My lab environment sits within a closet in my home office. It is not a particularly large closet, but it has been decked out with its own air conditioning, extra insulation in all the walls, and a double-pane insulated external door. The goal? To keep the rack cool, of course, but also to prevent noise from leaking out to the office and the rest of the house. Continue reading “A Quiet Rack”

In WordPress Hacked: Security Steps Take II, I wrote about the tools and steps to take to secure your WordPress installation. The current steps to take are the same. The tools, however, have changed significantly.  Even as the steps changed from WordPress Hacked: Security Steps, now we look at the tools once more. I will reiterate the steps at the end of the post for completeness. However, let us begin by examining the tools. I have removed quite a few from my installs that I had previously recommended, and I will explain why below. Continue reading “WordPress Hacked: Security Steps and Cleanup Take III”

I recently received a pair of Gen8 blades for my enclosure, and it is time to change out my Gen6 and 7 blades for Gen8. Now, as with every upgrade, a fair amount of planning must occur in order to start this upgrade. I consider it a hardware upgrade, and while it should be straightforward, one cannot simply swap the blades. So much for the easy way. Continue reading “vSphere Upgrade Saga: Exchanging HP BL460c G6 with BL460c G8”

There are many features in vSphere 6.0, such as multi-vCPU Fault Tolerance, that I wish to use for my VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA), as it is the single point of failure. Backups have been made, but they will take quite a while to restore. With the new Fault Tolerance, there is a chance that restore might not be needed, thereby speeding up my recovery. vSphere 6.0 also includes improvements for NSX, VSAN, such as VMCP, long distance vMotion, VVOLs, changes to SSO deployment, and many other existing features, as well as a new web client. All of these make upgrading to 6.0 a worthwhile task. But to do so, you need to first make some preparations. Continue reading “vSphere Upgrade Saga: Planning for vSphere 6.0”

I recently upgraded my Retina MacBook Pro to Mac OS X Yosemite and had several issues with the upgrade. The OS upgraded fine; the applications I normally use, however, had some issues. Not many, to be sure, but the ones I did have were very interesting in that they dealt entirely with communication. They also had something to do with previous upgrades causing issues with the latest upgrade.

Continue reading “Mac OS Upgrade Saga: Moving to Yosemite”

I have written about upgrading VMware vCenter Log Insight (vLI) in the past, but I have not discussed my first content pak for Log Insight. You can find my discussion on how to set up this content pak below. This was recorded at VMworld 2014 by the vBrownBag folks. I would like to thank them for their effort and for allowing me to speak on this subject. Continue reading “vSphere Upgrade Saga: Log Insight Content Pak”