Andrew Philp

4G Backup for Home Broadband

I've been thinking about how working from home means my wife and I are at the mercy of Virgin Media, and in 2022 we had a few outages. Nothing prolonged, but I wanted to add some automation and resiliency to ensure our internet connection is as stable as possible. I

Replacing legacy VPNs with Cloudflare Access

It's been a while since I wrote a post, and I thought I'd dive into more VPN-related stuff. Traditionally you would create a VPN server to access internal resources on your network, giving client access to whoever needed it and treating users who are logged in as trustworthy. However, this

Nice one Microsoft!

As you may have noticed from previous posts, I like Azure but it's nowhere near as good as it could be. I was suprised when I received an email the other day stating that I hadn't claimed my "MCSA" badge on some social network (Acclaim?) which was confusing.

5 out of 5

Today marks a massive career goal and personal achievement for me: I passed my final Amazon Web Services exam. I was set a goal when I first joined Cloudreach as an Engineer in April 2014 to get my AWS Solutions Architect and SysOps Administrator exams (both Associate level) within six

My thoughts on Microsoft Azure

I've been using Microsoft Azure for around eight months now and have passed both the 70-533 and 70-534 exams. In that time I've had a chance to figure out some of the 'peculiarities' shall we say, compared to Amazon Web Services which I have used for the past three years.

The Cloud

It has been some time since my last post - I'm going to try to resolve that! I've not touched VMware for over a year and a half now, having started at Cloudreach in April 2014. I've gained certification during this time in multiple cloud platforms (Amazon Web Services and

Work Things

vCenter server has no network connection after copying

After copying my vCenter server using ovftool, I watched it boot up and could see it said there was no configuration for eth1. When the MAC address changes, it will not update the config file automatically. Here's what to do: First of all go into the vSphere Client and connect

Networking

Using ovftool to copy between hosts without vCenter Server

So, I needed to copy my vCenter Server Appliance over to another host. Obviously can't do that while it's switched on, and it takes care of the migrations in vSphere Client so what can we do? Download ovftool (I downloaded the Windows version) from http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/

Networking

Veeam fails to back up after ESXi upgrade to 5.1 from 5.0

I found a problem when upgrading to ESXi 5.1 that Veeam won't back the servers up giving a "Error: Host with uuid '12345678-1a23-1b23-1234-123456789101' was not found" message. Having found http://tsmith.co/2012/veeam-job-fails-after-upgrade-to-vsphere-5-1/ (thanks Tim) he tells you how to sort it in an older version,

Networking

Easy upgrade from ESXi 5.0 to 5.1

Well I say easy, but it's not that easy. Total time was around eight hours including server firmware updates. Upgrade vCenter Server (I used the appliance, so download the appropriate files from the VMware site) - this is done by booting both, new one has DHCP, copying keys in the

Networking

Update on VMware Converter for ESXi 5.1

As I said in my last post about this, vCenter Converter 5.0 didn't work with ESXi 5.1. VMware released the new version, 5.0.1 on 25 October 2012. It's not fully verified with vCenter 5.1, but should work much better than the previous version. My SSL

Networking

How to get system information from command line

Here's how to get the serial number/service tag or product name from a server or client PC. Open up command prompt and type: Serial number: wmic bios get serialnumber Product name: wmic csproduct get name

Uncategorized

Using Linux on two Default Gateways

This was from about a year ago, when we were transitioning internet connections. We had two default gateways and obviously traffic can only go out one/come in one. This was for one of our web servers. The solution is to tag packets: echo "10 special" >> /etc/iproute2/

Uncategorized

VMware Converter 5.0 Speed

Converter 5.0 is slow, and doesn't work with ESXi 5.1 yet, so don't try it! Converter 5.1 is due for release in November I believe. For slow transfers with ESXi 5.0.1 or below, see the following text. SSL is the issue, VMware have switched it