Homelab

VIRTUAL LAB – PART 3 – ESXi Deployment

I have pulled down the latest ISO for ESXi 6.5 – I want to have 2 x ESXi Servers, so I will document the process once and then repeat.

Select File, New Virtual Machine and select Custom

Screen Shot 2017-03-13 at 14.25.22

Hit Next and then Next again at the Choose the Virtual Machine Hardware Compatibility screen

Browse to your VMvisor ISO and select Next

Screen Shot 2017-03-13 at 14.26.15

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VIRTUAL LAB – PART 2 – Domain Controller Setup

The next step is to spin up a Windows Server 2016 Domain Controller – this will provide DNS and Active Directory.

I provisioned the VM with 2GB RAM, 1 Processor and a 50GB HDD (this may need tweaking but should be enough to get started) and I have mapped the ISO. When you deploy the Server make sure you set a complex password for the Administrator account before starting the AD configuration as it will “promote” your local administrator account to a Domain Admin.

Windows Update
The first thing Im going to do is run an Update (as this Server will not be connected to the Internet after this point). At the moment it is connected as Host-Only, so I need to change that to Bridged (more…)

VIRTUAL LAB – PART 1 – Planning

Im now in the process of building up my Virtual Lab (I’m pretty excited about this as I have been out of the Virtualisation arena for a few years, so this will be an opportunity to learn whats new in 6.5 and also have a good play with Hyper-V) – My Home Lab Hardware is now in place and I have upgraded my VMWare Workstation to 12.5 (Current latest version)

The overall plan for my Lab is to run a small vSphere 6.5 and Hyper-V Environment for various reasons (mainly my new role – which i will post about soon) all contained within VMware Workstation.

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Permanently Mount CIFS/SMB Share in Ubuntu

I have a few SMB Shares running in my Home which i wanted to access from one of my Ubuntu Desktops. The Share in question was a Software repository on my NAS and so in my instructions you will see software or sw referenced, these you will have to change with your equivalent.

First thing to do is grab the cifs-utils

sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

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Installing VMware tools into Ubuntu Server via CLI

Create a directory to mount the cdrom

sudo mkdir /mnt/cdrom

screen-shot-2016-09-22-at-16-58-33

Now need to see where the cdrom is mapped to, so run:

lsblk

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Installing Kali 2.0 on Raspberry Pi 3 + NoMachine

I recently ordered a Raspberry Pi 3 (currently £30.80) with an SanDisk Ultra 8 GB microSDHC Card (Currently £4.35) with the intention of installing Kali 2.0. For this setup i used my Windows 10 PC.

This post will cover setting up the SD Card and installing Kali

I downloaded the ARM Image from the Offensive Security Site, which comes down compressed. I also downloaded Win32 Disk Imager and installed it.

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Running 3 external monitors with MacBook Pro Retina Mid 2015

I already had 2 external Monitors running from my MacBook by using 2 x miniDP to HDMI adapters. I was using the fairly standard ones that come with the Mac but I have another Monitor which i used for my Lab PC (Windows) and Figured I could connect this to my Mac and run Microsoft Remote Desktop to connect to it, removing the extra Keyboard and mouse off my desk.

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Homelab Update

Homelab Page updated:

Originally I planed on using a HP DL380 G5 and a few HP Microservers for my lab – but i changed my mind.. Instead I opted for a HP XW6600 Workstation: HP XW6600

I got this off Ebay for about £100 – this was fairly Barebones but had a Semi Decent Xeon Processor – E5440 @ 2.83GHz