Astaro not updating

For Unified Threat Management at some of my sites I like to use the Astaro Security Gateway (ASG). Sometimes the update process gets wedged and new firmware won't download to the box.

There is a command line ssh access that will allow a user to get into the system, but it's disabled for security reasons. In order to fix the update problem, ssh must be enabled.

I won't go into how to enable ssh or how to log into the system, but I will detail the fix:

Once logged in as root, check the files in /var/up2date/sys -- if there are files there, remove them and then upload the new firmware via scp to /var/up2date/sys.

After the files have been uploaded, type the following commands:

audld.plx

auisys.plx --rpmargs --force

This will verify the digital signature of the update file and if correct, install the firmware update and reboot the ASG.

Problem solved.

VMware service console memory setting

I had been running vmware ESX server 3.5 with the default memory setting of 272MB. This caused a couple of host migration and snapshot timeouts.







VMWare's suggested value is 800MB. So you click on the Properties... link in the VIC or vSphere Client and change the number:












The setting won't take effect until the system is rebooted and the Memory Configuration now reflects that: