I was recently playing around with EM7 and various Dynamic Apps around Dell hardware. I came to find that my remote server (hosting this site) had storage in a ‘nonCritical’ state. I promptly tried logging into my idrac for the system and was having issues getting in. I had forgot what I had set for the password on the root and personal accounts. (For those that leave it root/calvin, shame on you!) This set off a “fear” if you will of having to shut down several VMs and get the datacenter hosting it to attach a remote KVM so I could change the drac password. I hate this thought. I spent 30 seconds here and there trying every password I could think of but nothing worked. I finally started googling around to see if there was any other method. I struck a winner.

So I have a few “hand me down” dell servers. The ones I use right now have iDRAC 7 in them. I have always been annoyed at the SSL warning that comes up. I thought about rolling my own CA and generating my own certs. I shot that down though as some times I pull up the iDRACs remotely from systems where I don’t want to install the custom root cert. I finally took the time to figure out how to take the Let’s Encrypt free SSL cert and apply it to the iDRACs. This is mainly due to they started issuing wildcard certs as of today.

So I also host a small set of game servers for me to test plugins and maps out. Not to mention its also a simple way for me to say to a group of friends lets go play this and have a place to go without the hassle of looking for a server. Normally I would tell people to install LGSM when they want to setup a gameserver. I though have run into a few issues where LGSM is a tad constricting for my needs now. So off to setting the server up from scratch and trying to replicate a couple of features from LGSM.

Most likely will never public but here is a shitty idea I just had for hosting my website.

So I have some ideas from time to time that I tend to forget or deem to crappy to execute. So I figure I would at least write them down as sometimes the crappy ideas will still bear a fruit of some sort. Thus I will write them crib note style and password protect them with the password “shitty idea”. This way they do not get indexed by search engines but still allow the random visitor to view the idea.

So with this new server I am setting up I wanted to install the Dell OpenManage software but got a headache from doing so. Just about everything I was finding was pointing me to CentOS based info and I am using an Ubuntu based system. Hence my headache. After hours of googling I finally found the page I did and it helped me get Dell OpenManage installed. Of course I had to mangle their instructions some but it was not to bad. Below is what I used and a link to the page that was helpful.

So the server I have hosted at Dacentec is starting to show its age and limitations. Luckily I can get my hands on some decent hardware thanks to ebay and other methods. So the past few days when time allows I have been working on building a replacement 1u server to what I currently have. In doing so I am taking the RAM from 16GB to 196GB. With that said the system is installed with a stock ubuntu 17.10 server using guided lvm partitioning. Which thinks like days of old where total ram equals the swap size needed.