Category: Servers
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ESXi 6.5 – Error Loading /xorg.v00 Fatal Error: 33 (inconsistent data)
The Error During a recent thunderstorm one of the ESXi 6.5 hosts in my lab environment that was not on a UPS, rebooted from a power fluctuation and when it rebooted I received the following error: Error loading /xorg.v00 Compressed MD5: d04cc03dd29bbe3fe547e9566f79674c Decompressed MD5: 00000000000000000000000000000000 As the error indicates, the file /xorg.v00 appears to be…
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PowerEdge R610 – Updating Firmwares When the LifeCycle Controller Fails
Why You Should Always Update Firmwares! Security patches, new features and bug fixes – These are all very good reasons to ensure firmwares are up to date before moving your new servers into production. Things like the BIOS, RAID Controller, iDrac and network controllers will all usually have updates available. Some of these patches may…
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Installing VMware ESXi on an Internal USB?!
One of the things I get the most questions about with my VMware ESXi posts/videos is about installing ESXi onto USB drives and booting it from there, and that question is usually followed by the concern of someone accidentally or even maliciously removing the drive from the chassis. In the case of the Dell PowerEdge…
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Dell PowerEdge R610 Review – Virtualization On The Cheap
One of the things I always find myself telling anyone wanting to build out a home lab, is that it does not have to be expensive. The Dell PowerEdge R610 is a prime example of this and in this case I was able to pick up a matching pair of decently spec’d R610s that are…
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Home Lab Setup (2017)
In this post and video I give a quick run down of my Home Lab – everything from the rack itself, to the hardware and the basics of what everything is being used for. I started this project towards the end of 2012 with a single Dell PowerEdge 2950 GII and was hoping to teach…
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ELK Stack – Installing and Configuring Curator
In this post I am going to quickly cover what is needed to get Curator up and running on the ELK stack. In the last few posts about the ELK stack I covered everything needed to get it installed, configured and ingesting logs reliably. If you missed those posts, you can find them here: ELK…
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ELK Stack – Tips, Tricks and Troubleshooting
This post is going to be a sort of a follow up to my ELK 5 on Ubuntu 16.04 series. I am going to cover some of the lessons I have learned over the last few months of maintaining a running ELK stack instance. I am also going to cover some one liners that can…
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Installing and Configuring VMware vCenter 6.5 (VCSA)
In this third and final part of my VMware series, I go over all of the basics of getting the VMware vCenter 6.5 Server Appliance up and running. Everything that I show in the video can be done with the evaluation version of vCenter, which gives you up to 2 months of time to play…
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Powershell scripts fail when deployed via Group Policy as Startup scripts with Event ID 1055 and 1130
I recently went to deploy a new Powershell based Startup script in my test environment, and while the majority of my Windows machines happily complied, 2 of my test servers that were running Remote Desktop Services did not like the new Startup policy. The script itself was pretty straight forward – it pulled some files…
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Exploiting Apache Struts – CVE-2017-9805
CVE-2017-9805 is yet another very legitimate vulnerability in the Apache Struts framework. In the video, I demonstrate how easy it is to run a simple public python script against a vulnerable remote server, ultimately resulting in a reverse shell back to the attacker. In this post, I will cover all the steps shown in the…
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