Trend Micro Smart Protection Server Deployment

Trend Micro products leverage the ‘Smart Protection Network’ (SPN) which is essentially Trend Micros cloud network providing analysis and protection against malware and other malicious threats. The enterprise protection products have the ability to talk direct to the SPN or you can install a local appliance and configure your systems to talk to that and … Read more

Windows Server Core Expand Volume

I am trying to run as many of my Windows server home lab virtual machines (VM) as Core installs. This reduces the resource requirement for each VM in terms of drive space, memory and CPU – obviously a good thing in any environment. It also forces me to learn more ways of dealing with situations, … Read more

Kali Linux Open-VM-Tools Autostart

I have a Kali Linux virtual machine with the open-vm-tools package installed. Unfortunately the service did not setup to autostart on boot. This of course means I don’t benefit from the enhancements and functionality provided by the tools.   Check Service Status To check whether the service is running we can leverage the service command … Read more

Intel X552/X557-AT Network Adapter Driver Installation on VMware ESXi

My home lab is comprised of two Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T servers which utilise the Intel Xeon-D system on chip (SoC) CPU. This chip has built in 10Gb Ethernet support and provides two ports for cool stuff like storage/vMotion/VSAN etc. We also have two 1Gb NICs, again provided through the SoC. Unfortunately the standard installation of VMware ESXi … Read more

VMware ESXi Embedded Host Client Installation

Today I’m going to install the VMware ESXi Embedded Host Client software on one of my Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T lab servers. This is a VMware fling I’ve kept an eye on since it’s first release and much as I would like to see it on our production systems it isn’t’ something we have signed off on … Read more

Hyper-V Enhanced Session Mode

Hyper-V Enhanced Session Mode (ESM) is a configurable option which enhances the Hyper-V virtual machine console providing options and features similar to an RDP client session. Configuring ESM can be achieved either via the Hyper-V Manager GUI or through PowerShell – obviously if you have many hosts to configure PowerShell is the way to go. Some … Read more

Kali Linux Apt Repositories Missing

I went to update a Kali Linux virtual machine recently and found it wasn’t pulling back anything when running the apt-get update command. This was a new deployment of Kali so I figured the sources.list file must be missing the necessary repositories. It’s important to note that my examples are executed while running as root, … Read more

Cisco SG300 Default Route

I’ve been working on my home lab and finally have a few virtual machines running which will require Internet access (e.g Windows Server Update Services). My Cisco SG300 switch is setup for layer 3 mode and I have two VLANs currently configured on it with more to come as my lab environment grows. An important … Read more

Configure Cisco SG300 Switch Layer 3 Mode

The Cisco SG300 switch series can act as a standard layer 2 switch or be enabled for layer 3 functionality. Typically the switch will come in layer 2 mode (also called switch mode in the CLI). There are a couple of ways layer 3 functionality can be enabled and I will demonstrate them both below. … Read more