Where’s my ESXi Console (or, booting from a DVD by mistake)

I had a need to install and setup a Windows 8 VM. I have an original install DVD, so attached a USB DVD to my HP DL380 server and was planning on setting up a VM installed from the DVD. Some time later waiting for the ESXi console to be available, it was not responding and wondered what was going on. Started up the Remote Console option from iLO and found that the server had booted from the DVD. Yeah, that’s not gonna work 🙂

Sudoku and Exact Cover problems

Sudoku is an example of an Exact Cover problem and can be solved by picking a subset of candidate rows from the exact cover matrix that satisfy all of the constraints for the complete grid.

I explored building an implementation of Donald Knuth’s Algorithm X using Dancing Links as a Sudoku solver, which you can read more about here.

For a 9×9 Sudoku puzzle, a candidate grid has x possible candidates, by y constraints.

For a 9×9 grid using numbers 1 through 9, there are:

9 rows x 9 columns x 9 (values 1 through 9) = 729

… possible candidate values for the cells.

For 4 constraints applied to every cell in the 9×9 grid, there are

9 rows x 9 columns x 4 constraints = 324

… constraints to be met.

If you fill a grid where a 1 represents a met constraint by that candidate and 0 is unmet, if you zoom out far enough the table looks like this:

To see how a matrix like this is used together with Donald Knuth’s Algorithm X and Dancing Links, see my previous post here.

Upgrading cmake on Raspbian Jessie

Trying to build and install rtl-sdr from source I got this error on a Raspberry Pi 1 running Jessie:

$ cmake ../

CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:22 (cmake_minimum_required):
CMake 3.7.2 or higher is required.  You are running version 3.6.2

Doing an ‘apt-get update’ and ‘apt-get upgrade’ is not picking up a more recent version, so following the steps here, I downloaded the required 3.7.2 version from source and followed the steps to build it: http://osdevlab.blogspot.com/2015/12/how-to-install-latest-cmake-for.html

I downloaded a .tar for the 3.7.2 version from:

https://cmake.org/files/v3.7

The build look over 2 hours, but completed successfully, and now I’m able to build rtl-sdr.