Wow. Such a slick little system. I am surprised that I did not venture down this path a long time ago. For about $60, you can have quite a flexible little system. Best of all, its designed to run on Debian Linux. For me, the cost includes the Raspberry Pi Board, a basic plastic case, and a small SD card.
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Category Archives: Technical
Mounting ESXi Datastore from CLI
Moving some storage around this evening created a situation where my primary VM datastore was imported on one of my hosts with a new signature file. This had repercussions on the other host in the cluster, causing a situation where when the datastore was being detected through the iSCSI adapter, but not being displayed in the storage window. If the storage was manually added through the vSphere GUI, it would only allow a reformat.
CLI to the rescue.
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ESXi 5.5 Update with a Headless Configuration
Updating to ESXi 5.5 was a pretty straightforward task overall. One of my ESXi hosts upgraded without any complications. The second host hung during “relocating modules and starting up the kernel” of the initilization of the installer.
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CrashPlan Backups and Quality of Service
CrashPlan’s backup solution is comparable to many others out there. They have an application that runs on your PC that backs up the data to a web based server. The client application encrypts the data and attempts to compress it. At $4 per month for unlimited backup space, CrashPlan however is one of the cheaper solutions available at the time of this posting. With the backup service selected, I wanted to set the prioritization of the traffic to avoid issues with other web based applications.
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Linux Vim and set nocompatible
Every so often I am using a system that inserts a A, B, C, or D when using the arrow keys within the Vim editors insert mode. Vim is for VI Improved. While I did not dig into the exact reasons as to why (terminal emulation?) it happens, it is quite annoying. The fix was simple in my case.
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Multipurpose White Box NAS – ESXi + Personal File Storage
The storage that is running blog.destephen.com is a product of several iterations of lab Network Attached Storage (NAS) setups. What it developed into today allows storage and playback of 1080i home videos, bulk storage of personal files, as well as running 30+ VM’s on a daily basis. This post, while long, walks through the some features and through processes along the way of designing the 21 disk, 25 TB system.
WordPress Upload Size
Drafting some new posts that included images from a DLSR camera. The uploaded images resulted in the default WordPress upload size be maxed out. Not hard to do, the default was set at 2MB.
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PL2303 USB to Serial Driver in OS X
I have the CP-US-03 by CP Tech USB to Serial adaptor and have used that I have used for years. The manufactures driver always worked will for Windows and with kernels 2.6.11 and later, it is plug and play in Linux. With the new MacBook Pro, the provided CP Tech drivers did not work.
Transferring a Certificate from Ubuntu into Forefront
With the new certificate loaded on the Ubuntu server, the next step for this particular configuration is to transfer the certificate over the the ForeFront server that front ends the web servers in my environment. We again start off with a SSH session and the friendly vi editor.
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Adding a Signed SSL Certificate to Apache in Ubuntu
Initially this blog was setup with https using a self signed certificate. I did always intend on updating the certificate with a “real” certificate to avoid web browsing errors. This certificate would also need to handle other sites/services at destephen.com. This is my first effort at installing certificates that needed to be recognized on everyones browsers.