January 19, 2018
Trying to install VMware ESXi on a number of Intel Bay-Trail boards apparently
fails with a hanged installation right after a message like Relocating modules and starting the kernel. There’s multiple forum posts around the internet
where people suggest various workarounds, which never seemed to work for me.
One suggestion which stood out to me as most promising was completely disabling
the internal graphics chip and using a dicrete graphics card in the PCI Express
slot. Now, I didn’t want to buy a graphics card just to make the installation
work - especially since this system would mostly be used completely headless:
power cord, two ethernet cables and done.
...June 29, 2017
This is an update over my earlier post about PXE booting. I’ve learned a few more things and refined some rough edges.
Update: By now I’ve learned even more. See homelab/bootstrap for an updated guide.
My Motivation is similar to the last post: I started building my homelab with virtual machines. Most of them are based on a minimal CentOS 7 installation, and as such I have a lot of very similar systems. Yes, I could probably use containers to great effect. But I prefer the separation/isolation that I get from virtual machines on ESXi.
...April 6, 2017
I used KeePassX to generate a new, 24 character password with all character types enabled. This was supposed to replace the default ADMIN/ADMIN combination for IPMI on my ESXi box. So I opened the appropriate page through a browser, navigated to Configuration > Users and modified the ADMIN user.
It happily accepted the new password with no warning whatsoever and I logged out to test it .. oh well .. it didn’t work.
...March 9, 2017
Today I set out to setup a local CentOS mirror for quicker PXE installations of my virtual machines. In the long run this will probably be superseded by a Spacewalk machine (update: discontinued on May 31, 2020) and until now netboot.xyz has served me well. For the time being I just wanted a faster alternative.
...May 16, 2016
Introduction
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Some context
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I have a NAS at home which runs on Debian Jessie. A NAS wouldn’t be a NAS without some storage, so I put in two disks with 4 TB each when I built it. Those two disks have actually been used in a setup with OpenMediaVault before that and already had a software-RAID on them. When migrating the disks (to Ubuntu at first) I learned about mdadm and that OpenMediaVault uses it. Great, that was a rather painless transition!
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