My first white box specifically for VMs was solid, but I wanted more flexibility with storage configurations. The passthrough on my ASUS M4A88T-M/USB3 would not work even when IOMMU was enabled. This seems to be quite common for AMD boards, some have the option in BIOS, but it doesn’t work. The plan was to boot ESXi off USB and use the other two controllers (on-board and LSI RAID card) for my storage configuration. So, after some research I found an AMD motherboard that had working IOMMU. The board I found was an ASRock 970 Extreme4 which works with ESXi and IOMMU for passing through devices to VMs. When I bought the ASRock motherboard I overlooked the fact it did not have onboard graphics, so make sure you have an extra GPU you can throw in for installing the hypervisor. I went with a really cheap PowerColor Green Radeon AX5450 1GB. My current build is below. ...

By default the Squid package that pfSense installs will cut off the URLs if they are longer than a certain length. If you want it to log the full URL, add this to your squid.conf file. The config file says not to manually edit it, but I inserted this and restarted squid and everything continued working.

Another booboo I made while moving my Wordpress blog to another server was entirely my own fault, I forgot the administrator password I had setup, myep. Here’s a way to manually correct this without using something like phpMyAdmin. I’m assuming you have root access to your web server. Login to MySQL To get the md5 hash for your password you have a few options, visit this md5 Hash Generator or let MySQL do it for you… ...

The only issue I had with moving my blog from Apache to Nginx was with pretty permalinks. Installation and setup was very easy. I used this guide from Rackspace Knowledge Center. Add in MySQL server after setting up Nginx, PHP-FPM and you’re all set. My server now uses much less RAM and is better suited for serving my static content. When I first had everything setup, I could login to Wordpress dashboard and make edits to my site, but when I tried visiting any links I received 404 errors. After some Googling and trying a couple solutions it still was not working. I finally found the simple solution below, it’s on the Official Nginx Wiki (should have gone there first!). ...

Note so I don’t have to Google this. Find USB drive and unmount it, diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1 Convert .iso to .img. This will put a .dmg extension on the .img file, but you can leave it like that and still make a bootable USB drive with it. Make bootable USB drive

Decided to stop using Hyper-V as my main hypervisor and go with ESXi or XenServer full time. Leaning towards ESXi as I know for sure my hardware is compatible. Also, adding an IBM BR10i controller flashed to IT mode, removes RAID and is JBOD. Plan to run ESXi/XenServer off a USB drive, use onboard controller for datastore and passthrough the IBM card for NFS access for my VMs. When my SAS cables come in I plan on going with OpenIndiana and napp-it for an all-in-one ZFS based SAN/NAS. Looking forward to trying it out, will be using this guide. ...