A few months ago a freshly retired Dell Poweredge T310 came back to the office, I plugged it into the network and left it off in the unlikely event it data was needed off it. It’s now I’m remote to the office, and need it’s data.
No problem I thought, use the iDrac to log into the ESXi console and set a new IP as it is statically assigned to a different subnet to the office…
Trouble is, the iDrac is so out of date I can’t get to its web interface on any browser available to my Windows 10 machine.
This is how to get access to an outdated iDrac 6 web interface and remote console…
There are occasions when the storage capacity of a virtual drive needs to be increased. In production environments a backup and re-install of an OS to a higher capacity provision may not be practical.
Many of our systems deployed from OVA’s use Gentoo as it’s base OS for inexplicable reasons, here’s how to increase the drive capacity of a VM instance running Gentoo and make the extra space usable…
2021 is here and so returns (In the UK at least) one of my favourite shows to Netflix, The Office (US). Since starting working in VoIP its hard not to notice what phones turn up in TV shows, here the Cisco 7960, was prolific for showing up in shows around this era.
So why not, nearly 16 years after the show started, try and get one of these working on an Asterisk PBX? At work we had a number of similar 7940 models that hadn’t be used for years, so why not give it a try…
Recently
I’ve had the opportunity to deploy and test a call centre PBX product to gauge
if its viable to offer as a product and how it will sit within our
infrastructure.
Installing and poking around the GUI is all well and good but to really find out how a PBX behaves it needs some traffic, to find outs its performance in regards to resources but also to find out what a vendor’s interpretation of an advertised feature actually is.
To generate sample calls, instead of registering handsets/softphones and dialling manually it would be better to automate this, and SIPp is the perfect tool for this.
I like this time of year, a chance to reflect on the last 12 months and take stock of accomplishments and realise the achievements. And something I like to gauge a success on is the longevity of a solution, and a time-lapse comparison 6 months apart is seemingly my go to example.
To elaborate on this achievement, earlier this year was the setup of a homebrew CCTV solution using an array of Raspberry Pi’s with cameras, and a VM Cent OS server acting as a PVR host. A surplus Pi W Zero was pointed at the hills and used as a time-lapse experiment.
The real achievement is that since its conception in early June,
it has been stable enough to run in the background, capturing footage for such an
occasion.
So here I present my latest time-lapse, a split screen video on the difference between a June day and a December day:
If you’d ever searched for Raspberry Pi projects that
involved a camera then the results would certainly include Motioneye OS, an
easy to use self-contained operating system that is truly (write then) plug and
play.
Looking for a CCTV project earlier this year I too was drawn in by this, and with my small abundance of RPi spares it was the cheapest choice, using a couple of RPi 3B+ for video, and a Zero W for time-lapse image capture. All processing was self-contained on each Pi with capture data passed over via SMB to a Windows file share.
This worked, but had a couple of problems that prevented it
from being trustworthy. Firstly, it stops recording video after a few days of
uptime, by creating empty files. And secondly the time-lapse camera seemed to
reset every few minutes that created in white out image capture as the camera’s
exposure setting recalibrated, ruining a time-lapse video.
Looking wider there was also the performance issue. In
Motioneye OS’ default state of managing all features, the highest FPS seemed to
max at 15 fps even on the Pi 3B+. Forums suggest this is due to the motion eye
daemon handling all the image processing in software, putting a strain on the Pi’s
modest CPU.
The idea and goal is to move the processing and IO
responsibilities to my server, which would be far more capable than the then
latest available RPi, and as I have chosen Cent OS to be my go-to Linux OS of
choice, this is what I’ll be using.
A gateway to make this possible is an option in Motioneye OS, Fast Network Camera. This when set relinquishes the Pi of all processing duties and serves to just stream the camera capture as best as possible via MJPEG.
Here’s how to set up Motioneye on a Cent OS server to be a central data hub for a network of RPi Motioneye OS cameras.
Before we start, a story. When I created my first web server, I’d found a copy of Windows NT Server 4.0, upgraded it to Service Pack 6a to get IIS enabled, opened port 80 on the router and viola, working webserver. This was 2001 and unfortunately my creation of a webserver coincided with the spread of the Code Red virus, and it reached my server within days of it being online.
Not knowing at the time, and thinking it was a one off,
formatted the hard drive and completed the whole setup again. A day passed
before the virus was back. Now with the knowledge of what was happening and wary
of it happening again. I rebuilt the server and this time put the website
behind port 8080, this time the virus never returned.
I thought to myself that this was security through
obscurity, and with the victory over Code Red, was something I held onto for
many years.
I applied this method when it came to opening RDP access to
the outside world, choosing a seemingly obscure port 8021 on each network
setup. However, I’ve been dealt a wakeup call following what I’ve just seen…
From time to time we come across legacy applications and deployments that you didn’t know exist until something goes wrong with it. This week it was an unbeknown to me Joomla website that had been ticking over since 2012. However recent visits to the site got this result:
A report came in on this issue and a few checks of the domain DNS revealed it was on a platform we use for domains and web hosting.
Not overly familiar with the hosting company from a website standpoint and even less with Joomla, it was time to first fathom out how it works, and them find the problem and fix
As the years pass by we find ourselves moving on from an old computer to making a clean start with something more relevant, and when migrating to a new PC or laptop its always a worry that you may leave something behind. Luckily these days, instead of having a laptop laying about in its last used state for fear of losing that once forgotten file or program, the whole system can be virtualised on a server or donor machine for such eventualities, paving the way for the physical machine to be reused or recycled.
My method is to use VMware Standalone Convertor Wizard to convert physical machines to an ESXI 6.5 host. All previous conversions have been seamless however the latest conversion of a Fujitsu U904 laptop didn’t go as so, the conversion process completed without a hitch, but when starting the newly created VM I found that keyboard input was unresponsive. Continue reading “VMWare: No Keyboard on Newly Virtualised Machine”
While setting up a backup solution for my home network, I had an issue where my Windows Server 2012 R2 backup task would fail, with the following status:
“There is not enough disk space to create the volume shadow copy on the storage location. Make sure that, for all volumes to be backed up, the minimum required disk space for shadow copy creation is available. This applies to both the backup storage destination and the volumes included in the backup.
Minimum Requirement: For volumes less than 500 megabytes, the minimum is 50 megabytes of free space. For volumes more than 500 megabytes, the minimum is 320 megabytes of free space.
Recommended: At least 1 gigabyte of free disk space on each volume if volume size is more than 1 gigabyte.
Detailed error: Insufficient storage available to create either the shadow copy storage file or other shadow copy data.”
This doesn’t really explain the issue, as setting up a schedule with Windows Server Backup in 2012 involves the utility checking available storage before creating the backup task, and a manual check showed there was ample storage on the destination volume, with the source volume having 86% free space.
Delving into the Event Viewer for more detailed error message, I get this:
