grelbar.net

stories from the trenches.. vmware, san, backups and general hacking

14 Aug
2023

Temperatures Rising

I recently purchased an Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti from the second hand market. The seller assured me the card was in great working order, and that temperatures were good in the small case he was testing it in before shipping. I trusted the seller, and skipped my own due diligence. Per MSI Afterburner and sources […]

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15 Jul
2023

In need of rest

I recently had some odd issues with Windows 10 Pro (22H2) at home. For the longest while, I had working sleep. Then, all of a sudden, I was deprived of this essential talent. After a career in IT spanning three decades, I still sometimes have to stop and be amazed at how simple things manage […]

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27 Nov
2022

Auditory woes

My son recently had an interesting issue on his computer. He had recently switched out graphics cards (very proud of him!) and in the process there were some driver issues. Even though he went from Nvidia to Nvidia, there were bluescreens and it took a few reboots for him to get back to the desktop […]

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28 Oct
2020

DRS vCLS wtf?

vSphere 7 update 1 presents – the vCLS (vSphere Clustering Services) appliances which take care of, well, clustering services. They are now an integral bit of how DRS (and HA) works, if turned on. The catch seems to be disconnecting these functions from vCenter, where this functionality was previously integrated. As smarter people (namely Niels […]

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25 Oct
2020

VCSA 7 u1 update woes

“Don’t be hasty master Meriadoc” I was being hasty while updating my own lab vCenter Appliance to 7.0 U1a patch. I started the process from the VCSA gui as usual, but the download was interrupted at 3% (perhaps from a fault of my own), leaving the install in a messed up state. Refreshing the gui […]

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7 May
2020

VSS to DVS – a tale

Recently, me and a colleague were working on upgrading parts of a VMWare infrastructure from a mostly 1 Gbps network configuration to a mostly 10 Gbps network configuration as well as adding a 10G vMotion network. Cabling was already done at this point, but I’ll list the configuration below for posterity: 4 hosts Each host […]

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16 May
2018

Lenovo Thinkpad X270 – Dipping my toes in

The battery life of my previous work laptop, the T460s (first impressions -review here) had become abysmal after about two years of use. I tried to find a solution, but since the batteries are non-replaceable without surgical procedures, the only option would have been to get something like an external battery to keep using it. […]

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30 Mar
2018

Sierra Wireless EM7455 issues on Win 10 Fall 2017 and Workaround

As a somewhat ambivalent user of a Lenovo Thinkpad T460s laptop loaded with Windows 10 Enterprise and latest updates. After the Fall 2017 Creators update from Microsoft, the built in 4G Modem, a Sierra Wireless EM7455 stopped working. But not in an obvious way. You could still connect the 4G modem, and you’d have “bars” […]

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19 May
2017

Patching ScaleIO 2.0 VMware Hosts

Recently did an ESXi patch run, along with some BIOS and firmware updates on a ScaleIO 2.x environment (more precisely 2.0.5014.0). The environment consists of some Dell PowerEdge servers, some of which are ESXi 6.0 build 3380124, someĀ are Linux based, non-virtualized hosts. Luckily this environment was ScaleIO 2.x, because this version has a real maintenance […]

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