Starlink

Since moving to Dorset last year internet connectivity has been the bane of my existence. Currently, I have an ADSL connection provided by my old employer Zen and a 5G connection provided by Three. These are both plumbed into my Watchguard Firewall with multi-wan configured. Most of the time the Continue Reading

Lab Update – Part 3 Network

I have retired the Watchguard Devices with the migration to PFSense running bare-metal in one of the Supermicro Nodes. I will likely virtualise this in the future. In terms of network/switching I have moved to an intermediate step here vMotion and Storage are running over DAC’s while VMware management and Continue Reading

Nutanix NCP

I saw a tweet a couple of weeks ago mentioning that Nutanix were offering a free go at the Nutanix Certified Professional exam. They are also offering free on-demand training to go with it. In my current role, I haven’t used Nutanix however I have good experience using it as Continue Reading

VeeamON2020

As everyone knows by now the world has changed possibly forever.  Due to Covid19 working from home has become the new normal.  We are lucky in the IT world that this has been fairly straightforward for most of us.  We are privileged in that it’s possible for us to continue Continue Reading

Lab Storage

Lab Storage Update. Since starting my new role with Xtravirt my Homelab has gone through several fairly significant changes.  At the moment it’s very much focused on the VMware stack and one of the things I needed was some more storage and especially some more storage performance.  With that in mind, Continue Reading

2FA

In this day and age, two-factor authentication (2FA)  is basically a must. I try and use it on any system that supports it. I have a Yubikey and I am a massive fan of this but not everything supports U2F and sometimes it’s not convenient.  I recently have seen an announcement Continue Reading

New Laptop

I decided it was about time I replaced my trusted MacBook Air that I purchased back in 2011.   After waiting and watching the Apple announcements over the last couple of years I decided the MacBook Pro’s weren’t worth it.   So I have replaced my Air with yes you Continue Reading

AWS Lightsail

AWS Lightsail I have been running this blog on top of some of my Infrastructure at home but the performance ( due to my connection) has never been stunning. So I decided to move it over to an AWS Lightsail instance to investigate more about the newer VPS service from Continue Reading

Nutanix Life Cycle Manager

Nutanix Life Cycle Manager (LCM) With the introduction of AOS 5, Nutanix introduced Life Cycle Manager (LCM),  something that Is one of the best but least known Nutanix features.  Put simply it’s part of the Nutanix update mechanism but for dealing with hardware rather than the software components. To me Continue Reading

Cloudflare

Cloudflare – What is it and why would I care? I have been using Cloudflare for a long time.  It is one of my go-to services and I use it to protect all of the public services I run for myself and other sites/ organizations. The basic premise of what Continue Reading

Money Saving ( UK Version)

I recently got back from an amazing conference in New Orleans. This was the VeeamON conference and I was invited as part of the Veeam Vanguard programme that I am part of. A lot of the UK Vanguards all travelled out together and after numerous discussions, it became clear that a Continue Reading