Tag: howto

File system rights on mounted drives in Windows

As I repeatedly state, the same object oriented design that makes PowerShell potentially powerful in complex tasks, also makes it require ridiculous verbosity on our part to make it accomplish simple ones. Today’s post is a perfect example. Consider a volume mounted to an NTFS mountpoint in a directory. Since this is an obvious afterthought… Continue reading File system rights on mounted drives in Windows

PowerShell for Unix nerds

(This post was inspired by a question on ServerFault) Windows has had an increasingly useful scripting language since 2006 in PowerShell. Since Microsoft apparently fell in love with backend developers a while back, they’ve even ported the core of it to GNU/Linux and macOS. This is actually a big deal for us who prefer our… Continue reading PowerShell for Unix nerds

Workaround for broken connection management in Exchange

For legacy reasons (don’t even ask…) we still have an old NLB-based Exchange 2010 mail server farm, with a CASArray consisting of two servers, in front of a DAG cluster at work. The interesting thing, of course, is when one of the CAS’s fail, Outlook clients don’t automatically start using the other CAS as you’d… Continue reading Workaround for broken connection management in Exchange

Monitoring mounted Windows volumes using Zabbix

Sometimes it’s nice to mount a separate disk volume inside a directory structure. For a concrete example: At work we have a legacy system that writes copious amounts of data to subfolders of a network share. While vSphere allows for pretty large vdisks, after you pass 8 TB or so, they become cumbersome to manage.… Continue reading Monitoring mounted Windows volumes using Zabbix

Configuring Lenovo SR650 nodes for running vSphere

As usual nowadays, Lenovo SR650 servers come with energy saving presets that may seem ”green”, but which kill virtualization performance. The regular way to get them running the way they should is to enter the UEFI setup at boot, go to UEFI Settings -> System Settings -> Operating Modes and choose ”Maximum Performance”. Unfortunately, on… Continue reading Configuring Lenovo SR650 nodes for running vSphere

It’s so fluffy!

(Or: Backblaze B2 cloud backups from a Proxmox Virtual Environment) Backups are one of those things that have a tendency to become unexpectedly expensive – at least through the eyes of a non-techie: Not only do you need enough space to store several generations of data, but you want at least twice that, since you… Continue reading It’s so fluffy!

Replacing ZFS system drives in Proxmox

Running Proxmox in a root-on-zfs configuration in a RAID10 pool results in an interesting artifact: We need a boot volume from which to start our system and initialize the elements required to recognize a ZFS pool. In effect, the first mirror pair in our disk set will have (at least) two partitions: a regular filesystem… Continue reading Replacing ZFS system drives in Proxmox

IKEv2 IPsec VPN with pfSense and Apple devices

Part 1: pfSense configuration For a long time I’ve been content running a simple SSH gateway into my network, since I was severely bandwidth-limited. The connection was secured in a number of ways I consider a sort of best practice: no remote login for the root account, key based (as opposed to password based) logon,… Continue reading IKEv2 IPsec VPN with pfSense and Apple devices