Secure your Synology NAS, install a SSL certificate

Home Lab
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I’ve been using the default setup on my Synology DS412+ with HTTPS enabled for a while now but knew it really wasn’t all that secure without a proper SSL certificate and creating a self-signed certificated isn’t all the much better and can be easily forged. I decided it was about time I used a “real” certificate to better secure the NAS.

Prerequisites before starting

  • You need to own a domain name, for example MikeTabor.com and be able to receive email from the domain name.
    If you don’t already have a webhost for the domain, I’d suggest BlueHost.

  • You also need a DDNS service setup. In this case and for my use, I simply use the Synology DDNS service they offer for free.
  • With those two setup, you will also want to add a CNAME DNS forward from your domain (or subdomain if you wish to go that route) to your DDNS service.
  • Finally you’ll want to make sure Port Forwarding has been configured on your router.

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Upgrade ESXi host to ESXi 5.5 using VMware Update Manager 5.5

VMware
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A while back I wrote about how to upgrade to ESXi 5.5 via command line which works great when you only have a few hosts as each host has to download the ISO from the web each time. This time I’ll show you step by step how to upgrade your ESXi 5.1 host to ESXi 5.5 using VMware Update Manager 5.5 (aka VUM).

For this post I’m going to assume you have already upgraded your vCenter and VUM to versions 5.5 as well as the VUM plugin installed. So lets begin!

Upgrade ESXi host to 5.5 using VMware Update Manager (VUM)

  1. Open the vSphere client and click on Update Manager
    VMware Update Manager icon

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VMware vCenter Server 5.5b released

VMware
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vmware vcenter 5.5b released

VMware hasn’t let the holidays get in their way and has released vCenter Server 5.5b (Build 1476387) along with vCenter Server Appliance 5.5.0b (Build 1476389). The update includes a number of fixes.

Resolved Issues in 5.5.0b

Upgrade and Installation

  • Upgrading the vSphere Web Client to vSphere 5.5 fails with an error
    Attempts to upgrade the vSphere Web Client to vSphere 5.5 fails when they are installed in a custom, non-default location. An error message similar to the following is displayed:

    Error 29107. The service or solution user already registered...

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Restore a VM using the {vm}-flat.vmdk file

VMware
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missing vmdk file error

A couple days ago I was asked the question “An admin deleted the vmdk file associated with a VM, there are no snapshots or backups of the VM . Can we restore this VM somehow?“. I believe in backups, I like to have my VM’s backed up so that I can depend on them for events just like this very issue. At first I was stumped, until the {vm-name}.flat.vmdk was mentioned. That’s when I remembered a method to recover a VM using the vm-flat.vmdk file that I had actually done 2-3 years ago.

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Set default printer for View floating desktop and Persona Management

VMware
5 Comments

Sometime ago I asked a question over at the VMware forum about how to set default network printers on a VMware View 5.0 floating pool that used Persona Management as Persona Management wasn’t keeping this user setting on it’s own. The printers would be added to the VM just not remember the default printer setting. I’ll admit I forgot to update the thread, but a work around was devised which I’ll share below.

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Increase incremental backup speed by enabling CBT

VMware
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In a recent VMware environment I was working in, we noticed that our incremental backups was taking a long time (like up to 7-8 hours) to complete. After digging around it was found that VMware actually has a feature built-in since version 4 called Change Block Tracking (CBT). CBT will track any blocks that were changed since the last backup and tag them and stores the information in a -CTK file. The obvious benefit is that now the third party software only backs up the changed block and not the entire VM each time, reducing the amount of data being backed thus speeding up backups and even lowers the CPU utilization on the VM host.

CBT is disabled by default though there are some backup tools that will enable it automatically or you can enable it manually which can easily be done following these steps:

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How to install VisualEsxtop

Tools
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If you haven’t already heard, VisualEsxtop is a Fling developed by a few VMware Engineers that provides a java based GUI to the every useful ESXTOP. As an added bonus provides a description of each counter, multiple windows, the ability to sort metrics, and even provide basic graphs. Oh and it’s FREE!

Setup and install on Windows 7 is pretty easy as well:

Visual ESXtop

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Shrink a thin provisioned VMDK disk

VMware
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When maintaining a Horizon View environment I like to keep my parent images as small as possible and over time a thin provision disk can start to grow on you if you don’t watch it – be it from downloading installers, updates, or even running disk defrag. While there isn’t a simple, one click button in the View Administrator Console there is a fairly easy manual method using vmfkstools.

Before we can use “vmkfstools” to shrink the VMDK file we must zero out any unused space on the thin provisioned disk. A simple way of doing this is by using a free utility called SDelete from Sysinternals.

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VMware vCenter Server 5.5.0a update released

VMware
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VMware has released an update to vCenter 5.5 Server. The new updated, numbered 5.5.0a doesn’t appear to add any new features but instead focus on squishing a number of bugs in the 5.5 version – mostly around vCenter Single-Sign-On and the vSphere web client.

Issues resolved with this release are as follows:

  1. Attempts to upgrade vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) 5.1 Update 1 to version 5.5 might fail with error code 1603
  2. Attempts to log in to the vCenter Server might be unsuccessful after you upgrade from vCenter Server 5.1 to 5.5
  3. Unable to change the vCenter SSO administrator password on Windows in the vSphere Web Client after you upgrade to vCenter Server 5.5 or VCSA 5.5
  4. VPXD service might fail due to MS SQL database deadlock for the issues with VPXD queries that run on VPX_EVENT and VPX_EVENT_ARG tables

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