Replacing a failed disk in RAID on an OVHcloud dedicated server

Yesterday morning, I woke up to some Discord messages saying that one of my websites was offline. Not a great way to start off the morning! I tried to first ascertain the scope of the issue—turns out none of my services were accessible at all from that one dedicated server. Panic started to set in a bit… did I forget to pay my monthly server bill? Did the server get hacked? Or did the server burn down?

FreeNAS and ZFS

Since I built my home server back in 2012, I’ve had a FreeNAS virtual machine running on it as the file server of my home network.  For the past two years, I’ve been using it for the simplest of tasks (serving files).  But over the past week, I’ve started looking deeper at some of the cool things FreeNAS and ZFS can do.  The descriptions of each of these are going to be brief; they can probably be expanded to a full blog post, which I may do if I have time.  However, until then, if your interest has been piqued, you will have Continue Reading

USB Controller Passthrough with VMWare ESXi 5.1

Earlier last year I built myself a VMWare ESXi whitebox computer.  VMWare ESXi is a light operating system which allows multiple virtual computers (referred to as virtual machines or VM) to be run inside of one computer (called the host) at the same time.  For example, I usually have three VMs running on my box including a FreeNAS file server, Ubuntu, and Windows 8. One of the features of ESXi (and other hypervisors) is that you can pass through physical devices such as a video card and USB devices into the VMs.  That way, you could interact with one of Continue Reading

Updating VMware ESXi

Back in January I built a VMware ESXi 5 whitebox as my home server.  I updated the hypervisor today and I thought I’d record the process so that I can refer back to it later.  The blog post I found most useful was from VMware Front Experience.  If you’re looking for the detailed procedures, I’d suggest you look at that post. Upgrading from 5.0 to 5.1 The upgrade file can be found here on the VMware download site. For an upgrade from 5.0 to 5.1, the file to download is: VMware-ESXi-5.1.0-799733-depot.zip. After downloading the file, scp it to the ESXi host, Continue Reading