Home Lab Storage and Network Upgrade

I’m a huge advocate of home lab equipment – it’s one of the best ways to learn and grow as an IT engineer or whatever your job title names you. Having stuff you can intentionally break then try to fix or to test something so you are ten times more confident doing it for real … Read more

Supermicro IPMI SSL TLS Certificate Replacement

I’ve been meaning to replace the SSL/TLS certificates on my Supermicro servers IPMI (Intelligent Provisioning Management Interface) consoles. Now that I’ve upgraded the firmware on both units I think it’s about time I sorted the certificates as well. This is something I did at work some time ago and then handed over to our team … Read more

Supermicro IPMI Power On Server via SSH

Running two Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T servers for my home lab has required me to learn a new IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) web interface and command language. In this case I’m going to share how to power on a Supermicro server. While it is of course possible to connect via a web browser to the IPMI … Read more

Change Supermicro IPMI Admin Password

Changing default passwords is a vital task – it is never a good idea to leave any system credentials as they come ‘out of the box’. With that in mind I’m changing the password on the IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) admin account for my two Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T servers.   First off I log onto … 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

Supermicro Server BIOS Update

Having received my Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T servers for my home lab it’s now time to update the BIOS on each unit. This process can be achieved either through bootable media or if you have the correct license key for the dedicated IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) interface you can update through that. In my case I … Read more

Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T Servers First Look

Yay! Today my Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T servers arrived which will make up my home lab along with the Cisco SG300-20 switch. The microservers pack one hell of a punch, let me give you some quick specs. 8 core Xeon-D 1541 SoC (System on Chip) which includes hyper-threading and every feature you can think of enabled 128GB … Read more