Amuyu

Ok so I got it working on Sunday, but I’ve had a long week and didn’t have a chance to update. The C6100 is up and running. I’ve moved it into the DCF and surprisingly, the noise on it is actually so little, I can not hear it through the door. That was one of my biggest concerns. Long story short, the process was involved, but mostly because the SSL certs on the management IPs are so outdated.

So all that said, this is what I ended up with:

I’ve never had that much compute, memory, storage, or anything. That was a very, very large data center not long ago.

Cool. Now on to other cool stuff.

Oh… and a couple of things to note in case someone is actually reading this.

The back of the C6100 gets **hot**. I noticed in the move from my office into DCF that the USB thumb drives I’m using for boot were very hot. I’m concerned that it’s going to take them beyond supported limits, so I bought a set of little pig tails to have them off the motherboard.

Also – this thing runs relatively low power, but it is sucking about 660 watts being mostly idle. I’m going to have to buy another power supply and another UPS to make sure that I survive more than 5 minutes of outage.

Got the C6100 on Friday (8/5). The system is as described by the seller on eBay, but … FFS … it only included one power supply! Tried getting the thing going and ran into immediate snags. First, each node only has two USB ports. My intent is to boot this guy off of USB, but I need a keyboard, and a USB key to do the install and a USB drive to use for boot. One too many. So I tried using a hub to attach the key and the keyboard. Couldn’t get it to boot. Moved the key to a dedicated port and had the USB “drive” on the hub with the intent to move the “drive” to a dedicated port once the install was complete.

No Go.

So, next step was to try to use the remote management to mount a virtual CD. I tried connecting with a current release of Chrome from my production iMac. Well, wouldn’t you know it – you need Java to do that. Don’t want to install that on my main iMac, but I was going to do that for the sake of the project. But before I did that, I wanted to see if Firefox would run it better. Firefox won’t connect to the port because of a security warning on the old HTTPS certs on the box. Same thing with Safari. That made me fire up a Windows 8.1 VM. Same issues. And, oh, during all of that my internet connection goes out … for 3 hours. AHHHH. Well undeterred, I find an old XP VM. That too didn’t have Java loaded.

End of Line.

Back to the project now (Sunday 8/7/16).

First thing first, though, I have to finish the PFsense build and roll out. Cross your fingers. Lots of work.

Sophia! Please give me 100 licenses for internal use. I promise it’s not commercial work! Also note that I’ve single handedly driven multiple deals for you because I brag about your stuff to just about all the customers I visit. And I visit lots of customers. Lots and lots.

So, like usual, I’m sitting on a plane and have little to do. Figured that this is a good time to start writing for my blog again. It’s been much ignored recently, but a new update to Ulysses just came out and it supports posting directly to WordPress sites.

There’s been much that has changed since I last posted. Much has changed in my personal life, but much has also changed in my nerdery. My home network now has over 45(!) things with IP addresses on them. This is forcing me to make a change that I did not want to do. For years I’ve been running the Home Edition of Sophos UTM. I really couldn’t be any more pleased with the functionality of it, but for whatever reason, it is limited to only 50 internal IPs. Now, granted, when I first got the software, that seemed like a ridiculous number. But, as with all such things (640K of RAM – who’ll ever use that much?), the time has come for me to move on. My first attempt was to use the next generation firewall from Sophos. Well that failed 30 minutes into me trying to use it. Many of my devices have static IP addresses handed out to them via the DHCP server. When I was taking those address into the new firewall, it TIMED OUT ON ME AFTER I PUT THEM ALL IN. Yup 30 minutes of laboriously entering MAC addresses, IP addresses, and host names – the damned thing failed. You see, Sophos didn’t develop a migration tool from the old UTM to the new “goodness”. Time to move on.

So – this weekend, I’m going to pfsense. It’s not as slick. It doesn’t do all the UTM stuff. It’s clearly written by folks that are nerds like me and not professional UI dudes (no disrespect intended). I’m going to miss some of the features of Sophos, but I have to move on.

Why you ask? Well – that’s the good part of this story. I just bought a new (well to me), Dell C6100 four node blade system for my home lab. It’s going to bring 32 cores, 192GB of RAM, and lots of other things to the home DCF (Data Control Facility for you new readers). That gives me enough juice to run most of the “hard core” stuff my vendors are trying to shove into Datalink. It’ll be fun having a really nice home cluster again.

But … to get that guy on my network, I’m going to have to doll out at least 12 more IPs just for the hardware. Imagine home many more I’m going to have to hand out once I start firing that guy up full of VMs.

Yeah – I’m a nerd and have first world problems – but that’s how I learn and make a living.

More to come…