NVMe wearing out?!?

 One of the developer machines had an error, further digging revealed hard disk warnings.  The drive functions just fine, but was showing an error.  Turns out this this particular drive is well beyond its design specification.  There is no failed cells, no errors reading or writing, but the drive has 200% of amount of data written to it as designed.   Kind of like if one has a car that goes 250,000 miles; the manufacture didn't expect nor design the car to go that far.  Except in this case one gets a warning.  FWIW in this case the drive in question is HP M.2 NVMe drive.  I question HP's fuzzy match in calculating the endurance of the drive.

MAC OS on VMware ESXi

 Can one run a MAC OS as a VM on a VMware host?  Well technically yes.  Legally, No.  In my case we needed to just test how Saffari acts with some web pages.  

Disclaimer: my understanding is that Apple VMs are only legal on Apple Hardware.  The only hardware that supports ESX is the "TrashCan".  Otherwise Vmware Fusion is a free download. 

High Level Steps:

-on a Mac using the App Store, download the bits to the OS in question

-on that Mac, convert those bits to a DMG file

-on that Mac, convert the DMG to an ISO

-upload the ISO to VMware server

-create a VM, mount the ISO and install, however the following changes need to be made to the ".vmx" file.

smc.present = "TRUE"

smc.version = "0"

hw.model = "Macmini8,1"

board-id = "Mac-7BA5B2D9E42DDD94"

serialNumber = "C02ZK0XXXXXX"

efi.nvram.var.ROM = "A1B2C3D4E5F6"

efi.nvram.var.MLB = "C02712300Q6NNNJA8"

Once installed, install VMware tools.  I had a really hard time finding them, the file is called "Darwin.ISO"

New life to really old Macs??

 Apple is really strict as to what OS can be loaded on their hardware.  In this case I have a Mac Mini 2014, which is an i5-4278u.  The newest OFFICIALLY supported OS it will run is Monterey.  However with the help of "OpenCore Legacy Patcher" I was able to put Sequoia on it. 

The machine is slow, but that is to be expected on 11 year old hardware, including a spinning hard disk.  I should put in an SSD but I didn't want to take an hour to do that swap.  No thanks to Apple Engineers making things overly complicated. 

Sequoia installed on the infamous Trashcan, which isn't so bad considering it has an actual GPU, a Xeon processor, and a NVMe hard drive.

Somewhat ironically many Mac Mini 2012's actually outperform a 2014, due to the type of processor used.  Here is a few of the different models I found floating around:

Swapping out the 5400rpm hard drive isn't the most straight forward but very doable on the 2012, and more of a PITA on the 2014.

And for a bit of blasphemy: Windows 11 installed on a 2012 Mac Mini

Even more blasphemy......running Windows 11 on the infamous Trashcan.

Perle IOLAN Serial-Over-IP switch

 Do you have network devices that you need to occasionally log in via a console/serial port?   For example one wants a backup access to a switch at a remote site?   Perle has a solution.  In this case the IOLAN SDS32c has 32 ports for serial access.

Here are somethings I discovered.

They have an "Admin" port which I assumed was a serial port to access the box.   I could never get any connection, despite trying various serial cables and what not.   

The way to set up the box is to power it up, hold the RESET button down for three seconds, once it reboots, launch the software "EasyConfig", it will scan the network looking for Perle devices, once discovered, assign an IP address, then use a web browser to connect to that IP.  The default username is "admin" and the password: "superuser"

The models I have also require a CROSS-OVER in the mix.  I purchased little adapter/couplers from both MonoPrice and Amazon.  

In order to connect to a device, one telnets into the IP/DNS name of the serial switch followed by the port number that matches the port of on the serial switch.  IE if one wanted to connect to "stella", then telnet to:  IP-Of-Serial-switch:10002

One thing that REALLY annoys me, is that ANY change requires a reboot of the device.  Even changing the label to a port requires a reboot!

I also have a IOLAN SCS48 which is different far as the serial port wiring and I haven't been able to successfully get a terminal session to work.  Supposedly it prewired as RS232 Sun/Cisco pinout for direct console meaning it should just be a straight through cable for most connections.