Regarding homelabbing, tonight proved to be quite an interesting struggle with vCenter. Originally, I had planned to write an article outlining the creation of a new distributed port group, ensuring proper tagging on my ESXI host, and deploying a Veeam and immutable repository server. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, this will need to be postponed for another day.
Website Improvements
As is often the case in the field of IT, one’s plans can quickly become derailed. Despite this setback, I was able to make a few quality of life improvements to my website:
1. If “Posts” in the menu bar is clicked, it no longer redirects to my author page. It redirects to a dedicated post page that acts as an aggregator for all authors, even though it’s just me for right now. It looks a bit prettier and should help with search functionality. I was unaware Wordpress gives me the option to set such a page in settings.
2. If “Posts” is moused over, it now displays the so called “Mega Menu”. I think it looks a touch nicer. In addition, this will be a bit scalable going forward. I assume there will be many more categories of content as time goes on.
3. My author widget now contains biographical info!
4. Snap-shotted my instance and ran plugin, theme, and OS level updates. The web server was rebooted and came back up gracefully.
Fixing VCSA
The most challenging aspect of the evening involved unborking vCenter.
About a week ago, I was forced to remove my host from vCenter due to an obscure networking issue caused by VCSA using an incorrect subnet mask (/24). My server network is a /23. I use the first 254 addresses for physical servers and the second set of 254 addresses for virtual machines. A bit overkill for a homelab, but it works none the less. As a result, my VCSA VM could not resolve DNS because my domain controllers are in the second half of the subnet. This lead to the web console being extremely unstable and my ESXI host being unresolvable. I am still uncertain what caused this configuration drift. It obviously worked in the past, otherwise I would not have been able to add my server by its FQDN.
The VMware Appliance Management web UI would not let me change my subnet mask, so i solved this issue by jumping into my VCSA appliance from the ESXI HTML5 web console, pressing ALT+F1 at the same time to open up the console and typing ‘shell’ to drop me into PhotonOS’s bash shell. From there, I then executed cd /etc/systemd/network and modified my 10-eth0.network file with vi to change it to a /23.
After a reboot, I was back in business! I could resolve DNS queries from my VCSA appliance and re-add my ESXI server!
This evening I found an issue caused by re-adding my host: I forgot to add it back to the distributed switch. As a result, it was using the correct configuration, but I could not add a new distributed port group for my backup server VLAN. After much investigation, I was able to reassign it and I could create a new port group.
Although I encountered some difficulties, I was ultimately able to resolve the issue and make progress on my homelab project. Tomorrow promises to bring new challenges, but I am excited to continue honing my skills in this area.
Start the discussion at forum.sysadminafterdark.com