The switches in Ethernet networks learn all connected hosts’ link-layer addresses (layer 2 or MAC (Media Access Control) addresses) dynamically when the hosts communicate in the network and the switches see the traffic. Based on that information the switches are then able to forward frames optimally without flooding. When you disconnect a physical host from […]
Category: Server virtualization
HE Dynamic DNS ACME Support for Proxmox VE
Since the Broadcom’s announcement about changing the licensing for VMware vSphere products and discarding the free Hypervisor license, there has been a massive uptake for other virtualization platforms. Also in my own systems, where I reinstalled the ESXi hosts as Proxmox Virtual Environment (PVE) nodes, and imported the existing virtual machines in the new platform. […]
Get Linux Distribution Name and Version with Python
Since Debian 10 Buster there is no minor version number in lsb_release output or /etc/os-release anymore. Bug has been filed, but apparently there is no will to get the full version number back. The dist() and linux_distribution() functions in the platform module in Python have been deprecated in 3.5 and removed in 3.8.0: Also, the […]
NetBox Install on Debian 9
When installing NetBox on Debian 9 and Apache, the instructions in http://netbox.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ are fine, just some small additional operations are needed. The libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3 package needs to be installed as well, otherwise you will get errors about the “WSGIPassAuthorization on” command when starting Apache [this has later been addressed in commit b917e8d] Disable the “000-default” site […]
TLS Certificates in Debian and Apache
Adding TLS configurations in Apache: cat > /etc/ssl/private/myserver.key chmod 0640 /etc/ssl/private/myserver.key chgrp ssl-cert /etc/ssl/private/myserver.key cat > /etc/ssl/certs/myserver.crt cd /etc/apache2/sites-available cp default-ssl.conf myserver-ssl.conf vi myserver-ssl.conf – add ServerName if needed – RedirectMatch ^/$ https://myserver.mydomain.com/appname (if needed) – edit SSLCertificateFile and SSLCertificateKeyFile a2ensite myserver-ssl a2enmod ssl vi 000-default.conf – add ServerName if needed – Redirect / https://myserver.mydomain.com/ […]
Installing AWS CLI on Cygwin
To get AWS CLI working in Cygwin: Install “python2-pip” with the Cygwin installer (and accept whatever dependencies it brings) Run “pip2 install awscli“ See what you have: “aws –version“, and continue with the usual “aws configure” procedure. Using AWS CLI is not very fast in this setup however. For example, showing specific Virtual Private Gateway […]
SoftEther VPN with a VPN Address Pool
For replacing a physical remote access VPN implementation with a VPN server in a virtual machine, one of the options is SoftEther. There is a lot of documentation in the site but somehow I felt the material was hard to absorb. In this post I describe the reference implementation I managed to complete with SoftEther. […]
Setting Up a Syslog Server
In the field of networking it is very useful to have a centralized location for your logs as the system itself (the network) is distributed. Syslog is the usual method of collecting the logs. There are lots of different solutions to collect syslogs, ranging from general-purpose servers or virtual machines running some syslog daemon software […]
Installing VMware Tools on Debian Linux
[Updated on 1-Apr-2017: For a long time now I haven’t bothered with installing VMware Tools manually anymore. Instead I’ve just used the open-vm-tools package included in Debian, so a plain “apt-get install open-vm-tools” does the job. I’ve understood that some features are missing when compared to the original VMware Tools, so be sure to check […]
Building My Own VMware vSphere Hypervisor Host
As I wrote in my previous post, I’m building my own VMware vSphere Hypervisor (a.k.a. ESXi) host. Today I was able to get the first Debian server running on it! Let me go through the platform install for us. Planning the Hardware I was totally not planning to get a rackmount server or even a […]