pfSense 2.0 RC3 embedded with VGA

Last week I blogged about hacking up an old Google Mini appliance and transforming it in to a energy efficient pfSense router. Today I wanted to make a quick note about how to setup pfSense 2.0 RC3 embedded with VGA. For many years I used pfSense 1.2 on a older pentium III. What drew me to pfSense was its small platform and ability to run off a compact flash card. It was only after I purchased some used 1u vpn routers that had compact flash card readers built in that I started researching about the embedded version. These same appliances had VGA ports and usb ports, along with 4 network ports and 1 additional PCI device (wifi or lan for example). After searching around a bit I found Hacom, an embedded systems and appliance company. These great folks have provided their modified factory embedded install, enabling VGA and USB while still running off a small 256mg-4gb compact flash card. Now that I am more accustom to console devices, the CLI no longer scares me, but even so I installed Hacom's latest release of vga enabled pfSense on my new router.

You can download PFhacom here:

http://www.hacom.net/kb/pfsense-2-rc3

And use physdiskwrite to get it on to your CF card:
http://m0n0.ch/wall/physdiskwrite.php

Enjoy!

Setting up SSH through vSphere 5 client.

Here is a simple guide to setting up SSH access to your host through the provided vSphere 5 client. This is a nifty trick, as before with 4.1, you had to enable it on the local console. This was rather inconvenient if you were not local to your host.

Fire up vSphere 5 client and head over to configuration. Locate "Security Profile".

Notice SSH down near the bottom (I already enabled mine).

 Double click SSH and select your favorite startup method. Be sure to click ok and restart before trying to connect.

 Fire up your favorite SSH client, I just happen to have PuTTY on my laptop. Default settings.

Now you have SSH access. Enjoy!

When you can't re-add a data store in ESXi...

Google it!
http://scev7n.blogspot.com/2011/02/error-disk-is-blank-with-esxi-datastore.html

I recently had a issue with one of my SAS drives, which caused a failure on my raid card and a lost datastore. After I replaced the drive, I kept getting the error that my disk is blank. Duh, I just recreated the array. Anyways, 5 minutes on Google and I found the helpful post above. Some simple fdisk commands later through a SSH command prompt, and bam! Everything is back to normal and I was able to re-add the datastore.

vSphere 5 Hypervisor is here!

It is finally here!
After VMware announced the release of vSphere 5 months ago and confused/frustrated us all with their new vram licensing, you can now download a copy for your home lab. Head over and grab the Free version for yourself. Be sure to check the hardware whitelist as device support has changed! This is perfect timing as my virtualization project at work has been put on hold while some old legacy NT systems are upgraded. I should have plenty of time to evaluate vSphere 5 before it gets put in to my production environment.