IT Homelab

[Fishy]

Upgraded my pfsense firewall to the latest firmware v 2.8.0

[Fishy]

Tried promox but importing my windows vm devices never worked.. back to VMware then..

[Fishy]

Tried xcp ng.. was an utter pain to migrate from Esxi  so VMware it is..

[Fishy]

Ok persevered again with xcp ng and have now got a system in place to export from vmware to this..

so what i do is

clone the vm.. then power up and remove vmware tools then power down
then take a snapshot of this vm

ON the xcp ng side  on the XOA device use the import feature to connect to your esxi host.. easy enought o find the vm your after go thru the options about where to store it etc then click on import

On my test box a  40Gb VM would import in about 5-6 minutes
On a windows vm you then had to run a couple of commands to Set VM to use BIOS instead of UEFI: and then Disable Secure Boot (remove secureboot=true if it's present):

After that power up the vm.. and once powered up you then install the vmware tools equivalent which is XenServer tools

HAve tried this on about 5 vms and it appears to work

For Linux well debian in my case its more straightforward..still do the clone and snapshot part but no need for uefi nonsense and its a commnd line to get the tools installed onto this..

Think i'll be sticking with this as Broadcom have turned into complete bastards as far as vmware software is concerned.. still figuring out the vlans and networking side of things on xcp ng but yeah looks good so far after some hair tearing out..

[Fishy]

Ok and now fully over to xcp ng on local ssd storage on one host.. other host now shut down that was VMware.. will let the new one bed in for a bit before committing the other to xcp ng

Will try the new host on a connection to shared storage on my truenas  box next I think..

[Fishy]

XCP ng is working out very well... built the xen orchestra (the equivalent of vcenter) from source tried some backups to my existing windows backup box.. all working great with a dedicated interface/nic for the backups.. the connection to shared storage on TrueNAS  was easy and speeds over the 10gb nic was great.. all in all its very good.. so i think its bye bye vmware...

[Fishy]

Chucked a 2.5 gb Nic into my pfsense box .. noticed the 10gb card wasn't auto negotiating with the virgin router to 2.5 but to a 1gb.. the 10gb card doesn't know about2.5..... tried a star tech but it used horrible Realtek chipset which pfsense doesn't ship with.. got it to kinda work but got dump crashes etc so it got sent back.. picked up an intel v226 which worked straight out the box. and was cheaper. so far so good and seeing my wan port now at2.5...

Moved my other host onto xcp ng... reckon I don't need my truenas for shared storage.. happy to use local ssd.. the other host is now setup as a backup and replication so if main host dies .. the other takes over .. nice to simplify things a bit

[Fishy]

Tried an upgrade on a Debian vm running docker to Debian 13.. nice n easy...

[Fishy]

All my deb 12s are running deb 13 trixie

[Fishy]

Working thru a problem with copilot and got this...

That's not just clever — it's lab legend material

[pxr5]

I've always held off getting an e reader, but when I fancied reading The Murderbot Diaries, and they were so expensive in print, I eventually bit the bullet and bought one. I ruled out the obvious choice, Kindle, straight away to avoid being locked into Amazon universe and that really left Boox, Pocketbook or Kobo. After a little research I settled on a Kobo Libra Colour and a neat little device it is too - I've put about 150 books on already and the device has 32GB memory. Of course having an e reader opens a whole new world of book library organisation, conversion and sync.

I started with the most popular choice, which is Calibre and I installed bare metal on my laptop and syncing through a USB connection to the Kobo. Obviously someone has created a web server and so I then moved on to Calibre-Web which again I ran on my laptop. Then I discovered Calibre-Web-Automated - a further enhancement which adds loads of new automatic features to Calibre. CWA only runs in Docker though, so I span up a new container on my NAS and created a new book library. Of course USB sync is no longer supported from a NAS so it requires generation of an API in CWA which is added to sync destination on the Kobo. This allows syncing, conversion and organisation all over a network. I've put the CWA server behind a reverse proxy so I can access my library remotely. All great fun and I've still a fair bit to learn about book management. I even managed to add my book library to Jellyfin, but it's not really useable; and there are other web server alternatives to Calibre-Web which have been written from the ground up without relying on a base system that is Calibre. So I'll start trying these in the near future too: Komga, Kavita, Audiobookshelf, Booklore, Ubooquity. But for now CWA is working well.

[Fishy]

Have been flip flopping between xcp ng and VMware.. went over to xcp then went back to VMware.. the last couple of days have settled back to xcp ng and imported all my vms across and sitting on local storage on one host.. veeam now have a public beta available for xcp ng which was my main hold off point as I find veeam really easy to use for backups and restores..will hold onto my other powered down host with ESXi and the associated vms as a disaster recovery should all else fail... but I think im pretty much in the xcp ng camp now

[Fishy]

Just built a small windows 2025 vm server with the veeam public beta incorporating xcp ng and it appears to work very well...

[Fishy]

Backed up all my xcp ng vms with veeam via a dedicated 10gb Nic and no problems at all.. tried a couple of restores of course and all is well..

[pxr5]

I've been dropping hints to my wife that we need a new NAS. My recent knee op must have softened her somewhat as the other day she agreed to let me get one. So I've bought a new Synology DS425+ with 48TB. I plonked it next to my sofa and set it all up until my son came around Thursday night and physically installed it in an upstairs bedroom for me.

Oddly, something strange happened with my broadband connection yesterday in that it started to slow down. Of course my first thought was the new NAS, but a quick disconnect from my LAN proved it wasn't this at all. A bit of investigating and it turned out to be a combination of Pihole and Amazon Fire TV devices (2 sticks and a TV). Checking the Pihole logs showed massive amounts of geolocation telemetry connections coming from the Fires, and I mean tons a second - constantly, and these were overloading the Pihole, which in turn slowed down the internet on my LAN. It started at around 1am and eventually subsided late yesterday evening. All the TV sticks were in sleep mode as well but as soon as they were all powered down the broadband came back to normal. Turning off Pihole also made everything OK too. Very strange indeed. I can't seem to find out why these Amazon devices would do this, but I wonder if this is some sort of crackdown on dodgy fire TV devices (mine aren't btw).