I have been using EdgeRouter X for about five months now and it is amazing! It has awesome features at an affordable price. Win win situation in my book. Truth to be told, it is not for average consumer. I am not saying it is difficult to be configured but to benefit fully from it you need to know linux and networking. For example, you have Port Forwarding and NAT. You can easily configure port forwarding via "Port Forwarding" but most features you get is if you configure it via "NAT" if you know what you are doing there. I hope I will have time to prepare another page just for that.

I have bought Qnap TR-004 recently to use it as simple external enclosure with disks set in individual mode for a linux server. In other words: I had all disks visible separately in the system. Unfortunately I had to return it for 2 reasons, important for my needs:

1. Inserting or removing a disk interrupts the USB connection with the computer

This means if you create, let's say, a RAID 5 under linux and you want to replace one disk from it, you will have to unmount the filesystems using the raid and shut down the software raid.

This error, is normal if you want to add a disk or partition to LVM and was previously used. For example, below I was trying to add /dev/sdb1 to LVM:

13:59:10 root@eeny:~# pvcreate /dev/sdb1
  Device /dev/sdb1 excluded by a filter.

When you see this, usually a disk wipe can fix it. !!!

How to list network adapters:

[root@mini:~] esxcli network nic list
Name    PCI Device    Driver  Admin Status  Link Status  Speed  Duplex  MAC Address         MTU  Description
------  ------------  ------  ------------  -----------  -----  ------  -----------------  ----  -----------
vmnic0  0000:01:00.0  ntg3    Up            Up            1000  Full    68:5b:35:7f:07:8d  9000  Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM57766 Gigabit Ethernet
vmnic1  0000:09:00.0  ntg3    Up            Up            1000  Full    a8:20:66:06:e0:fa  1500  Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM57762 Gig

For this procedure you need to enable SSH access to your ESXi host.

You can change the hostname, also fqdn if you want, via two commands.

Of course, the easiest way would be to use rufus via windows but if you do not have a windows around, you need a different approach. Under macOS there is balenaEtcher but for unknown reasons it doesn't detect the ESXi image as bootable and the result is not bootable either. What's left is a manual approach, via terminal, that should work under macOS or Linux. Below is a way to do this under macOS. Under linux is not that different: you need to use fdisk -l instead of diskutil list.

1.

1. Download the installers from the Mac App Store. If they are no more listed, below links are for:

Macos Mojave Macos Catalina

UPDATE: to ease up macos downloads, use gibMacOS.

Short and sweet: you need to create a bootable ESXi USB stick and the "normal" method was not doing it. In my situation, I was using balenaEtcher but even if it was successful, the USB stick was not bootable. The tool did warned me when I have selected the ESXi iso. So here we are. In order to create a bootable ESXi usb stick, you need to have: 1. ESXi iso image from vmware website (https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi7) 2. An empty USB stick.

1.

Switched from Catalina to BigSur and as normal this pops out when trying to upgrade macports:

fmbpro:~ florian$ sudo port -v selfupdate
Password:
Error: Current platform "darwin 20" does not match expected platform "darwin 19"
Error: If you upgraded your OS, please follow the migration instructions: https://trac.macports.org/wiki/Migration
OS platform mismatch
    while executing
"mportinit ui_options global_options global_variations"
Error: /opt/local/bin/port: Failed to initialize MacPorts, OS platform mismatch

The error is explaining very well what is happening and

Seeing this when running dmesg?

[521157.397833] CPU6: Core temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 27113)
[521157.397834] CPU2: Core temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 27113)
[521157.397836] CPU1: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 27528)
[521157.397837] CPU5: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 27528)
[521157.397839] CPU7: Package temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 27528)
[521157.397841] CPU0: Package temperature above thre