the birdhouse in my soul

I recently configured an IKEv1 L2TP/IPSec VPN for a customer. They needed support for a mix of Android 5, iOS 9, and Mac OS X 10.10 clients. During testing and going through debug logs on the VPN gateway, I found that these devices announce support for several authentication hashes, and encryption protocols: OS authentication encryption Android 5 SHA256-128, SHA1-96, MD5-96 AES256, AES128, 3DES, DES iOS 9 SHA1-96, MD5-96 AES256, AES128, 3DES Mac OS X 10.10 SHA1-96, MD5-96 AES256, AES128, 3DES The working configurations I found were: authentication encryption SHA1 3DES SHA1 AES128 SHA1 AES256 and I settled on the last combo as AES256 is the strongest CBC from that list. PS for DH key exchange, only so-called Group 2 1024modp was in the list on all three devices, so there was no other choice available, and no further testing was done. PS2 I tried SHA256 authentication with the Android device, but no successful connection could be set up with the VPN gateway. It looks li...

In a recent VMware project, an existing environment of vSphere ESXi hosts had to be split off to a new instance of vCenter. These hosts were member of a distributed virtual switch, an object that saves its configuration in the vCenter database. This information would be lost after the move to the new vCenter, and the hosts would be left with "orphaned" distributed vswitch configurations. Thanks to the export/import function now available in vSphere 5.5 and 6.x, we can now move the full distributed vswitch configuration to the new vCenter: In the old vCenter, right-click the switch object, click "Export configuration" and choose the default "Distributed switch and all port groups" Add the hosts to the new vCenter In the new vCenter, right-click the datacenter object, click "Import distributed switch" in the "Distributed switch" sub-menu. Select your saved configuration file, and tick the "Preserve original distributed switch...

In vSphere 6, if the vi-admin account get locked because of too many failed logins, and you don't have the root password of the appliance, you can reset the account(s) using these steps: reboot the vMA from GRUB, "e"dit the entry "a"ppend init=/bin/bash "b"oot # pam_tally2 --user=vi-admin --reset # passwd vi-admin # Optional. Only if you want to change the password for vi-admin. # exit reset the vMA log in with vi-admin These steps can be repeated for root or any other account that gets locked out. If you do have root or vi-admin access, "sudo pam_tally2 --user=mylockeduser --reset" would do it, no reboot required.

The vCenter Server Appliance in vSphere6 can be deployed as "tiny", "small", "medium", and "large". The deployment wizard gives info about the vCPU and vRAM consequences of this choice, and about the total disk size of the appliance. But as there's 11 (eleven!) disks attached to the VCSA appliance, it's worth looking into which disks get a different size. Tiny Small Medium Max hosts 10 100 400 Max VMs 100 1000 4000 vCPU 2 4 8 vRAM 8 16 24 Disk size 120 150 300 disk0 / and /boot 12 12 12 disk1 /tmp/mount 1,3 1,3 1,3 disk2 swap 25 25 50 disk3 /storage/core 25 50 50 disk4 /storage/log 10 10 25 disk5 /storage/db 10 10 25 disk6 /storage/dblog 5 5 10 disk7 /storage/seat 10 25 50 disk8 /storage/netdump 1 1 10 disk9 /storage/autodeploy 10 10 25 disk10 /storage/invsvc 5 10 25 N.B. I currently don't have the config data for "large". This table can help if your environment is growing slightly or wildly beyond th...

(an update of an older post, now complete up to vSphere 6) Your Linux runs on a VMware VM, but which on which ESXi version? You can see for yourself: run "dmidecode" and look at lines 10, 11 and 12. ESX 2.5 - BIOS Release Date: 04/21/2004 - Address 0xE8480 - Size 97152 bytes ESX 3.0 - BIOS Release Date: 04/17/2006 - Address 0xE7C70 - Size 99216 bytes ESX 3.5 - BIOS Release Date: 01/30/2008 - Address 0xE7910 - Size 100080 bytes ESX 4 - BIOS Release Date: 08/15/2008 - Address 0xEA6C0 - Size 88384 bytes ESX 4U1 - BIOS Release Date: 09/22/2009 - Address 0xEA550 - Size 88752 bytes ESX 4.1 - BIOS Release Date: 10/13/2009 - Address 0xEA2E0 - Size 89376 bytes ESXi 5 - BIOS Release Date: 01/07/2011 - Address 0xE72C0 - Size 101696 bytes ESXi 5.1 - BIOS Release Date: 06/22/2012 -  Address: 0xEA0C0 -  Size: 89920 bytes ESXi 5.5 - BIOS  Release Date: 07/30/2013 -  Address: 0xEA050 -  Size: 90032 bytes ESXi 6 - BIOS  Release Date: 09/30/2014 -  Address: 0xE9A40 -...