All articles by vSkilled

 

Scaling down the home lab, slightly

Since my last post about my new Zion 4U storage server I have been more and more impressed by Unraid and have started using Docker and KVM virtualization on it. Since then I have moved some VMs over to KVM virtualization on Unraid. That left my Domain Controllers, IPAM, and VCSA left on my VMware
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ZION – 4U Unraid Storage Server

I am excited to reveal my latest 2020 custom server build – ZION. See my previous planning post for Zion here. Built from the ground up to be a custom 15+ drive bay rack-mountable storage server and virtual machine host. Using AMD Ryzen Zen+ architecture and X370 chipset. Zion was designed to be powerful enough
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2020 Home Lab Upgrade (Unraid 4U)

It’s a new year, and that means it’s time for some home lab upgrades! The last few upgrades I did were some hardware hacks to my old Thecus N5550’s to support 6 drives and Unraid. Before that I did a SSD upgrade on NAS3 for my VMware VM storage. And finally almost a two years
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Google Stadia and Cloud Gaming

With Google Stadia’s release date quickly approaching on November 19, 2019 I wanted to give some of my thoughts on Cloud Gaming and the Google Stadia platform. Cloud gaming is not a new concept prior to Google’s introduction into the market. There have been a few previous companies that have tried and failed like OnLive
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unRAID on Thecus N5550 with 6 drives

Thecus N5550 6th Drive Mod This post is specific to owners of the Thecus N5550 but will apply to almost all of the Thecus NAS lineup as well. Anyone with Thecus NAS devices knows that the operating system “ThecusOS” has been practically abandoned. The vendor came out with “OS7” but it never fully finished and
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Website Improvements: RunCloud.io, OVH, BunnyCDN and Redis Cache

Quite a few back-end improvements to the vSkilled.com website this week.  For starters the website was moved to a new server on OVH Public Cloud and it’s running RunCloud.io for management.  The website also runs in a dual-CDN configuration using both Cloudflare and BunnyCDN. Cloudflare acts as the primary web proxy while BunnyCDN serves up
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NAS3 SSD Upgrade

This week NAS3 got a storage upgrade from 128GB SSD’s to 500GB SSDs. NAS3 is my SSD NAS which is used for hosting virtual machines. NAS3 has been running with the 128GB SSD’s for many years now. In fact I paid more for the 128GB SSD than I did for the 500GB SSD. However that
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Adding a SSL Certificate to Untangle Firewall

Untangle SSL not working? A small hack here for those that might be struggling adding a third party signed certificate to their Untangle firewall. Using self-signed certificates isn’t a problem. However when you try to add a trusted third party certificate to Untangle using the GUI it doesn’t work. The GUI doesn’t seem to add
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Using Cloudflare Firewall to Secure WordPress

If you’re using Cloudflare for your website you might not realize the security protections that it can offer. Using the free package you get access to setup up to five active firewall rules. On the Pro plan this goes up to 20 active firewall rules. The Pro plan also includes the Web Application Firewall (WAF)
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Serverless WordPress

Can it be done? Yes. Is it practical? No. That is so far what my conclusion is at the time of this writing. I was looking again at the web tier for the vSkilled website. I want to ideally run the website serverless, but without ditching WordPress. Like many others I use WordPress as the
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VMware vCenter 6.7 U1: Windows to VCSA Upgrade and Convergence

Today we will be talking about the VMware vCenter 6.7-U1 (Update 1) upgrade process. I recently had an opportunity to work with a enterprise customer to upgrade their VMware environment. In this post we will be going through the upgrade process and my thoughts. VMware 6.7 U1 is a major upgrade that includes the fully
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vSphere 6.7 U1 now released

On October 17, 2018 VMware announced that vSphere 6.7 Update 1 is now available. The new HTML5 client is now ‘Fully Featured’ which means that you can use the HTML5 client for all administration and configuration of vSphere; including Auto Deploy, Host Profiles, VMware vSphere Update Manager (VUM), vCenter High Availability (VCHA), network topology diagrams, overview performance charts,
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Upgrades to my gaming rig

My main gaming rig is getting a bit of a storage upgrade this weekend. It was back in 2015 that I had originally built this computer and it hasn’t had much love since then. The major upgrades since then have been a Samsung 950 Pro NVMe drive, a GTX 970 video card, and RAM.
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Windows Server 2019 – Now available in preview

On March 20th, 2018 the Microsoft Windows Server Team announced that Windows Server 2019 was now available in preview. This is the one of the first times we’ve heard about the new server operating system and it has certainly been met with mixed reactions. It is expected for release sometime in the second half of 2018.
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New Synology DS1817+ NAS & ISP Switch

By the end of 2017 nearly all my NAS servers were close to reaching full capacity. I had already pre-decided on getting a Synology DS1817+ but it was just a matter of when. I wanted something that was more than five bays and would be upgradable to 10G networking in the future. The DS1817+ seemed
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VMUG Advantage is 10% off

Today VMware announced that VMUG Advantage is 10% off until December 31st, 2017. Unwrap the many exclusive benefits of upgrading your VMUG membership to VMUG Advantage. Give yourself a Christmas gift and sign up today with discount code ADV17! https://t.co/lawjHYUZJP pic.twitter.com/EwjqHGrLoq — VMware User Group (@MyVMUG) December 11, 2017 This is the best way to
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Website Refresh! v2.0

The vSkilled blog website has had some major improvements and is now officially launched as version 2.0! The previous design had been in use since late 2014. Over time there were design elements and plugins that stopped working altogether or were causing various issues. I had worked tirelessly to improve the page loading times but
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Home Lab Rebuild

It’s been long overdue for some changes to my home lab. The latest full outage on Sept 4, 2017 due to a power brown-out had me realizing that some improvements can be made. There has not been any major changes to the lab since 2015. In 2016 I upgraded the storage in NAS1, memory upgrade
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Disaster strikes as NAS3 crashes

This past weekend we had a power brownout for about 4 hours. This caused my servers to fail-over to battery power. The batteries don’t last long with servers running. I guess something went sour with the automatic shutdown of my NAS3 which is used only for my VMware virtual machines and it did an improper
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Home Lab Updates: AC Unit, Failed Drive on NAS1

  I’ve been meaning to make a post about all the recent changes to my home lab but I’ve been quite busy. I’ve also done some more work on the backend of the website to help speed things up. I’m also, slowly, working on a new design for vSkilled as well. The biggest update I
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vSAN all hosts down scenario

  The worst case scenario in a VMware vSAN cluster is all hosts down. A situation where no sysadmin wants to find themselves in. Panic & frustration quickly follow suit. Despite all the safety features built into vSAN it is designed to tolerate failures within it’s failure domains, not an entire vSAN cluster outage. Scenario Unsaid
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Reducing Home Lab Power Usage

I have come to the conclusion that in 2017 I will need to down scale my home lab in order to reduce power & cooling usage.  It’s grown year over year and unless I start making changes it’s not going to start going down. My plan is to beef up VMH02 with more RAM so that
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Tuning Large Windows DHCP Servers

I’ve been involved in setting up some very large Windows DHCP deployments during my time working as a Consultant at Long View Systems. Along the way I’ve found some interesting challenges and caveats of using Windows DHCP, especially so anytime your working with DHCP enabled dynamic DNS updates. I wanted to have a quick post about this
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Migration from Cisco 1000v to VMware Virtual Distributed Switch (Part 2)

This is part 2 of a series. Click here to see Part 1. I apologise for taking so long to get Part 2 posted. Sometimes I just don’t have the time or effort I would like to have with the blog. This portion of the guide focuses on the second half of the VSS to VDS migrations. We
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Firewall Swap & Windows Telemetry Data

I recently switched over from Sophos UTM to Untangle NG for my personal use firewall at home. During the process I basically had to rebuild all of my firewall rules and general network policy configurations. This allowed to me “start fresh” as my previous configuration had gotten quite bloated and complicated over time. It’s clear
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WHMCS – Is the promo applied or not?

WHMCS is one of the most popular billing systems for web hosting companies. Despite this fact there are many small caveats and grudges you will find with the WHMCS platform. For example, when a customer is passed to an order page using a link with a promotional code or with an existing promo code applied the
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My first dedicated server, back in 2005

This is a short post about my first ever dedicated server… back in 2005. I seldom forget exactly how long I’ve been involved in the web industry. I took a moment to reflect back in time. Using the WayBackMachine I was able to find the company’s page and details. I rented my first dedicated server from a company
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Virtual Firewall and Networking – Planning Guide

This is a planning guide on how to create a robust, redundant, virtual network for your home-lab environment including a virtual firewall. This requires a lot of existing hardware and expertise. This is not recommended the faint of heart and will challenge you. Using a physical firewall is the easy choice. I have structured this guide around how I have
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Firewalls for Home Use

A question I see often is what firewall is the best for a home/residential environment? Before I get into that, we must realize that the majority of non tech-savvy people do not even have a firewall, or they have one but it’s not enabled/configured correctly, or they’re just not sure. In an age where we see more weaponized vulnerabilities and threats year after
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Windows Server 2016 – Technical Preview 5

Microsoft has released Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 (build #14300). You can see what’s new here. This could probably be one of the last few TP (tech preview) builds that we will see. Especially so if Microsoft is still firm on their plans to officially launch Windows Server 2016 this summer (Q3 2016). As long as you are running
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vSkilled Crypto – Now SSL Encrypted!

vSkilled is now fully SSL encrypted and including HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS).  Since vSkilled is a technical IT blog, one would expect to think that the communication between the client and server aught be encrypted. Now that traffic has picked up on the site I decided to move things over to SSL. vSkilled uses CloudFlare as our CDN so
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Home Labs: Remote Access and Security

I am sure that most who have a lab environment in their home also have a way of remotely accessing it – either from at work, with friends or family, vacation, etc. The problem with any remote access into a secure network is that you are quite literally punching a hole into your network from a security
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Worried about Windows 10 privacy issues? Group/Local policy to the rescue!

I hear and see all over the Internet that people have privacy concerns about Windows 10 and for good reason. For any security concious person, like myself, they’re probably not very happy about many of the decisions that were made for Windows 10. Microsoft seems to be very tight lipped about their updates and what information is actually shared
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vExpert 2016

I am very honoured to be selected as a vExpert 2016 by VMware. Getting recognition is awesome but knowing that you are sharing content that is for the benefit of others is even better. The annual VMware vExpert title is given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year. The
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Whoops! My Samsung 950 PRO M.2 512GB SSD experience

This story is a bit of a sad story. Mainly due to the failure of my own personal oversight over a very important specification requirement and snowballed by my online shopping addiction. For a little back story – I had been reading great reviews all over the internet about Samsung’s new 950 PRO 512GB M.2
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Microsoft support and security updates for Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10 end on January 12, 2016

Microsoft has announced that they will no longer provide security updates or technical support for older versions of Internet Explorer. Running older versions of Internet Explorer after January 12, 2016 may expose you to potential risks. The latest version of Internet Explorer will continue to follow the component policy, which means that it follows the support
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Migration from Cisco 1000v to VMware Virtual Distributed Switch (Part 1)

While working with a enterprise customer I was tasked with migrating an entire production environment from the Cisco Nexus 1000v to a VMware Virtual Distributed Switch (VDS). Then moving the VDS and the ESXi 5.1 hosts over to a fresh built vSphere 6.0 server. The customer is in the middle of an upgrade from vCenter 5.1 to 6.0.
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Automatically reboot an ESXi host after PSOD

Anyone who has worked in a VMware environment for any length of time should be quite familiar with this purple diagnostic screen, or what we like to call the “purple screen of death“.  Even VMware themselves internally reference this setting as “BlueScreenTimeout”, so make no mistake where it’s fathered it’s name. This PSOD screen is what will appear when
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Storage Refresh 2016 – Time to Build! (Part 2)

Part 1: http://www.vskilled.com/2015/07/storage-refresh-2016-the-plan/ The hard drives have arrived today from NCIX and it’s now time to build it out to finally increase the storage capacity in my home lab. I’ve made only minor changes to the original plan; I ended up shying away from the Seagate 8TB archive hard drives I had originally planned on buying to use
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Dashlane – Password Manager Review

First off, I am a technical user. Nothing gripes me more than a piece of software that is too dumb’ed down for the sake of “ease of use” that it lacks basic functionality. I have tried many password managers in the past but just have not been impressed by their reliability, security, features, etc. This
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Installing open-vm-tools on CentOS

Just a quick post here today. This is in regards to installing open-vm-tools on CentOS. There’s no need to download and install separate epel-release files anymore as it’s now in the CentOS extras repo directly. To install them, just use this command, then install open-vm-tools. yum -y –enablerepo=extras install epel-release – extras is enabled by
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ARIN Region IPv4 Free Pool Reaches Zero

Well it has finally happened. The IPv4 free pool for the ARIN region is now fully depleted. ISPs are encouraged to utilize IPv6 for additional customer growth and the IPv4 transfer market for their IPv4 interim needs. A copy of the announcement: From: ARIN <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: [arin-announce] ARIN IPv4 Free Pool Reaches Zero Date: September
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New ESXi Server Build – VMH02 Replacement

This build was originally meant to be a remote ESXi server for my parents place, but I’ve ended up liking this new build so much I’m going to have to keep it for myself. So what I’ll be doing is finishing up this build for my lab and swapping my current 2nd ESXi host (VMH02)
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VMware HTML5 Client?

I’ve caught wind of a real HTML5 web client being developed. Its currently very early into development and is released as technical preview fling. To be clear it’s not for vCenter, but we can only imagine the direction this would eventually go. This version of the ESXi Embedded Host Client is written purely in HTML
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Steam – “Pressure” Skin

Just a quick post about a recent discovery I made about a awesome looking Steam UI theme called Pressure. I’ve never been a fan of the default Steam UI and have always been using the Metro skin as an alternative. Metro is a good improvement over the default skin, but still nothing crazy. Pressure, on
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Enable SNMP on ESXi 5.5

This is a quick guide on how to configure ESXi 5.5 hosts for SNMP monitoring. I use Observium to monitor and collect information about devices on my home network that support SNMP. This allows me to have an in-depth look at devices on my network as well as see metrics that go far into the
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Storage Refresh 2016 – The Plan

The time has come to increase storage capacity in the home lab. I expect that before the end of this year that I will have less than 1TB of free space left on my primary data NAS. That is a problem, and an expensive one at that. At the time of this writing I have
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CentOS nightly auto updates using yum-cron

It seems like new security vulnerabilities comes out at least once per month now a days. Keeping your systems up to date is the easiest way to keep these threats at bay as well as overall system stability. You can do nightly YUM updates automatically with email notifications via a package called yum-cron. This is
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SubPac S1 Tactile Bass Systems Review

As some may know I am a bit of a bass freak / audiophile. My car’s sound system is a great example of this. Music in general is a very influential and important part of my life. I listen to many different genre’s of music and my taste in music changes over time.  Anyway enough
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A closer look at WHSuite (Beta 4)

I had an article last year about the the company (Turn 24 Ltd) looking for participants for it’s alpha/beta of WHSuite. Since then it seems development has been in full swing and now the product is in open beta – which means anyone can (and is encouraged to) beta test the software. See the WHSuite
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