Yesterday evening, I recieve a report that a user can't log into a particular virtual machine. A quick look and it turns out that the virtual machine is stalled awaiting an answer to a question.
For those without access to the image above, the relevant portion is "The directory /vmware/virtual_machine/ has less than 150 MB of free space. Running out of free space in this directory may corrupt the virtual machine's RAM."
sidenote: You can see if a VM in VMWare Server has a question to be answered by eithe connecting to the console of the VM (this is what generated the image above) or with the command line "vmware-cmd vmwareconfig.vmx answer"
This became a problem only because we do not pre-allocate the disk space of virtual machines upon creation. As users of the VM added data to the VM, the hosts's disk filled up and we got this error message.
For historical reasons the default shell for the engineers I support is tcsh. The default cshrc sources a half dozen other csh scripts. One of those scripts issues the command bindkey -v which sets the shell to use vi style keybindings.
I learned this little joy when I first started working here, but as I use VI regularly I could adapt (and there was the little fact that I use bash as my day to day shell and enter tcsh as little as possible). I had quickly forgotten about it until I recieved a bug report complaining about "oddly" terminal windows.
Sitting down at the user's machine shortly after the bug report hit my inbox I realized quickly what the problem was; vi keybindings. After explaining what was going on to her, we added the line bindkey -e to the end of her cshrc and her world was better. For the rest of the week, I kept receiving thank you's from people who learned about my "fix" through the grapevine.
It seems few people like many of my coworkers dislike vi keybindings on the shell.
