netdata: A remarkable server monitoring utility.

Tyler Woods

I wanted to write a short introduction to a tool that I’ve been using a lot on my newest servers and development projects. This tool seriously provides the most amazing way of monitoring and comprehending your server’s performance and other metrics that I’ve seen in such a simple, lightweight installation. Here’s the current RAM utilization of my server, thanks to netdata: From the readme: netdata is a system for distributed real-time performance and health monitoring. It provides unparalleled insights, in real-time, of everything happening on the system it runs (including…

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NGINX Security Hardening

Tyler Woods

 After setting up an NGINX webserver with a GoDaddy-issued SSL certificate, I did an SSL test and saw that I was graded a C. That’s average! I want a secure site. So I looked around at a couple of things, and decided to put together a small list of things you can add to your NGINX configuration/server block for enhancing security. I’m going to assume you’re already using an SSL certificate. If you aren’t, start there, and THEN look into how you can improve security 😉   1. Redirect all…

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How to install NGINX, get a free SSL certificate, and configure a reverse proxy (part two)

Tyler Woods

This is part two, the final part of configuring NGINX with SSL as a reverse proxy. Now that you have successfully installed NGINX and obtained a free SSL cert, you can proceed.   There is one important thing to note when configuring reverse proxy: For each “subfolder” you want to act as a proxy to another server, you must have that server configured to listen on that subfolder.   This makes little sense in plain english so let’s review briefly, using CouchPotato as our example: Say I run CouchPotato on…

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How to enable SNMP monitoring for VMWare ESXi 6.0/6.5

Tyler Woods

You can do a lot of configuration of ESXi through the GUI, but one thing I’ve found that you cannot do is configure SNMP. I can see in  the GUI that SNMP service is stopped, and that’s about it:   Even if you can manage to get the service started from the GUI, you’ll still have to set your community string somehow. I couldn’t exactly find a place to set that, so it’s off to the CLI we go. So here’s how to enable SNMP and configure the community string/firewall…

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Install Dell OpenManage 8.5 VIB on ESXi 6.0/6.5

Tyler Woods

I recently wrote an article on installing OMSA 8.4 VIB on ESXi 6.5 and also installing OMSA 8.4 VIB on ESXi 5.5 — Sometime between then and now, Dell released OpenManage Server Administrator version 8.5 and a VIB for ESXi 6.0 and 6.5.   Here is how to download/install OMSA 8.5 VIB on ESXi 6.5 or ESXi 6.0. This is not available for earlier versions. 1. Download VIB VIB for ESXi Version OMSA Version VMware ESXi 6.5 OMSA 8.5 VMware ESXi 6.0 OMSA 8.5 Upload to Datastore   2. SSH to host You…

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Upgrading the size of an Azure Virtual Machine

Tyler Woods

Increasing the size/resources of a VM in your own environment is usually pretty straightforward. You’ll know whether or not you can hot-add resources; if you have to reboot the machine or not, etc. and it’s probably a familiar interface such as VMWare, Hyper-V, or a KVM or similar hypervisors. I know that my first time resizing a VM in Azure, I had some questions that I couldn’t exactly look up. I basically just wanted to see the process through before I performed the re-sizing in production. The main reason I…

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Download latest vSphere client installer directly from VMWare

Tyler Woods

Ever since vSphere 6.5 I’ve bee missing some parts of the vSphere client. I still use it over the web interface for some things such as iSCSI target mapping, port binding, and all those configs. If you, too, miss the vSphere clients, you can make sure you get the latest version from VMWare website, as you cannot get it directly from your host anymore. https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2089791 At the time of this writing, the latest update is VMware vSphere Client 6.0 Update 3. Here’s what is first in their list: VMware vSphere Client 6.0…

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How to install NGINX, get a free SSL certificate, and configure a reverse proxy (part one)

Tyler Woods

This is part one of a two-part series for using NGINX as a reverse proxy for microservices on the same server or hosted on other servers/ports Click here for part two. In this article, we will: Install NGINX Install LetsEncrypt CertBot Obtain free SSL certificate Configure NGINX for SSL In part two, we will go over how to turn the basic HTTPS encrypted NGINX site into a reverse proxy for your other services. Installing NGINX and CertBot Auto We are using Ubuntu 14.04.5 Download certbot-auto to the /usr/local/sbin directory

Make sure…

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Upgrading/patching vCenter Server 6.5 to version 6.5.0b

Tyler Woods

With the release of vCenter 6.5.0b  comes a nest of improvements and fixes to the platform: HTML5 Client Updates vCenter SSO Issues Security Issues Bacukup Issues HA statistics bugfix To get your vCenter server updated to the latest, download the patch here: https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/patch#search Select VC from the dropdown and look for VC-6.5.0b-Appliance Product:VC Version:6.5.0   Now, simply upload the ISO to your datastore and proceed with VMWare’s recommended steps. I performed the below over SSH: Attach VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-6.5.0.5300-5178943-patch-FP.iso file to vCenter Server Appliance. Go to command prompt and run the commands…

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FreeNAS Corral: Control Fan Speed for your Lenovo SA120 JBOD Enclosure

Tyler Woods

Earlier this year, I wrote an article on how to control the fan speed of your Lenovo SA120 JBOD from within FreeNAS. It turns out this doesn’t work on the newest FreeNAS 10 ( FreeNAS Corral ), but the reason is simple. When I went to run the Fan Speed control script, I got an error returned:  

  I pondered this a bit, but the first thing I thought of was to execute python2 and see if I got a shell…  

OK! So, I thought that…

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