/2023-04-19T15:13:30.418000-06:00https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2023/04/why-bitcoin-needs-to-go-to-zero.html 2023-04-19T15:08:00.003000-06:002023-04-19T15:13:30.418000-06:00

I wanted to play with ChatGPT and have it create a blog post. Here is my its first creation with some input/guidance from myself. Bitcoin has been touted as a revolutionary technology that can transform the way we store and transfer value. However, there are numerous reasons why it needs to go to zero. While the underlying technology behind Bitcoin, known as blockchain, is genuinely innovative…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2022/08/virtual-transparent-firewall-not-working.html 2022-08-19T17:09:00.015000-06:002022-08-19T17:26:03.340000-06:00

I have been successfully using a pfSense community edition firewall to protect my home test lab. My local ISP delivers me a subnet of addresses directly so I need to leverage a transparent firewall or "bridge" to protect the lab. After rebuilding a few pieces of the lab I restored my pfSense configuration to a new host/VM and found that no traffic was passing. I did a packet capture and did not…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2022/02/yum-update-failing-on-google-cloud-vm.html 2022-02-03T16:50:00.002000-07:002022-02-03T18:41:17.103000-07:00

I use google cloud's smallest VM for hosting my own DNS servers. I use the f1-micro instances that are very limited in memory and cpu, but cheap! During a regular yum update I received the following error and my instance (VM) failed to reboot. During the Cleanup part of yum update the google-cloud-sdk gave me this error: /var/tmp/rpm-tpm.rdz2f9: line 4: 11963 Killed gcloud components post-process…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2021/05/home-dns-fun.html 2021-05-05T20:00:00.012000-06:002021-05-05T21:56:43.045000-06:00

I recently purchased a USG-3P (Unified Secure Gateway) Ubiquiti Unify Home router. With its DHCP, everything points to this device as the DNS server for the house. I like this because I don't want to depend on my home lab being up for DNS (Internet) to be working for basic name resolution. However, I want my xyz.home.lab domains to resolve. I did a bunch of googling and found I needed to modify…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2021/04/sre-team-rules.html 2021-04-29T16:32:00.004000-06:002021-04-29T16:35:15.048000-06:00

I dug this up from many years ago, just as good today as it was then! Team Rules - by Brian Smith It's all about the customers! We must provide a reliable and cost effective solution! If there are customers on it, then it is in production and will be treated as production until the customers are off and it is NOT in production. You can't say that's not my job, you may direct someone to the…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2021/03/sre-buzzword-bingo.html 2021-03-24T12:26:00.004000-06:002021-03-24T12:26:53.617000-06:00

ok, it's not bingo, but it is a crossword https://crosswordlabs.com/view/sre-buzzword Enjoy!

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2021/03/what-does-sre-commonly-do-five.html 2021-03-24T11:54:00.005000-06:002021-03-24T12:01:13.834000-06:00

Here are some slides I've presented at a number of places people have asked me to post. Lastly i'd like to add that "Self Correcting Systems" are vital to the success of SRE. Of course we all hear about auto-remediation or self-healing technologies. While those are self evident I personally recommend you think about your people and processes. Think about the motivations, rewards and expected…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2020/09/what-is-sre.html 2020-09-30T16:38:00.031000-06:002020-11-19T16:34:33.570000-07:00

SRE is an abbreviation for Service Reliability Engineering, also known as Site Reliability Engineering. SRE can also be a job description for a Service(or Site) Reliability Engineer. DevOps is a methodology (and should never be someones title) where a developer supports the code they write in production. Service Reliability Engineering exists to improve reliability of services by writing software…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2020/04/wd-red-price-per-gb-april-2020.html 2020-04-10T13:29:00.002000-06:002020-04-10T13:30:42.492000-06:00

If you are like me, you do this exercise every time you need to buy a new drive. I always try to remember what it used to cost, so I'm just going to start posting them here. WD RED TB Size Price Cost per GB 1 $ 61.27 $ 61.27 2 $ 78.92 $ 39.46 3 $ 96.99 $ 32.33 4 $ 101.99 $ 25.50 6 $ 156.49 $ 26.08 8 $ 224.99 $ 28.12 10 $ 300.00 $ 30.00 12 $ 357.93 $ 29.83 14 $ 462.90 $ 33.06

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2019/05/blogs-on-vmware-site.html 2019-05-03T07:52:00-06:002019-05-03T07:52:19.548000-06:00

Recently, most of my blogging has been directly on VMware site. I thought i'd link you to a couple of the more popular ones here. Embracing a DevOps Mindset, this is all about leading a team through a cultural transformation https://blogs.vmware.com/vov/2018/07/25/embracing-a-devops-mindset-in-vmware-it-cloud-operations/ Are we ready?, a post about how VMware makes sure its SaaS services are…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2018/08/troubleshooting-101.html 2018-08-23T14:12:00-06:002019-05-03T10:52:47.920000-06:00

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #dca10d} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 2.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px 'Helvetica Neue'} span.s1 {text-decoration: underline} Think of yourself as a doctor, but for computers. Start with "DO NO HARM" as your credo. Don't make things worse, snapshots, GO SLOWLY,…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2016/03/netgear-vlan-pvid.html 2016-03-19T23:06:00-06:002016-03-19T23:24:52.083000-06:00

Rebuilding my home lab tonight, I got stuck because every time I plugged a cable into my switch, everything died. I came to realize that the reason for my problems was the fact I had been moving cables around in my Netgear GS748T v5 switch and even though it seemed like the VLANs configs were correct, somehow my old PVID ( Advanced-Port PVID Configuration ) settings were messing things up. The…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2013/12/vmware-vsan-iops-testing.html 2013-12-09T09:30:00.001000-07:002013-12-09T09:36:45.824000-07:00

Take this with a grain of sand, these are only initial figures. I am using a combination of IOMeter for Windows and fio for Linux. Baseline redundancy and caching, no storage profiles used, only using vSAN as a datastore (I’ll do the other options later) My vSAN is made of 3 identical ESXi hosts, with a single SSD Samsung 840 250GB, and two Seagate 750GB SATA drives. vSAN has a dedicated single…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2013/12/vmware-vsphere-55-vsan-beta-ineligable.html 2013-12-08T17:36:00.001000-07:002013-12-09T09:11:15.906000-07:00

While building my home lab to use vSAN and NSX following Cormac Hogans 's great instructions , I've encountered an issue that the disk I am trying to use for vSAN are not showing as available. In the "Cluster/Manage/Virtual SAN/Disk Management" under Disk Groups, I see only one of my 3 hosts has 0/2 disks in use, the others show 0/1. My setup is this, I purchased 3 new 250GB Samsung SSD drives…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2013/11/vmworld-2013-hands-on-labs-dashboards.html 2013-11-25T10:59:00.001000-07:002013-11-25T11:35:51.303000-07:00

I’ve been asked several times to publish these as not everyone got to take pictures, or they were not clear enough. We chose to build custom VMware® vCenter™ Operations Management Suite™ (vC Ops) dashboards. The Built-in vC Ops dashboards are build around a normal datacenter where workloads live indefinitely, and trending is key, for our environment, workloads are created and destroyed so…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2013/08/vmworld-hol-using-vcva-vcenter-virtual.html 2013-08-28T10:51:00-06:002013-08-28T11:06:32.504000-06:00

This is the first of a series of HOL posts about "how we did it". For the primary workload, we used the vCenter Virtual Appliance using the local Postgres database. Due to the unusually high churn rate of HOL, we need to have a high ratio of vCenters. These vCenters needed to have a lot of horsepower behind them to survive this churn. 1) Paravirtualized SCSI adaptors for disk controllers for the…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2013/08/esxi-51vhost-vds-ports-on-stateless.html 2013-08-28T10:23:00-06:002013-08-28T10:55:17.932000-06:00

By default when you set the ports on hosts max to 1024, after reboot, it goes back to 512 on a stateless host. This is a known issue in the 5.1 release notes . maxProxySwitchPorts setting not persistent after stateless host reboot The maximum number of ports on a host is reset to 512 after the host is rebooted and a host profile applied. When you set maxProxySwitchPorts on a specific stateless…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2013/07/vsphere-51-update1-new-build-1117900.html 2013-07-03T09:40:00.001000-06:002013-07-03T09:44:54.086000-06:00

VMware released 5.1U1 on April 25th with Build 1065491. There were some critical bugs identified and fixed, so if you are using 5.1U1 with Intel Processors, you may want to use build 1117900, which came out May 22nd. This build fixes some bugs about occasional PSOD (purple screen of death) related Flex Priority in Intel processors (part of the VT featureset). Here is the Build KB…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2013/07/storage-iops-planning.html 2013-07-02T15:06:00.001000-06:002013-07-02T15:06:07.001000-06:00

The limit on the VNX is the Storage Processors. Utilizing the aggressive numbers is likely to see significant impact to the workloads. Array Conservative Typical Aggressive VNX7500 60,000 80,0000 100,000 S200 Isilon 8,000 (per node) 10,000 12,000

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2013/05/new-performance-and-optimizations.html 2013-05-09T12:13:00.003000-06:002013-05-09T12:25:54.569000-06:00

vCloud http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-vCloud-Director51-Perf.pdf vSphere http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.1.pdf

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2013/05/getting-your-memory-sabings-back-on.html 2013-05-09T11:46:00-06:002013-05-09T12:27:37.186000-06:00

Many other VCDX's have posted all the technical details about this before, so this isn't revolutionary, but back in the day's of 32 bit OS's their memory was stored in small 4k pages on the ESXi host. TPS was great at comparing and colapsing these and generating huge memory savings, typically about 30%. Now with modern 64 bit OS's, this memory is stored in large 2MB pages by default. The reason…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2013/04/vds-port-limits.html 2013-04-26T15:04:00.001000-06:002013-04-26T15:05:10.894000-06:00

Mnaging the maximum number of ports you can have on a distributed switch has always been difficult for those of us running large clouds. It appears that with vSphere 5.1 that limit has mostly been removed. In vSphere 4.0 the limit was 4,096, in 4.1, it was 8,192 but could be modified with PowerCLI to 20,000. As of vSphere 5.0 the limit was 30k, now in 5.1 that limit is 60k. However today we…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2013/03/datastore-connectivity-issues.html 2013-03-11T16:09:00.002000-06:002013-03-11T16:10:24.601000-06:00

We have a shared datastore to provide global catalogs to our various ORG's in the vCloud. For whatever reason several ESX hosts across mulitple clusters were reporting APD (all path's down) when trying to connect to this VNX NFS Export. After putting those hosts into maintenance mode, everything seemed happy again. We did quite a bit of digging, it turned out all servers had the same patch level,…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2012/09/cant-create-vmware-standard-switch-vss.html 2012-09-20T10:47:00.001000-06:002012-09-20T10:48:53.210000-06:00

I thought perhaps we had removed this functionality in vSphere 5.1, but it is still there, just very buried. You have to go into the properties of the Host, Actions/All vCenter Actions/ Add Networking.. (see below) Here is the published document on how to do it.

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2012/09/deploying-vcloud-director-51-virtual.html 2012-09-19T13:34:00.001000-06:002012-09-19T13:45:41.126000-06:00

This is a guide for deploying vCloud in a LAB environment, these settings are not the most secure or performant, but this should get you up and running with vCloud 5.1 so you can test and learn it. The easiest way is with the appliance, you don’t need to use a MS SQL DB, but occasionally I need to crack open the DB and I am the most comfortable with that technology. My Assumptions about what you…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2012/09/buildinstall-vmware-vcloud-51-on-rhel-62.html 2012-09-18T17:01:00.001000-06:002012-09-19T13:36:51.182000-06:00

This is a down and dirty guide for deploying vCloud in a LAB environment, these settings are not the most secure or performant, but this should get you up and running with vCloud 5.1 so you can test and learn it. The easiest way is with the appliance , but if your like me and want to roll your own, this is the guide. I am using RHEL 6.2 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 64 bit, Update 2) because it is…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2012/09/disable-fibre-channel-hba-so-i-can.html 2012-09-11T17:32:00-06:002012-09-12T11:42:44.396000-06:00

We are doing a forklift upgrade of our servers, in order to do so, I would like to connect my esx hosts to both fabrics for a while so I can transfer the VM's over that network and not the front end ethernet network. Because I don't want to make changes to the legacy Fibre, and I don't want to connect the fabrics more than I must, I will disconnect the redundant fibre cable from each ESX host and…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2012/09/whats-new-guides-for-new-products.html 2012-09-07T10:28:00.001000-06:002012-09-07T10:28:47.083000-06:00

If your like me, you always want to know what changed in the latest version, so here is a list of links to all the new PDF’s vSphere 5.1 (Marketing Overview) VMware vCloud Suite (Marketing Overview) vSphere 5.1 vCenter vSphere 5.1 Performance vSphere 5.1 Storage vSphere 5.1 Networking vSphere 5.1 Platform vSphere 5.1 Storage Appliance vCloud Director 5.1 vSphere Replication vSphere Data…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2012/08/lab-manager-4-runs-out-of-ports-on-your.html 2012-08-06T12:23:00.001000-06:002012-08-06T12:25:00.401000-06:00

If you see an Error such as: Unable to deploy virtual machines in resource pool "LBM4". Error deploying configuration networks. dvs.VmwareDistributedVirtualSwitch.addPortgroups task on AddDVPortgroup_Task failed: fault.LimitExceeded.summary The numPorts value : 8215 in spec exceeded maxPorts 8192. Even though the vDS (VMware Distributed Switch) maximum went up from 4,096 to 20,000 in vSphere 4.1,…

https://bsmith9999.blogspot.com/2012/07/vcdx-spotlight-91.html 2012-07-31T09:22:00.001000-06:002012-07-31T09:22:04.749000-06:00

Greg Robertson recently did a VCDX Spotlight paper about me, Thanks for the mention! http://thesaffageek.co.uk/2012/07/31/vcdx-spotlight-brian-smith/