My VMUG Advantage subscription gives me a license for NSX, which is something I’ve been wanting to play with for a while.

Unfortunately, the resource requirements for a minimal installation of NSX is 16 vCPUs and 28GB RAM.
In my setup, this is a significant chunk of my resources, not leaving much for any actual VMs

Resizing the NSX Manager VM is easy,  you can just edit the resources in vSphere. But the NSX Controllers have their “Edit Settings…” Link grayed out.

Here’s how you can re-enable that link, and thus edit the resource allocation.

1. Enable SSH on your vCenter server
2. Enable BASH on your vCenter server
3. SSH to vCenter server
4. type ‘shell’ to get a BASH shell
5. Launch Postgres shell

   /opt/vmware/vpostgres/current/bin/psql -U postgres

6. Connect to the VMDB

   \connect VCDB;

7. Find the Object IDs for the VMs

   select * from VPX_DISABLED_METHODS;

8. Delete the entry that locks the editing in vSphere

   delete from VPX_DISABLED_METHODS where entity_mo_id_val = 'Object ID';

9. exit Postgres shell
10. exit bash shell
11. Restart vCenter Server Service

    service-control --stop vmware-vpxd
    
    service-control --start vmware-vpxd

12. Edit your resource allocations in vSphere

I’ve been able to get away with halving the allocations for each VM. But your mileage may vary.

DO NOT DO THIS IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT. This is not supported by VMWare, so don’t go opening support tickets if your NSX environment goes flaky.

But now there’s DN42, which is describes itself as,

dn42 is a big dynamic VPN, which employs Internet technologies (BGP, whois database, DNS, etc). Participants connect to each other using network tunnels (GRE, OpenVPN, Tinc, IPsec) and exchange routes thanks to the Border Gateway Protocol.

I’ve joined DN42, and gone a little crazy with it. So far I have nodes in the US, Ireland, Australia and South Africa. This means I can interconnect with other DN42 members anywhere in the world, having resilience against failures.
I’ll probably be adding more to that, but my first step will be to upgrade my Australian node to something with a bit more bandwidth.

So, get over to http://dn42.us/ and get started.

Not terribly interesting, but I do go through explaining how a laser printer works in this and the following parts..

Sure, you can probably buy one for €100, but where’s the fun in that?

Since I have a pile of Linksys WRT54G’s, I’ve decided to turn them into something useful.

Here’s the first part in a series on How to Build an Internet Radio.

I tore it apart in the last video without explaining to people what it is. So I’ve made a follow up video to give a very brief overview of the functionality of the Kit, and provide a few links for English resources.

Here’s the first installment, a teardown of a very solid little Smart Home Controller from the massive Chinese tech powerhouse Xiaomi.

We’ve relocated to Sydney, Australia. The work/life balance in Ireland started to get to me and I was tired of not being able to spend much time outdoors with my kids.

So now we’re Too Far South, the family loves it. Decent weather, proper meat and big cars.

Check your /var/log/syslog
Do you have a line saying something like
dnsmasq[14673]: Ignoring query from non-local network

Well, thats because dnsmasq has decided to change the default behaviour for service DNS queries.
It will now only answer to itself by default

From the changelog for version 2.69

Add –local-service. Accept DNS queries only from hosts
whose address is on a local subnet, ie a subnet for which
an interface exists on the server. This option
only has effect if there are no –interface –except-interface,
–listen-address or –auth-server options. It is intended
to be set as a default on installation, to allow
unconfigured installations to be useful but also safe from
being used for DNS amplification attacks.

So the fix for me was to add a line to my /etc/dnsmasq.conf
interface=eth0

It looks pretty good on a phone, better on a tablet, and aweful on a proper web browser.

Its great that they’re making the information freely available, I’m just not keen on having a web page open that hurts my eyes. I want a simple 2-line summary of what’s going on.

So I dove into the background and figured out which HTTP POST to fake to get all the information I needed. Then I wrote a simple python script to do just that, and print out what I wanted to know.

The output I get now is very simple, but it contains everything you need.

Power Status: high/up/red
Turn off: Electric Stove,Geyser,Pool Pump,Dryer,Dishwasher,Heater,Normal Lights

Code is available on github

Feel free to fork it, contribute and make something awesome.

Its not fancy or big, but its certainly nerdy and awesome!

In the tree, are 18 LEDs. 17 Green and 1 Red. It’s connected with a strip of ribbon cable to an AVR Atmega168.

I used the Atmega168 because thats all I had lying around, and I couldn’t have been bothered to minimize the number of pins needed by using charlieplexing instead of multiplexing to make it work with an AtTiny.

It has 3 rows of 6 LEDs. The top row is actually 5 Green LEDs with the Red LED sticking out the top.

The legs of the LEDs form the structure by bending the Anodes up to solder to the Anode of the next LED.

This leaves you with 6 Cathodes and a single common Anode.

Do this for the next layer, but shorten the Anode legs a little so it turns out smaller than the first layer.

Repeat for as many layers as you want. The final layer in mine was 5 Green LEDs and then a Red LED. The Anode of the Red LED was soldered to the common Anode ring, so it forms part of the same layer.

Then solder them together by putting the layers on top of each other, and soldering the Cathode of each LED to the Cathode of the LED directly below it. You’ll end up with a common Cathode per column.

Repeat until you’re happy. Then solder some wires on to each of the common Anode “rings”. Bring them out at the base of the tree so you have 6 Common Cathodes and as many Common Anodes as you have layers.

You can just see the Anode legs and the wires for Cathodes in this pic.

So 3 layers and 6 columns gives me 9 wires, so I soldered them to a ribbon cable and connected that up to an AVR Atmega168 using 6 digital pins and 3 digital pins with PWM.

I don’t do it yet, but I can use the common anodes on the PWM pins to adjust the brightness.