Realtek NIC 8169 with ESXi 4.1

Posted on by Andy

Hi, ESXi does not recognize Realtek 8169 based network cards by default. So here is a little howto to enable these cards on ESXi 4.1. Simply follow the next steps and after a reboot the card will be there:

  1. Download oem.tgz
  2. Transfer the downloaded file to your ESXi 4.1 host trough SSH (e.g. with SCP or WinSCP)
  3. Enter maintenance mode:
    # vim-cmd hostsvc/maintenance_mode_enter
  4. Replace /vmfs/volumes/Hypervisor1/oem.tgz with the downloaded version of the file
  5. Reboot

Here is a nice link: how to customize esxi 4.1

Check here for more drivers.

 

Slow download speed on PS4

Posted on by Andy

As you may read across the web the people are not that satisfied with Sony's PSN network: slow downloads, often down etc…

I had this slow downloads too, around 200 KBytes/s which is not acceptable when you are using the playstation store to buy games and need to download about 40 GBytes.

For me two simple tricks worked finally to push my line to max again:

  1. Set up a fast DNS provider like OpenDNS or Google's DNS servers. I chose OpenDNS because i am not a Google friend 😉
  2. Set the MTU setting of your LAN connection to 1473

I haven't tried the MTU setting with the wireless card because around the web a lot of people said that the wifi connection on the PS4 is crap. I used it at the beginning but had constantly voice chat dropouts so i gave it up.

Secure crypto ciphers CentOS

Posted on by Andy

Here are two lists of secure (at date of writing) ciphers for the CentOS/RHEL operating system. These lists are not complete but only reduced to RSA/AES encryption ciphers which are considered secure. Use following command to get all supported ciphers on your OS: 

openssl ciphers -v ALL

Following string uses secure ciphers while keeping some of the older secure ciphers available. This string can be used in apache, postfix or others: 

ECDH+AESGCM:DH+AESGCM:ECDH+AES256:DH+AES256:ECDH+AES128:DH+AES:ECDH+3DES:DH+3DES:RSA+AESGCM:RSA+AES:RSA+3DES:!aNULL:!MD5

CentOS 6+7:

ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384
ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256
DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
ECDH-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
ECDH-RSA-AES256-SHA384
ECDH-RSA-AES256-SHA
ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256
ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA
DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256
DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA
ECDH-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256
ECDH-RSA-AES128-SHA256
ECDH-RSA-AES128-SHA

 

CentOS 5:

DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA