Watching a VM Sleep

I sometimes find myself putting a VM in "Save" mode or "Sleep" mode. Invariably, I'm curious as to how long these VMs end up being down- for example, when a Linux VM is hosted on Hyper-V and backed up with DPM, the VM is paused for a few seconds while a snapshot is taken. I've seen these VMs take between 20 and 55 seconds to go down and come back up. How do I know how long they were down?

while true; do date | tee -a ~/date.txt; sleep 1; done

Enabling a Self-Signed Certificate on Apache2 on Debian 7.1 Squeeze

It's always useful to configure SSL whenever you make a web site that needs to be in any way secure. And let's face it; if it's something you yourself are setting up, an SSL certificate of any kind is fine. It doesn't need to be expensive or verified by a "trusted" SSL provider.

And besides, once you have everything working with a self-signed certificate, making a "real" certificate is as easy as making a request, fulfilling it, and putting the files in the right places.

How I enabled a self-signed certificate:

a2ensite default-ssl
a2enmod ssl
service apache2 restart

Fixing AnyConnect Problems

I was connected to my AnyConnect SSL VPN a few days ago when our data center had an outage. When my connection was available again, my VPN would no longer log in. AnyConnect simply complains that:

The VPN client driver has encountered an error when connecting through Cisco AnyConnect Client.

 So far, no troubleshooting steps that I've found anywhere online have helped except this one:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6120/products_tech_note09186a00809b4754.shtml#e21

And I quote:

This issue can be resolved when you uninstall the AnyConnect Client, then remove the anti-virus software. After this, re-install the AnyConnect Client. If this resolution does not work, then reformat the PC in order to fix this issue.

I don't have antivirus software installed. Yes, I ended up *reformatting my PC*. And this is the third time in as many years that I've had to do it.