USB Controller Passthrough with VMWare ESXi 5.1

Earlier last year I built myself a VMWare ESXi whitebox computer.  VMWare ESXi is a light operating system which allows multiple virtual computers (referred to as virtual machines or VM) to be run inside of one computer (called the host) at the same time.  For example, I usually have three VMs running on my box including a FreeNAS file server, Ubuntu, and Windows 8. One of the features of ESXi (and other hypervisors) is that you can pass through physical devices such as a video card and USB devices into the VMs.  That way, you could interact with one of Continue Reading

Updating VMware ESXi

Back in January I built a VMware ESXi 5 whitebox as my home server.  I updated the hypervisor today and I thought I’d record the process so that I can refer back to it later.  The blog post I found most useful was from VMware Front Experience.  If you’re looking for the detailed procedures, I’d suggest you look at that post. Upgrading from 5.0 to 5.1 The upgrade file can be found here on the VMware download site. For an upgrade from 5.0 to 5.1, the file to download is: VMware-ESXi-5.1.0-799733-depot.zip. After downloading the file, scp it to the ESXi host, Continue Reading

MyBB Security

These are just my thoughts about MyBB security updates.  I’m not a security expert of any sort, but I just offer my opinion based on the knowledge I have. Over the last few weeks there have been two releases to MyBB to patch potential security vulnerabilities that have been discovered by various parties. I have seen some people who have found these seemingly miniscule updates too trivial to apply to their own boards, despite the fact that I and various other members of the MyBB staff have recommended these updates. These people seem to believe that just because no harm Continue Reading