being exhausted every minute or so of the playback making it unwatchable.

Audio: AppleTV Gen 3 claims to support AAC stereo bitrates of up to 160Kbits. Suspiciously low, isn’t it? My findings: AAC 5.1 (6 channels) audio plays back ok on my TV at 640Kbits. AppleTV is just passing through the unencoded audio to the TV via HDMI, and TV is down-converting the audio to 2-channel stereo mode.

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