Home lab upgrade log April 11, 2019

Last year, I bought a few new used HP computers via eBay to build-out my VMware lab setup -A EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF – which has a Intel core i5 6500 CPU, non-hyper threaded!-A HP Prodesk 400 G3 mini – which has a Intel core i5 6500T CPU, non-hyper threaded! This is the 2nd of

New year’s resolutions don’t work

As per the title of this post, I don’t believe in new year’s resolutions. Any date you can put a “magic” start time on, is a date you can prepare a dozen excuses not to make once the date comes up.That’s why I like to make changes all year around: this week, it was cycling

How I automate windows updates/reboots on my home lab

As my home lab has grown, so has the amount of time that I spend manually patching/rebooting each server, no fun!So last weekend, I came up with a means to automate the process with active directory groups, group policy and powershell. The goals Automate patching / rebooting of all vmware/hyper-v guest operating systems in my home

Export-STFConfiguration / Import-STFConfiguration fails

On a few new Win 2012 / Win 2016 systems I’ve setup on my home lab over the past week , I’ve noted various error messages on attempting the following simple Powershell cmdlet based process which you would use to export the config of a working StoreFront server to a new StoreFront server. Citrix details

Current lab setup

My current lab environment supports a few goals: Stay sharp with Microsoft active directory and group policy Keep up to date with windows server versions: 2003, 2008, 2012R2, 2016 > beyond Keep up to date with the windows desktop OS family Keep my hardware skills sharp by continuing to build my own desktops and servers

Chrome with folder redirection works with only one session

In my previous job, my exposure to Citrix imaging solutions was limited to PVS. So, over the past few days, I’ve been going through the process of setting up MCS in my home lab. To be honest, it’s a pretty great out-of-the-box experience. PVS is a lot of work to setup / maintain, man! 🙂Anyway, I

Disabling SMB v1 breaks Sonos home NAS support

I’ve had Sonos gear for about 5 years now. 4 units, great little speakers – when they work! Case in point, I disabled SMB v1 on my win 2016 hyper-v based file server this weekend, only to discover that the default (as in only) SMB format that Sonos supports to enumerate/connect to windows shares is

New lab bits have arrived

I’m going through a multi-stage upgrade to my aged home lab hardware, part 1 includes mostly storage items, 4 of those items arrived today!1x WD Red 7200 RDP 10 TB HDD for file server1x mATA  to M.2 HDD adapter for file server1TB Samsung 960 Pro M.2 HDD2x 8 GB DDR3l SODIMMS for Gigabyte Brix (ESXi