Illustration above by Randall Munroe, with the full comic strip at xkcd.com/1354. See also preorders for his What If? book. April 9th 2014 got off to a rough start, with my phone alerting me about TinkerTry.com downtime overnight. Turns out my CentOS instance ran its usual overnight chron job to …
Welcome to the very first weekend after the Tuesday March 11 2014 arrival of ESXi 5.5 Update 1! Given the number of folks likely to be tinkering with their own home labs right now, felt it might be a good idea to share my own preliminary experiences. If you've been here before, you'll know about my …
Aug 04 2014 Update: See also Problems downloading VMware vSphere VMware vCenter Server 5.5 Update 1c Appliance, and a way to download 1b (that can be updated to 1c). Original article appears below To get started with your own vSphere 5.5 home lab, you'll find that there's just 3 files needed. …
I had Vonage for 7 years for my 2 phone lines, but the prices crept up to the point where the savings over cable company phone lines had nearly vanished. I then tried Ooma for the past 2 years or so, and the voice quality has been decent. After spending about $220 in hardware to get going with the…
The public internet is a scary place. It's where your home's WiFi router lives, one "foot" on the outside, the other on the inside, vulnerable to attack as it works to protect your home's precious, connected gadgets. I've been doing some security "tuning" in the months since I…
Whatever you think of Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson, this is quite the entertaining episode. Leo has a hard time hiding his disdain for Comcast. While I don't (yet) have this cable giant in my town, this episode explores the far-reaching implications of all this, and a bunch of other interesting…
Are you interested in being able to use public WiFi, with considerably less fear unscrupulous folks around you might be sniffing your packets, looking for tasty morsels of unencrypted goodness? You know, things like an email account that might be pulling IMAP messages over an unencrypted…
What if you'd like to connect your Windows 8.1 laptop to four routers, each at factory defaults, doing the initial configuration, one router at a time. But each router is also a DHCP server, feeding your laptop with a 192.168.1.x address. If you put an ethernet switch or hub between your laptop and…
Ever found yourself with a Windows system that just won't let you browse the local network? If you're on a public connection, like at an airport or hotel WiFi, you'd expect this behavior, a good thing. If you're on a wired or WiFi connection at home, Windows may sometimes mysteriously wind up with …
Like peanut butter and jelly. Spaghetti and meatballs. Bluetooth headphones and yardwork. You know, things that go well together. I put together some of my favorite practical, efficient things that I have personally tested out. Useful around my own home, withstanding the test of time. Saving you…
I'm honored to have been invited back, for another visit with Mike Faucher, to be the guest on the BYOB (Build Your Own Box) podcast. This time, Mike discussed his recent rack mount enclosure experiences, and I talked all about my recent trials and tribulations trying to get to 150Mbps down and 50…
support.microsoft.com/kb/2862551 The "DNS auto-detect and configure" feature turns on after Connector is installed on clients. This feature tries to find the server that is running Windows Server 2012 Essentials, and then uses the server’s address as the client's DNS address. This may c…
You may have seen headlines about the new TiVo app update, such as this article from last week: TiVo iOS apps now let you stream and download shows from Roamio DVRs anywhere there's Wi-Fi The Roamio starts to live up to its name, by Nilay Patel on Oct 24 2013, The Verge: The TiVo Roamio Pro and Plu…
Tonight, I was listening to This Week In Computer Hardware 195, where 5 minutes in, hosts Patrick Norton and Ryan Shrout have an interesting discussion about the wireless interference issue with USB 3.0, especially when external USB 3.0 drives are in use. It's all described with scientific preci…
For weeks, I've been trying to help my ISP, Cox, get to the bottom of a sporadic slowdown of my home broadband service. These sort of intermittent issues are the hardest to nail down, and can be expensive and aggravating to resolve. All members of the household would simultaneously notice a 3-5…
In the last few weeks, I've had intermittent internet issues, where the speed would drop to about 1Mbps down and 0.1Mbps up for a few minutes at a time. Checking into my cable modem's log files, I could tell Cox (US cable provider) what times I was affected, as we tried to get closer to a solution.…
There's considerable demand apparently (voicemail, emails, and comments) for me to cut to the chase and draw some preliminary conclusions, based on my experiences so far. At this point in time, Dec 07 2013, I've got a month of 24x7 use of the winner in my house, so I'm beginning to form stronger…
Taking a moment from my usual technical writing to share a big picture view of some things I've noticed since ESXi 5.5 was released 11 days ago. That's not a lot of time, so we should all refrain from jumping to any big conclusions just yet. But it does seem that a bit of housekeeping is happening, …
Here's a quick look at the TP-LINK Gigabit PCI Express Network Adapter TG-3468, found on Amazon or Newegg for around $13 USD, with a nice product overview here. Yeah, it's only one port. But it works right up through ESXi 5.1, out of the box. With 5.5, since it's based on a Realtek chipset, you'll …
Here's a quick look at the Intel I350T2 Dual Port Ethernet Server Adapter, found on Amazon or Newegg for around $135 USD, with a nice Intel Product Brief here: The Intel® Ethernet Server Adapter I350 family includes Intel® Virtualization Technology for connectivity (Intel® VT-c) to deliver I/O virtua…
ESXi 5.0 and 5.1 all worked fine with the common Realtek 8111/8168 series of network adapters, typically found in a variety of consumer-class motherboards. What to do for ESXi 5.5 in the home lab? Suddenly you can't even install ESXi, even though you have a perfectly workable system that happens to …
Sep 25 2013 Update: vSphere 5.5 has been released, including ESXi 5.5 and vCenter Server Appliance 5.5. This problem with Single Sign On not liking lack of reverse DNS lookup is still there, so this post is still relevant. Figured out a work around yesterday, to be properly documented (write-up and…
Consider using powercfg to arm a device to wake your PC up, and for un-arming other devices. Desktop, laptop, ultrabook, doesn't matter. Same straight forward commands, Windows 7 or Windows 8. Read more about powercfg over here. WOL (Wake-On-LAN) and those magic packets have been around since 1998.…
UPnP might be running on your router's Internet (WAN) port. Here's an excerpt from the wiki article on Universal Plug and Play, explaining what UPnP was intended to do: seamlessly discover each other's presence on the network and establish functional network services for data sharing, c…
TinkerTry - PCs, EVs, home tech, efficiency and more, including virtualization. My opinions here, not my employer's.
Paul Braren, MCSE in 1998, VCP #2681 in 2005, vExpert 2014 to 2024, Veeam Vanguard Emeritus, 2015 to 2019.
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After 6 successful years testing then shipping well over 1,000 Xeon D Bundles, Wiredzone had to stop selling them in mid-2021 due to cost, supply, and logistics challenges. So far, Xeon D-1700/2700 (Ice Lake D) was a minor refresh for 2023, with Xeon D-1800/2800 (Granite Rapids D) refresh looking a little better for 2024. More cores, but still just PCIe Gen4 and DDR4. Looking ahead, I'm glad it's Pat Gelsinger at Intel's helm. I'm also grateful to have had the honor of working at VMware when Pat was the CIO there. I'll leave it at that, given the whole Broadcom thing.
Easily update VMware ESXi at TinkerTry.com/easy-update-to-latest-esxi
