VMware

Building a home lab – Part 1 – Starting with CPU, Motherboard, PCIe Lanes and Bifurcation

Before we get started, a little info about this post

At a high level, I need to install five (5) PCIe NVMe SSDs into a homelab server. In this post I cover how CPU & motherboard all play a role in how & where these PCIe cards can and should be connected. I learned that simply having slots on the motherboard doesn’t mean they’re all capable of the same things. My research was eye-opening and really helped me understand the underlying architecture of the CPU, chipset, and manufacturer-specific motherboard connectivity. It’s a lot to digest at first, but I hope this provides some insight for others to learn from. Before I forget, the info below applies to server motherboards, too, and plays a key role in dual socket boards when only a single CPU is used.

Sometimes the hardest part of any daunting task is simply starting. I got some help from Intel here, though.

Maintenance Mode task hangs

I told one of my nodes to enter maintenance mode and it sat for overnight like this:

That screenshot was taken almost exactly 26 hours later. There were no running VMs on the host, nothing on the local datastore, no resyncing or rebuilding objects in vSAN, and lastly nearly zero IO on the network adapters.

I tried canceling the task, it would not cancel.

I rebooted the host, it came back into the cluster with that task still running.

I rebooted my vCenter, and that finally killed the task.

How to bypass BAD PASSWORD: it is based on a dictionary word for vCenter VCSA root account

Today I am midway through setting up my lab and realized the reason VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is failing is because I set the wrong password in my JSON file for the root account on my vCenter appliance.

No big deal, right? Just SSH in and change it. I tried, and got this:

New password:
BAD PASSWORD: it is based on a dictionary word
passwd: Authentication token manipulation error
passwd: password unchanged

New password:

BAD PASSWORD: it is based on a dictionary word

passwd: Authentication token manipulation error

passwd: password unchanged

The bypass was actually easy. Presumably you’re already SSH’d in as root, so you just need to edit /etc/pam.d/system-password

# Begin /etc/pam.d/system-password

# use sha512 hash for encryption, use shadow, and try to use any previously
# defined authentication token (chosen password) set by any prior module
password  requisite   pam_cracklib.so   dcredit=-1 ucredit=-1 lcredit=-1 ocredit=-1 minlen=6 difok=4 enforce_for_root
password  required    pam_pwhistory.so  debug use_authtok enforce_for_root remember=5
password  required    pam_unix.so       sha512 use_authtok shadow try_first_pass
# End /etc/pam.d/system-password

# Begin /etc/pam.d/system-password

# use sha512 hash for encryption, use shadow, and try to use any previously

# defined authentication token (chosen password) set by any prior module

password requisite pam_cracklib.so dcredit=-1 ucredit=-1 lcredit=-1 ocredit=-1 minlen=6 difok=4 enforce_for_root

password required pam_pwhistory.so debug use_authtok enforce_for_root remember=5

password required pam_unix.so sha512 use_authtok shadow try_first_pass

# End /etc/pam.d/system-password

Remove enforce_for_root from the first line with pam_cracklib.so. Save the file, no need to restart any services, and retry passwd.

New password:
BAD PASSWORD: it is based on a dictionary word
Retype new password:
passwd: password updated successfully

New password:

BAD PASSWORD: it is based on a dictionary word

Retype new password:

passwd: password updated successfully

After that, I re-added enforce_for_root to the file and clicked RETRY back in VCF and all things are happy once again.

How to fix TPM 2.0 device detected but a connection cannot be established on Dell EMC VxRail nodes

I just built a new environment and was greeted by this error. This fix will likely work on other Dell servers, and the settings may apply to other vendors.

High level is you need to set TPM2 Algorithm Selection to SHA256 in the BIOS. You MIGHT have to turn on Intel TXT, and then enable Secure Boot. This SHOULD NOT impact the ESXi installation, but there is a chance it might. Enabling Secure Boot on a machine with modified or unsigned files carries with it the risk of rendering your machine unbootable with the current ESXi installation.

So, here we go:

How to determine the active edge transport node in NSX-T 3.x

I’m blogging about this because I always seem to forget where to find the status of the Tier-0 Logical Router, basically which edge transport node is Active and which is Standby for that specific Tier-0 Gateway. It’s easy once I remember, but hitting the search engines doesn’t show anything useful, so I’ll try to keyword spam this to get more visibility for the next time I forget.

TL;DR: Switch to Manager mode. Click the Networking tab, Tier-0 Logical Routers, select the T0 you want. Look under High Availability Mode (screenshot below)

ThepHuck