A quick and very random post, I’m working on a project that requires a microSD card, I could’ve sworn I had some microSD breakouts in my “giant tub-o-random-ebay-modules” but alas I was unable to locate any, then I realised I (like I’m sure pretty much anybody who’s bought any number of SD cards in the last decade) have a bunch of microSD to SD adapters lying around, the metal in them is kinda crap but I wonder if I can solder to it… Turns out the answer is yes, so I bring you the “Ghetto MicroSD Breakout”, I’m sure I’m...

TL;DR: wall of text, mostly a braindump, wait for the next(?) post if you’ve got a broken Drobo you’re trying to recover… So I bought a broken Drobo FS (appeared to have had a failed firmware update) off eBay for $100, mostly just for shits and giggles, figured it’d be an interesting exercise to fix it, not sure I’d trust their weird “BeyondRaid” thing with important data but maybe I’ll use it as a third-tier storage for surveillance footage if I get it fixed. This post isn’t detailing the fix because I’ve not actually fixed the damn thing yet (I...

TL;DR: If you’re having intermittent issues starting your Magna check out the details at this link: https://martybugs.net/articles/magna-stall.cgi Just a quick-ish one today. I’ve been bashing my head against an issue we’ve been having with our 2003 Mitsubishi Magna for several months, initally when you try to start it. It will fire up for about a second then the ECU kills the engine, sometimes after 4-5 attempts you can get it to start but sometimes it just outright refused. We’ve had the RACV out a couple of times, each time they’ve diagnosed no spark and we’ve towed it back home....

TL;DR: Getting FreeIPA 4.7 fully functional is a pain in the arse (and not just on Debian/Ubuntu), I’d STRONGLY recommend you get a distro that has 4.8 packaged as that gets rid of a lot of the python 2 nastiness. Because managing users on 20+ individual VMs manually was getting a bit beyond the pale I decided it was about time to delve into the wonderful world of Linux directory servers, enter FreeIPA. Now a sane person would probably have built their FreeIPA directory servers on Fedora, CentOS or RHEL because, let’s face it, if Red Hat is the primary...

This is a bit of a corrolary to the previous couple of posts regarding the self-hosted filer on ESXi, you may want to (and probably ought to) setup a dedicated vmkernel adapter for your iSCSI storage, it’s a bit of a pain in the arse so I figured I’d write it up… First thing, you’ll need a new vswitch (Networking->Virtual Switches->Add standard virtual switch); New "Storage" vSwitch creation If you’re not planning to expose the iSCSI storage...

Obviously if your filer is a VM on your ESXi box your datastore won’t be available until that box is fully booted, this is rather irritating as generally one wants at least some of the VMs on a given host (aside from the filer) to boot when the host boots, fortunately this is not too hard to fix. Important note (trap for young players, and something I derped on for a couple of days the first time round…) there’s a global setting to enable autostart, Manage->System->Autostart->Edit Settings->Enabled->Yes, probably also want to set “Stop Action” to “Shutdown” and enable “Wait for...

Intro As a follow on to “Creating a Datastore on your ESXi USB Boot Drive”, I’m now going to go through the process of setting up a “self-hosted” filer to support the actual VMs, I’m mainly doing this to save me having to either remember what I did or figure it out again next time ;) This is for my home lab whereas the “USB Boot Drive” process was developed for another box, in this case I’m fortunate enough to have spare controllers and bays in my home box (that SC836 I picked up on eBay), so I’m...

TL;DR: if you want a SuperMicro SC836 Chassis look on eBay for the Dell CT-040 instead, continue reading for some caveats around that. I’ve been in the market for a SuperMicro SC836 chassis for a while now, seemed the logical upgrade path from my existing NAS solution which uses a full-tower case with two four-in-three hotswap adapters in it (units which contain 4x3.5” sleds and fit in the space of 3x5.25” bays, though some… pursuasion was required with respect to the sheet metal inside the case). The SC836 is a nice 3RU rack mount chassis with 16x3.5” hotswap bays on...

A quick note on this, I suspect that this would have been less of a pain if we’d have opted for using the internal micro-SD slot in the server rather than stuffing a 16GB USB3.0 stick into one of the internal USB ports, so you might want to explore that option before going down this path, I chose the USB stick because theoretically at least a decent USB3.0 stick should be faster than an equivalent micro-SD. Intro When you install ESXi onto a USB stick it doesn’t create a “datastore” partition like it does when you install to a...

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted, I know, but shrug that’s life. Yesterday I noticed that the screen on my Kobo Touch eReader (doesn’t get much use, so I only occasionally see it) was displaying garbage. I figured it had crashed or something so (forgetting the reset button on the back) I cracked it open to disconnect and re-connect the battery, when I did that I found this. Note that the battery connector wasn’t broken from factory, just seems to be VERY fragile, as it broke as soon as I tried to unplug it, fortunately there’s enough of...