Hardware

D-Link DGS-1510-28X – cheap 10G switch

Some months ago, I built a small VSAN home lab. Gradualy I expanded the setup – e.g. I moved from a hybrid setup (HDDs and SSDs) to all-flash (SSDs only) to utilize deduplication. Because errors … Read more

Spoiled for choice: new HDDs for my NAS

2016 seems to be the year of big hardware renewals for me – after completely overhauling my virtual infrastructure, I also needed new hard drives for my NAS after nearly 4 years. NAS, DAS, what? … Read more

ASUS P9D-M, ASMB7-IKVM and false vCenter alarms

I was puzzled when I saw that the ESXi hosts of my new lab are generating critical CPU fan errors. Strange, I’m sure I mounted the fan correctly – otherwise the system would have been … Read more

New VSAN 6.2 home lab

In 2008 I started working as VMware administrator and thus also began using vSphere at home. You might know this – as an IT person you want to have a lab at home that can … Read more

IPFire hardware upgrade

2016 seems to be the year of hardware upgrades for me. After replacing my ESXi host with a VSAN cluster recently, I also had to replace the D.I.Y. router after upgrading my internet connection. At … Read more

Short tip: Configure HP Smart Array Controller using EFI Shell

New HP Smart Array controllers built into a HP Integrity machine are basically unconfigured. When running the EFI Shell, you will probably see the following message: HP Smart Array P800 Controller (version 7.22) 0 Logical … Read more

A new ESXi home server

At about two years ago I replaced a lot of my hardware with more power-saving alternatives. My self-made NAS and hypervisor wer replaces by two HP ProLiant MicroServer G7 servers (N36L and N40L) – for … Read more

There’s life in the old dog yet – HP Integrity RX2600 EFI Unexpected TRAP

A couple of months ago I installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a dedicated hard drive of my HP Integrity RX2600 servers. Because the installation programm doesn’t support the native Management Processor console I had … Read more

Nokia IP130 – a different kind of IPCop

Currently I’m implementing a IPSec tunnel between my and another flat. After my first plan, using an already existing Raspberry Pi as IPSec gateway, fizzled after plently of failed tries I decided to implement a … Read more

HP C8000 – System firmware hang. Contact your HP Support Engineer.

A few days ago I wanted to use my HP C8000 workstation after a long time – but a defect changed my plans. Instead of showing the Boot Console Handler (BCH) the C8000 only presented … Read more