My current infrastructure has an instance of Jenkins as the Continuous Integration server and Sonatype Nexus as the repository manager. The POMs for my project and the settings.xml file for maven are configured so that Jenkins can automatically deploy SNAPSHOTs to the Nexus repository but the problem arose when I had a build that went to production and I needed to deploy that pre-built artifact to Nexus’ RELEASE repository. This was easier that going back and checking out the correct versions of the many dependencies. In the future I’ll use the maven-release-plugin but for now, this is how I solved this problem.

This assumes you have vim (the command line text editor) installed. If not, you can use vi or any command line text editor in its place.

1. Change to the modprobe directory:

   cd /etc/modprobe
   

2. We need to create a new blacklist file to store our blacklistings in. If there are already other files in this directory, you can reuse one of them but for the sake of separating configuration you’ve made from the out-of-the-box setup, we’ll create a new file. you can name this file anything you want as long as it ends in a .conf suffix and it would make sense to add blacklist and the type of device you’re blacking list to the name so it’s obvious what things live in there (as the module names might not give this information away). Note that you’ll need to be superuser or sudo and this command requires vim:

   sudo vim blacklist-<deviceType>.conf
   

3. Add one blacklisting per line in the file using the format

   blacklist <module>
   

   for example:

   blacklist pcspkr
   

   If in doubt, have a look in the other blacklist files for examples.
4. Save and exit the file
5. Restart your machine

Credit to: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1850267

Back story

This is a problem that I ran up against because I was running the host machine as a bare host and all the functionality that I needed was in the guest machine. The purpose of this was to insulate myself from changes in hardware and to be able to easily backup the entire server (the guest) so it could be restored from image. This meant that occasionally I’d need to access files on the guest machine’s “hard drive” but it wasn’t running so methods that require networking were out. The  solution is to mount the guest’s hard drive image on the host to access it like any other partition.