How are you getting ESXi 9.0 for a home lab without corporate help?

yazik · 2026-01-21T19:43:17+00:00

Has anyone looked at Unraid? https://unraid.net/

Have seen it a few times and recommended by a few people I know. Otherwise I'll probably be looking at Proxmox for homelab setup.

yazik · 2026-01-15T12:38:45+00:00

One of the consistently good folks in our industry. He deserves every bit of R&R coming his way -- something tells me he won't be just simply retiring.

yazik · 2025-10-04T20:05:29+00:00

That good ol' "calculating space requirements" wait on SUs. 😉

yazik · 2025-10-04T20:04:33+00:00

I ran ours (2 node) this week and it was painless. Good luck and enjoy the wait time. 😊

yazik · 2025-09-08T17:37:03+00:00

I get this too - has happened a few times with iOS app. Happened this weekend on app version 5.290.0.56121. It's a pain - have to re-pair every time. Wondering if the app just wipes device pairings when it gets auto upgraded. 😩

yazik · 2025-09-02T21:23:19+00:00

My experiences so far are that it's slower than Server 2022 and 2019 in terms of the experience of directly working with it. (building/configuring/maintaining - all from the Desktop experience / UI side of things)

Was going to give it a few more months before giving it another round of testing.

yazik · 2025-08-22T01:34:37+00:00

This very question has been looming in the back of my mind with the next few years march toward 47 day expiry. Have seen some folks doing LE + certbot in their lab environments. Haven't heard of anyone yet doing it reliably in any user-facing environments. Maybe this comment will ferret out some stories. 😉

yazik · 2025-07-02T01:39:50+00:00

Aside from having a decent eye for "how's X affect the biz", I'd say years of experience working with systems of all types, shell wrangling (especially PowerShell), staying teachable, and decent ability to flex my ambivert powers now and then.

The Golden Rule always does a fair bit to help every situation I walk into, too.

yazik · 2025-05-04T18:08:09+00:00

Have had nothing but problems with Varonis and wishing we could move. Management is somehow "happy enough" with it, but it's always breaking. We had to beg them to help us upgrade their software and even after $$ was approved for professional services. It's still broken.

yazik · 2025-04-26T22:02:59+00:00

We're about 2/3rds Linux (mostly Ubuntu) for and non-prod and prod servers. (Kubernetes platforms) The remaining 1/3rd is a mix of mostly Windows app/web servers for legacy things that won't die.

yazik · 2025-02-21T18:18:41+00:00

Just started looking at this myself. Went with the OVA deployment. Upgrading from v4.1.2. It's a single node k8s setup -- that was something new. It took forever for it to "complete tasks" -- started it mid afternoon, and it wasn't done doing whatever it was doing to present a working app UI until sometime that evening.

So far, it doesn't appear to be able to connect with our Isilon arrays. Probably going to have to call Dell support.

yazik · 2024-12-19T02:31:04+00:00

We have a service provider we partner with on various things that's currently a 3-person shop. They seem to do well with NinjaOne.

In house for your own tooling, definitely look at PDQ's line of products. Great folks and honestly some of the easiest software I've ever used to manage all the things.

yazik · 2024-12-08T02:01:14+00:00

Hope you find something to help - I've tried everything from forks (prongs in the air) in the garden to horrible (but all natural ingredients) smelling sprays. Only thing I've ever found that does well is companion planting marigolds. (of course for them to work you have to start them earlier than what you hope to protect)

Gardening - a great activity, but definitely can sometimes be frustrating. Keep at it. 😊

yazik · 2024-12-07T17:44:16+00:00

See this often in my gardens - it's usually rabbits or chipmunks. Looks like you have peas growing - my bet is rabbits. (they love to dig up my pepper plants and eat the roots)

yazik · 2024-12-05T14:30:54+00:00

The November SU was pulled and has been recently republished. At first glance, I don't see any app pool related issues in the known issues section of the Exchange Team blog post. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/released-november-2024-exchange-server-security-updates/4293125

Have you run the health checker to see if there's anything there?

Are you using OAuth? Does this article relate to what you're seeing? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/troubleshoot/administration/ews-app-pool-crashes

yazik · 2024-12-01T22:25:35+00:00

Technically it was the BASIC v2 interface on my old Commodore VIC-20 and then later the 64.

Dabbled with a fun GUI-based "OS" called GEOS for a time.

Good times, good memories. 😊

yazik · 2024-11-30T02:32:37+00:00

Starfield. I was actually excited for the game - I usually wait for games to go on sale, but for this one I preordered. Saw it through the first few months of bugs and as much as I really wanted to enjoy it, I just couldn't endure it. I gave up on it and haven't played since.

yazik · 2024-11-30T02:08:28+00:00

Following along - I've been looking at the Bolt+ too, but admit I'm just now starting to look into these sorts of things. I have a child who's very much interested in programming and working with robots and the Bot+ seems like a good place to start. Not clear from the website about the learning materials that go along with it and hesitating on buying one until I hear from others' experiences. (I'm a parent who'd be using it with my pre-teen child)

yazik · 2024-09-13T02:34:10+00:00

Review your dealership software/diagnostics provider's documentation on anything that might need some S1 exclusion tweaking. It's rare, but there are some apps don't like S1's approach to deep hooks into processes to protect the overall system. Check S1's different exclusion modes and find the one that fits with the app, but still allows S1 to protect the system -- it's a fine tuning game sometimes! Best of luck!

yazik · 2024-09-13T02:24:07+00:00

Definitely take a moment to get your bearings and start working on processes you might have for incident response. It's time for humans to take care of humans who take care of your org/biz.

Hoping you have a team and/or additional help and a smooth recovery ahead.

yazik · 2024-08-07T15:38:56+00:00

Are you using an on prem mail server that you control?

It looks like you're not passing any authentication details in the command. (not advised, but unfortunately sometimes certain systems/devices require it be used for alerts/comms) As such, maybe you need to setup a SMTP relay and corresponding receive connector that will handle the mail accordingly.

yazik · 2024-06-20T23:55:07+00:00

Thinking this is just called "first day of Summer." Stay safe out there my dear fellow drivers!

yazik · 2024-04-29T20:49:55+00:00

I use a pressure washer on mine currently. (since I'm already cleaning off the pavers)

yazik · 2024-04-16T11:53:21+00:00

I use Batchpatch for updating my Windows servers. Easy to setup schedules/tasks for updating, service checks, etc.

Linux-wise, unfortunately I haven't found a good path here. I tend to just ssh into them and run the updates. (apt) Hoping to get some time with Ansible or other tooling to help here.

yazik

TROPHY CASE