pfSense OpenVPN Ubuntu 20.04 client setup

This post documents fixing pfSense + OpenVPN to work with Ubuntu 20.04. After years of upgrades to both systems and some configuration drift this stopped working after a laptop replacement and the following was required to get the connection working again. The main symptom was the client would connect to OpenVPN with no errors and no traffic would be passed over the connection. No traffic … Continue reading pfSense OpenVPN Ubuntu 20.04 client setup

Thinkpad X1 Carbon G9 – Ubuntu 20.04 – LVM full Encryption install

Review and Installation This review of installing Ubuntu 20.04 on a generic Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen9 unit. My particular unit was a refurbished X1 Carbon G9 model with Windows 10 pre-installed. This unit is also available from Lenovo store with Fedora and Ubuntu pre-installed, but this review shows that Ubuntu seems to run fine on the generic Laptop ordered from the store. Specs Lenovo Type: … Continue reading Thinkpad X1 Carbon G9 – Ubuntu 20.04 – LVM full Encryption install

NSX lab North/South Routing options

References vSphere / ESXi homelab setup   ( Existing lab setup ) Logical Switch setup on NSX   ( Earlier post on setting up Logical switches ) Intro This post continues my studying of basic NSX concepts in preparation for my VCAP6-NV. I’ll try and cover some answers I’ve found to some of my mis-conceptions along the way, and finally run a few labs. As a review … Continue reading NSX lab North/South Routing options

Adding VSAN to my Nested ESXi lab

Introduction It’s relatively easy to enable vSAN on our Nested lab,  so let’s  take a short detour. My previous posting on Nested ESX setup is here. And the physical network setup is here. I originally had setup my nested lab with vSAN but immediately got very low disk IO performance of about 2 IOPS, so I switched to NFS storage.    Even NFS had sub-par … Continue reading Adding VSAN to my Nested ESXi lab

ESX/NSX nested lab – Part II

This part continues to build out NSX on top of the Nested ESX cluster created in the last part ESX/NSX nested lab – Part I. Part I included some basic NSX setup for convenience such as. NSX Manager installed from OVF, and linked to vCenter. Physical network ESXi uplinks included allowed vLAN 100 for vxlan. distributed switch set to allow Jumbo 9000 MTU,  (> 1600 MTU … Continue reading ESX/NSX nested lab – Part II