17Aug 2020 by Tom Southerland No Comments

Roll Your Own Thunderbolt 3 External SSD

Mac, Technology, Virtualization
I recently received a 13" MacBook Pro with an internal 512GB SSD. I support a lot of different products and need to virtualize many different environments to do so. Naturally, 512GB fills up pretty fast when creating a bunch of virtual machines so I started shopping for decent external SSDs. It seems silly to waste my money on SSDs based on USB 3.x interfaces as they generally top out between 500MB/s to 1050MB/s when we now have Thunderbolt 3 which is 4 times faster at 40Gbps. The Sticker shock of these new TB3 SSDs is a bit much as at the time I'm writing this, the Samsung X5 2TB SSD is a whopping $699.99. I just couldn't justify this purchase and started doing a bit of research. Turns out you…
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22Apr 2014 by Tom Southerland 1 Comment

FreeBSD / FreeNAS Clone Jail

BSD, Technology, Virtualization
I recently had the need to update my shiny new FreeBSD jailed server because I wanted to migrate to WordPress. I didn't want to bring down the existing server while I did the install and converted my content so I managed to clone my existing jailed server using warden: warden export name_of_jail --dir=/directory_for_warden_file This will take a while... Once done, you can import the warden file creating a new jail: warden import jail_warden_file.wdn --host=jailbird --ipv4=192.168.1.105/24 You've now got a cloned jail and a template for creating other jailed servers.
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22Apr 2014 by Tom Southerland No Comments

VirtualBox Serial Port Console on Solaris 10

Solaris, Technology, Virtualization
If you're like me and prefer the command line to the GUI, here's a trick and script to help you manage your Solaris VMs. Enable a serial port for the VM. Enable Port 1 Port Number COM1 Port Mode: Host Pipe Create Pipe Port/File Path: /tmp/vb-VM-NAME-console Perform a reconfiguration boot on the VM. Install socat on the host system sudo apt-get install socat Change the eeprom console device for the VM: eeprom console=ttya Change the /boot/grub/menu.lst for the VM: ... # To enable grub serial console to ttya uncomment the following lines # and comment out the splashimage line below # WARNING: don't enable grub serial console when BIOS console serial # redirection is active!!! serial --unit=0 --speed=9600 terminal serial # # Uncomment the following line to enable GRUB splashimage on console #splashimage /boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz # # To…
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