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

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

Cisco SG300-20 Switch First Look

Today I received my Cisco SG300-20 network switch – part of the new lab environment I am putting together at home. It’s a 20 port gigabit switch with layer 3 functionality. The unit itself looks very nice as you might expect from a Cisco switch and importantly for me is passively cooled so no noise! … Read more

VMware Networking Error – IP address already assigned to another adapter KB 1179

This is an old fault that I thought I wouldn’t see again however I came across a VM this morning which tried to automatically update it’s VMware tools install and failed. The machine was left without the tools and we had to deploy them manually. This wasn’t difficult of course however after the reboot the … Read more

Tale of the changing MAC Address

Today I had an interesting e-mail from a supplier with regard to an issue they were experiencing. Firstly let me outline the issue – Devices are tracked using a combination of radio frequency technologies to ensure we can local objects (people, equipment etc) within a building Each device has an identifier, this supplier would like … Read more