the worlds gone mad

we've lost the hope we had

Posted on 4 August 2017   2 min read

USB NIC drivers for ESX

installing drivers for nuc usb nics

Intel NUCs only come with 1 built in NIC so when using them as ESX hosts it is useful to add additional USB ethernet adaptors. Before these will be recognised by the ESX OS the drivers need to be installed using a VIB file.


Posted on 21 July 2017   15 min read

Cisco N1000v Switches

cisco distributed vSwitches

A cisco vswitch that can be used instead of the default VMware DvS to have a similar environment to that of Cisco physical NXOS switches. The control and packet communication can either be carried over VLANs in Layer2 mode or IP addresses in Layer3 mode. The default and Cisco recommended solution is L3 mode.


Posted on 21 July 2017   3 min read

VMware vSphere vSwitches

local and distributed vSwitches

Local and Distributed vSwitches server the same purpose as physical switches allowing for VM vNICs to be assigned to specific VLANs. In a production environment it is usual to define a local vSwitch on each ESX host for management and backdoor and have distributed vSwitches shared between hosts for VMs.


Posted on 14 July 2017   11 min read

Cisco IP Device Tracking

IPDT and DHCP collision detection

Ever thought about how ACS gets an end users IP or how when showing an interfaces authentication sessions it had the IP of the host attached? This all stems from IP Device Tracking. I only recently came across it when troubleshooting an issue we had with windows machines not getting a DHCP address due collision detection involving the 0.0.0.0 address. Although there are lots of posts about people having a similar issue and the workarounds, I couldn’t find much information on the exact reason why this happened. This post is designed to give more reasoning on why this happens.