Quad8

So I've sat down and done a bit of research on some of the NAS like operating systems around. Originally Freenas Corral is what got me so interested in building my own. I’ve had a look today and iX have dropped Corral completely and have no intention of updating it. I thought the whole UI change was quite nice and its a shame to see all that effort gone to waste. Freenas 11.0 U3 is available right now however I’ve been using it in a VM and I can't say I like it over corral. Now I acknowledge that I don’t yet understand the key differences between corral and 11.0 but from a fresh set of eye and around 2 – 3 playing around with both of them corral felt so much more easy to achieve what I wanted. So as a result of this I’ve decided to have a bit of a poke around until FreeNAS 11.1 is out (hopefully with native docker support) and see what other systems have to offer! The list I have compiled is related to what interested me enough to download an ISO and have a play in ESXi t...

Turns out that the spare Hynix ram I had lying around was ECC registered! Unfortunately, the Gen8 micro server only takes unregistered DDR3 which is kinda expensive (when compared to registered). Through some research, though I discovered that the gen8 server is rather picky about what unregistered DDR3 you put in it. I used the gen7 micro-server wiki to view what ram it accepted and was met with a rather small list of verified ram that works, Kingston was the brand and only 3 sticks were certain to work. I have spent quite a bit of time on eBay looking for a reasonably priced stick of the stuff (hence the long time before this update post) and they were averaging around 100-140 AUD per stick. This was a bit frustrating as I bought 32g ecc registered from china for 130 aud delivered! I had been spending some time just fluffing around until I found some NEW hp OEM memory, the very sticks that were certified by HP and on their spare parts list! I had struck gold after some cheeky eBay ...

After pulling the batteries out and having a closer look at everything I noticed that one wire had some damage done to the outer plastic shielding however it had not gone through to the copper wires. Gotta treat these with respect  I decided that I should repair that little issue and grabbed some heat shrink and the trusty heat-gun to patch it up. Before After After the new batteries arrived I plugged them in and let them charge for the next day. The next day I decided to test the system and unplug it while it had a load on it and it worked! I had the system on the UPS for 5 minutes and the new batteries still had another 15 minutes left in them. Bit messy… I decided to take the opportunity and clean up my little area, do some cable management and whatnot. Before and After After that bit of work, I was presented with a nice clean computer area! Hooray, all clean! So at the end of the day, I’ve taken a few things from this learning experience ...

So after having a poke around the unit i found out that “On buck” basically means that the incoming voltage from the wall was higher than the output voltage of the unit, so after reading the PDF manual I discovered that I had to set the rear switches to a specific way in order to accommodate the voltage and clear the “On Buck” warning. Switches are now set at 240V based on the conveniently placed diagram However upon testing the batteries of the unit and how long it would last I discovered that the “good” batteries were, in fact, no good! I tested them by putting my laptop charger on the UPS and then unplugged it from the mains, within 30 seconds it died and I was confused and assumed that the unit was dodgy. But I thought I should at-lease check the batteries when the unit was under load to check they were outputting the correct voltages! I pulled the front panel off the UPS and found the battery tray just slides out, handy! The batteries were stuck to the tray and each-other w...

So I was updating my home network now that I have a separate server to handle the pi-hole and DHCP/DNS requests, I decided to fix my VMWare setup. I was using IP addresses because I did not have a proper DNS setup and it caused all sorts of issues (i was running a pi-hole VM inside ESXi off my server), now that all that has been updated and sorted, ESXi was all happy and I could use its name in the web browser! However after updating my vCenter IP, I have run into the Error 503 page, after a quick google, the internet said I should check if the vSphere client service is running! I went to the appliance page and that was running, so I enabled SSH and BASH then SSH into the appliance to check of the service was running. service vSphere-client status While I was in the shell, the internet said I should check the HOSTS file if the IP is correct and matches, turnout it does not match… vi /etc/hosts Using VI I changed the IP to match the one on the appliance page then stopped a...

Did some quick research on how to update my ESXi host since I have run into some problems running the first release version of ESXi 6.5 (Build 4564106), such as not being able to deploy OVF files through the web client. Bit of a pain, but I found another blog (Link down below) that linked me to another site that tracked the ESXi patches and offered a copy paste CLI commands to updated ESXi Hosts to whatever patch was outlined. This is great for me because it was super simple to do and quick (great for a home-lab environment), however, if you were in a production environment I dunno if I would be updating your ESXi hosts using SSH. The site was  https://esxi-patches.v-front.de/ESXi-6.5.0.html So I went to my ESXi webpage to check my version number (i had already tested it out and put a few patches through to test how it works) and enabled the host SSH. I had already tested it out and put a few patches through to test how it works. After matching the build number with ...