Monday, 23 July 2018 / Published in Lab, Networking
This post details my experiences getting the GNS3 VM on ESXi to work with 802.1q. I’ve been using the GNS3 VM on VMware Workstation for years, so far I’ve been unable to get virtual devices on the GNS3 VM to link to external networks using 802.1q. From my research I believed the issue to be
Friday, 01 June 2018 / Published in Automation, Lab, Networking
This is a follow up post to the last one about backing up VMware host configurations. This post details how to Restore VMware ESXi Host Configuration. Restoring a configuration requires the host to be running the same product and build version that the backup was taken from. This was harder than I thought to work out
Saturday, 19 May 2018 / Published in Automation, Lab
This post details a VMware ESXi host backups Python Script I use in my home lab. VCSA does not backup the configuration for the hosts it manages. Config items like vswitch, vnic, MTU settings, kernel interfaces and various other settings would be lost if the host fails. Re-building a host manually, especially hosts with complex
Sunday, 01 April 2018 / Published in Automation
I’ve been slowly converting my bash scripts to Python. This post details how I solved an issue with executing Python scripts from crontab. Most of my bash scripts are scheduled to run daily using crontab and work fine. The first script I converted to Python was a bash script used to backup the configurations of my
Sunday, 25 March 2018 / Published in Lab, Networking, Security
How do you upgrade a VMware ESXi host that VCSA is running on? well, you can not use VCSA VUM (vCenter Server Appliance, VMware Update Manager). In this case we have a chicken and the egg problem. This is due to maintenance mode required on the host prior to patching but maintenance mode requires VCSA
Friday, 16 February 2018 / Published in Automation, Lab, Networking
New script published to GitHub, a Cisco SG300 backup python script used to backup my SG300’s in my home lab. The script uses Netmiko to handle the ssh connection. The configuration from each switch is saved to a TFTP server in my home lab. I’ll shortly be adding an alternative version of the script which
Tuesday, 27 June 2017 / Published in Networking
It can be tricky finding a reliable USB to serial adaptor. I’ve recently brought a new as I’ve replaced my laptop and my old adaptor was not compatible with Windows 10. Fortunately I found one that works on my first purchase, the StarTech USB to serial Adaptor. The Adaptor was recognised by Windows 10 with
Friday, 19 May 2017 / Published in Certificates, Security
This post details how I’ve been using OpenSSL to generate CSR’s with Subject Alternative Name Extensions. You may have noticed that since Chrome 58, certificates that do not have Subject Alternative name extensions will show as invalid. Amazing, I must have missed the memo on that. Most of the certificates I use in my home
Saturday, 11 March 2017 / Published in Lab
This post details a Lenovo TS140 VMware ESXi 6.5 Storage Driver Issue. This issue is not limited to the TS140’s as I discovered during my research to the problem that a number of other servers are also affected. My TS140’s originally had ESXi 6.0 installed on HDD’s. I was experiencing IO issues so opted to
Thursday, 01 December 2016 / Published in Lab, Networking
I don’t usually write “this how you configure this” type blogs but for this particular problem I experienced I’ll make an exception. This post details how I resolved an issue with a Windows server 2012 domain controller not authenticating users. Up until I purchased a VM backup solution I was manually and occasionally taking backups