Feb 03
Unboxing my new Ubiquiti Unifi Dream Machine Pro and running through basic configurations for my home lab network.
Video Equipment:
Logitech Brio – https://amzn.to/32JN0Dx
Lavalier Mic – https://amzn.to/31vPgOi
Video Capture Software – https://amzn.to/31yq0qQ
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2021/02/03/ubiquiti-unifi-dream-machine-pro-unboxing-and-configuration/
Jun 03
This video covers the installation of the NPS, CA and Remote Access Server roles on a Microsoft Windows 2019 Server. We then configure those roles to support RADIUS authentication within Ubiquiti’s UniFi platform.
Check Out My Other Videos:
Networking Playlist – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2lsgXYaK5wEn5zEGxOFHAcF1irL4UZYS
Windows Server Playlist – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2lsgXYaK5wGbpyq25G9LIjjIH-rXwa5M
Check Out My Personal Blog Site:
https://achubbard.com
Video Equipment:
Logitech Brio – https://amzn.to/32JN0Dx
Lavalier Mic – https://amzn.to/31vPgOi
Video Capture Software – https://amzn.to/31yq0qQ
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2020/06/03/configure-windows-server-2019-for-ubiquiti-unifi-radius-authentication/
Jun 03
Learn how to change the SDM Template to lanbase-routing and enable ip routing on a Cisco Catalyst 2960s switch.
Check Out My Other Videos:
Networking Playlist – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2lsgXYaK5wEn5zEGxOFHAcF1irL4UZYS
Windows Server Playlist – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2lsgXYaK5wGbpyq25G9LIjjIH-rXwa5M
Check Out My Personal Blog Site:
https://achubbard.com
Video Equipment:
Logitech Brio – https://amzn.to/32JN0Dx
Lavalier Mic – https://amzn.to/31vPgOi
Video Capture Software – https://amzn.to/31yq0qQ
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2020/06/03/how-to-enable-ip-routing-on-a-cisco-catalyst-2960s-sdm-template/
Mar 06
Learn how to install pfSense on a Virtual Machine in VMware ESXi.
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2020/03/06/installing-pfsense-on-vmware-esxi-virtual-machine-virtual-firewall/
Nov 26
Learn how to add a VLAN to over a Ubiquti Nanostation M5 P2P Link for a security camera or other device. I am using 2 Ubiquiti Nanostation M5s in my setup to get a wireless link from one of the out buildings on my property. I have my security cameras on a segmented VLAN in order to keep them from talking to the web. I show you how to pass that second (or multiple) VLAN over the point to point (P2P) link created between the two Nanostations.
Ubiquiti Nanostation M5 – https://amzn.to/2Pvw9AS
Ubiquiti Switch US-8 Switch – https://amzn.to/2JtOyu4
Check Out My Other Videos:
Networking Playlist – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Windows Server Playlist – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Check Out My Personal Blog Site: https://achubbard.com
Video Equipment:
Logitech Brio – https://amzn.to/32JN0Dx
Lavalier Mic – https://amzn.to/31vPgOi
Video Capture Software – https://amzn.to/31yq0qQ
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2019/11/26/1012/
Feb 24
For the last year and a half, I have been all about consolidating my gear. I got into this funk where I absolutely wanted nothing to do with enterprise equipment in my home. I wanted to go home and just be home. However, that attitude has sacrificed a lot of my personal learning and growth. I am a guy who LOVES to tinker. Doesn’t really matter what it is, I just love to tinker and I love gear.
After talking with some fellow IT guys during a meeting recently, I realized, I miss having the gear to work on at home. I missed having the resources to test something and not give a care if I break something.
I’ve also recently started this blog and am attempting to teach myself about WordPress, it’s plugins and WAFs (Web Application Firewalls). I felt re-invigorated to acquire some gear new gear. I am hoping this blog, and purchasing some new gear, will keep me interested in a hobby that has turned into a career for me.
I have acquired 2 Dell PowerEdge R610s to use in my rebuilt homelab. Both are outfitted with only 16GB of RAM. Ideally, I would love to increase this to 32-48gb of RAM per host. The price was right on the two machines the way they sit so I figured I would just outfit them as needed. As low power is a slight concern for me, I ordered a pair of Xeon L5630s for each machine.
I would love to have a true Dell SAN to go with the rest of my Dell stack, however, they are subtly out of my price range at the moment. Can you tell? I am a rather big Dell guy when it comes to servers. I picked up an 8 bay Dell R510, was hoping for a 12 bay, but this will give me a start. Honestly, with the size of drives these days, 8 bays should be sufficient for what I am using it for. This will allow me to install my collection of hard drives and pass them through to FreeNAS. I have also picked up a set of 10gb Mellanox cards and cables.
I picked up a pair of Dell PowerConnect 5524Ps. Initially, I planned on using these as my VM switches and picking up a 48 port Cisco of some variation for my core switch. However, I’ve decided I would use both of these for the time being and forgo the Cisco idea. The 5500 series Dell switches support stacking via HDMI cable, not something I have ever tried, but I scored both switches for a song and this is homelab right?
I did however, purchase a Cisco WS-C2960G-8TC-
VLANs, what good is a homelab without VLANs?
I will provision 3 ports on the Cisco C2960G on what I call VLAN5. Taking the link from my cable modem, I will feed the WAN into 1 port, and send it out the other 2 additional ports to my redundant firewalls. VLAN5 will only exist on the Cisco switch. By setting up the environment this way, it gives me a little bit of redundancy, at least, in my mind. Obviously my two single points of failure are my cable modem and the Cisco switch.
As the hosts will have no local storage, we will need to create this VLAN to handle all of the iSCSI/Storage traffic for both. This VLAN will only be present on the Dell stack.
This VLAN will allow the movement of virtual machines back and forth between my two hosts.
VLAN25 is where most of the err….action…happens. This is where my end devices sit. I don’t typically try to break that stuff up in my home environment. This VLAN will be on both the Dell stack and Cisco switch. It will only be present on the Cisco switch so that I can manage the switch from my workstation.
My security cameras were once on VLAN25….with everything else… my network was in essence…flat. I currently have 9 cameras with the plan to add a few more (small farm, we have animals etc so we like to keep an eye on things) – I decided it was time to break them out into their own VLAN. Enter stage left, VLAN35. Some of you reading this may be asking, how does this guy pick his VLAN numbers?? Honestly, the number is in direct correlation to the 3rd octet of the VLAN. So, an example might be, 10.10.35.0/24 – the x.x.35.x is where the number comes from. Just something I came up with and ran with.
I do not typically have a lot of guests at my house, we’re out in the woods and people don’t like to visit. I’m ok with that. However, when we do have the occasional guest, I would rather they be on their own VLAN and have no access to anything other than the internet.
This is a new one for me. VLAN51 will become my secure VLAN. It will have no access to the internet. No access to the rest of the network. Any VMs that are apart of VLAN51 will be shut down when not in use. VLAN51 will be used to network my penetration testing VMs.
Since I am moving my office to my basement, I will be working on installing two dedicated circuits for my new lab. My electrical panel is right there and access is fairly easy. Most likely these will be 2 – 20 amp circuits. I am not an electrician, I just play one on the internet. Just kidding, please if you are going to run your own circuits, be aware of the risks involved. I am fairly comfortable working with electricity.
One thing I regret selling is my UPS. That is a pricey component that I will need to re-acquire at some point. I have a couple of smaller ones, and frankly, it’s my homelab, if it goes offline, eh not the end of the world.
One item that I had a hard time selling when I was consolidating my lab, is my 25u StarTech Open Frame rack. I had advertised it locally numerous times and never had anyone actually come and buy it. So I kept it and I am glad I did. It’s one less thing I need to purchase for the this adventure. I am planning on either enclosing it or putting it in a small server closet in my shop/office. This will hopefully help keep the noise down.
Something I never needed before was a VMUG subscription. I always had access to VMWare products through work. This time around I will be purchasing the $200 subscription so that I can utilize all of the products that come with it. Both of my hosts will be running ESXi. I will also be using the vCenter appliance instead of the Windows based vCenter install since that is the way things are headed anyways.
Several years ago I utilized FreeNAS as my SAN for a POC (Proof of Concept) for a previous employer. This worked out very well. FreeNAS will be once again utilized for this en-devour. It will be installed on an R510 as stated above. Then I will create an iSCSI target and present that to VMWare as a LUN. Once the LUN has been presented to VMWare, we can go to town building out the Virtual Machines. Fairly straight forward here.
As of the moment my virtual machines are…..lacking. I went from having numerous VMs to accomplish one or two tasks down to one physical host and only a couple VMs to do a lot of tasks. Some things on my list to virtualize:
Firewall – pfSense and CARP – this is something I have never tried. Never really had a reason to. I feel like in the spirit of homelab, I should attempt this. Currently I am running a single Untangle firewall on Hyper-V. I love Untangle (so far) but I do not believe there is a way to create a failover cluster. None the less, this could change at any time. I jump from UTM to UTM or Firewall to Firewall. Keeps things exciting you know?
Monitoring – Nagios, Observium (perhaps Grafana will make a debut at some point too)
Domain Controllers – Currently I am working on my Master’s in IT, so I have access to the Microsoft Imagine program, so I will more then likely be spinning up a couple DCs to work with.
File Server (either nextcloud or something)
Security related – AlienVault, Nessus, and a dedicated KALI VM. Perhaps even a couple other pentest VMs on a secure VLAN.
Patch Management – ManageEngine
Web Server – Centos 7/WordPress/MySQL
Home Automation and Security – HomeSeer
Media – Plex (and maybe iHome Media Server too)
Additionally, aside from my 2 hosts and the R510 SAN, I do have several physical machines present in the lab. One of the biggest tasks will be to remove all of my VMs off my Hyper-V box and turn my Hyper-V box into a BlueIris/Nakivo backup box. I switched to BlueIris from Ubiquiti’s NVR recently, and although I am loving Blue Iris, I find it resource intensive. So I will be leaving it as a physical box. The way I figure it, I can remove all the other tasks off my SuperMicro Mini and then have room for Nakivo along side Blue Iris. That machine has plenty of oomph for those two tasks.
I have a custom built workstation that I can never figure out what to do with, so I ordered up a 2u case and will be racking that as well. This will server as my media ingest machine. By that I mean, when I buy my next lot of DVDs and Bluerays or borrow them, I will use this machine to ingest the media and flip it to my Plex server.
A secure homelab or network environment should have a jump box or jump point. For me, my Intel Skull Canyon NUC will become this. Just a versatile box that is always on. Something I can hit from the field. My NUC will also be tied to a TV or screen in my office so that I can monitor the systems in real time.
*Update*
Check out my latest Home Lab rebuild posts
Dell R610 Intel Xeon CPU Upgrades – to see my progress on the two new hosts!
Add VLANs and Assign Ports on Cisco 2960G Switch – to see some configurations on my WAN switch
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2018/02/24/homelab-rebuild-network-hosts-freenas-dell-r510/
Feb 08
Creating service groups in Nagios Core is a pretty easy task. Service Groups allows you to see the status of like services for multiple hosts. If you have numerous hosts or network devices reporting in to Nagios, this is a fantastic feature.
There are a couple of ways to create Service Groups. I find the easiest way is to use WinSCP and Notepad++
Launch WinSCP and connect to your Nagios machine.
WinSCP will present to you two sides. The Nagios side on the right, and your Windows side on the left. On the left hand side, create a folder called “Nagios_Backup” – You can call this folder whatever you wish. It is purely copying files from Nagios and editing them with Notepad++
Copy the “servicegroup.cfg” from the right hand Nagios folder, to the left hand Windows folder you just created.
On your Windows computer, open up file explorer and navigate to the folder you copied “servicegroup.cfg” to and right click it. Select “Open with Notepad++”
In here you can define your Service Groups. This is a sample config I threw together. You can see any service that you have in Nagios. For me, General_Ping is for miscellaneous devices that I want to see the status of the ping request in Nagios. Network_Ping is where I group all my network devices. CPU_Load shows the CPU Load of various hosts and workstations.
Upon completing your servicegroup.cfg file, you can copy it back to your Nagios server with WinSCP. You will be copying from the left hand side to the right hand side.
Launch Putty and connect to your Nagios server. Issue the command “systemctl restart nagios” and hit enter.
Login to your Nagios web GUI. On the left hand side you will see a list of links. Find the link that says “Service Groups” and click on it.
The link will take you to the Service Groups page within Nagios. You can now see all of your hosts grouped together by service. The screenshot below is of a running Nagios box I have in service.
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2018/02/08/create-service-groups-nagios/
Feb 08
This tutorial will cover manually adding MIB, Management Information Base, files to Ubuntu. Specifically, Dell and Ubiquiti MIBs.
You can acquire the Ubiquiti MIBs here:
Ubiquiti MIBs
Ubiquiti UniFi MIBs
Dell Switch MIBs are included within the firmware when you download it from Dell. This process should work for adding just about any MIB to Ubuntu. You can see my post titled “Dell PowerConnect 5524P Firmware Upgrade” to learn how to obtain the Dell firmware.
You will need WinSCP and Putty fohttps://achubbard.com/2018/01/29/dell-powerconnect-5524p-firmware-upgrade/r this tutorial.
Launch WinSCP and navigate to the home directory for the user you logged in as. Within the home directory, right click and create a new folder. I called mine “mibs” to keep things simple. Copy all of your mib files from your computer to this location.
Now that the mibs files are located on your Ubuntu server, we need to get them into the correct directory. For this we will use Putty. Open up Putty and connect to your Ubuntu server.
Type the command “sudo cp /home/username/mibs/*.mibs /usr/share/snmp/mibs/”
Where username is, put your account username. So in my case, my command would look like this: sudo cp /home/altach/mibs/*.mibs /usr/share/snmp/mibs/
This will copy all of the files with the .mib file extension to the /usr/share/snmp/mibs/ folder.
Another way to get MIB files on your Ubuntu server is to use the wget command. We will use the Ubiquiti MIBs for this example.
Open Putty and connect to your Ubuntu server. Create and/or navigate to the “tmp” folder. Navigate to it by issuing the command “cd /tmp”
This is where you can now download your Ubiquiti MIB files to.
Type: “sudo wget http://dl.ubnt-ut.com/snmp/UBNT-MIB” and the Ubiquiti MIB file will then be downloaded to your /tmp folder. You can use any folder you wish, I just happend to use a /tmp folder. Issue the command again using the path for the UniFi MIBs if needed.
When the MIBs have been downloaded, you can now copy them to the /usr/share/snmp/mibs/ folder by issuing the command “sudo cp UBNT-* /usr/share/snmp/mibs/
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2018/02/08/add-mib-files-ubuntu/
Feb 01
Over the years I have had numerous different types of firewalls and UTMs in my home lab. For a while, I ran an ASA, then migrated to pfSense and soon after that I went over the a Ubiquiti USG-Pro. Looking for my next challenge, I stumbled across Untangle. Although I had heard of Untangle before I had never used it. I figured I would give it a try. Untangle has a home use version available for $50 per year. I purchased a subscription. So far, it has been a fairly decent application. I have been extremely happy with it. For $50 you get Untangle and most of their premium plugins. I thought it was a great deal.
To download and/or purchase Untangle at Home Please click the link below
The consumer can download Untangle in a couple of difference forms. ISO 32/64bit, Firmware or as a Virtual Appliance. I thought, great, I can download Untangle, spin up a VM and be on my way. As it turns out, Untangle only provides their appliance as an OVA. This is only supported by VMWare. Here in lies my issue, I am running Hyper-V. I was determined to get it this working either way. Untangle will install on Hyper-V, they just do not provide the virtual appliance.
Getting Untangle to work on Hyper-V took me some time. I ran into numerous configuration issues along the way. Almost to the point where I gave up on the whole project. However, I was fairly determined to make it work. My background is in ESXi and not Hyper-V so that was where most of my learning curve came from. For me, the biggest hangup was configuring the virtual switch for the WAN. Whatever my issue was, I could not get it to function. Hopefully my blog/tutorial post will help someone get their Untangle instance setup on Hyper-V
Prior to creating a new virtual machine for your Untangle install, open up the Hyper-V Management Console and create 2 virtual switches. The Virtual Switch Manager will help you do this. One will be for the LAN connection, the other will be for the WAN connection. 
We will start with the “External” or the WAN switch first. On your physical host, this is where you will plug your ISP’s modem into.
Create your virtual switch. Give it a name that indicates it’s use, so in this case, mine is simply, “WAN”. From the drop down menu under the “External Network” radio button, select the physical adapter that you will use. Be sure to un-check “Allow management operating system to share this network adapter” – this will prevent your host from trying to use it.
Repeat the virtual switch creation process again, only this time, select the physical network adapter on your host that you will be connecting to your LAN. Select “External” for this switch too. Be sure to check off “Allow management operating system to share this adapter” – this will allow your host to share LAN access with this VM.
Create a new virtual machine. If you need help creating a virtual machine, please see my post titled “CentOS 7 Minimal Installation on Hyper-V”or click on the link to take you there. The only difference with this virtual machine will be the specs. Here is what I have chosen for my install:
Memory: 6gb
Processor: 2 Virtual Processors
Hard Drive: 40gb
Network Adapters: 2 – 1 for LAN, 1 for WAN
Once your VM has booted, you will see the “Untangle Installer Boot Menu” – I used the graphical install option
Select your language
Pick your location
Choose your keyboard type
Untangle will show you a system summary before beginning it’s installation process
To continue with the installation, select “yes” to format your VHD.
Write the changes to disk
Untangle will continue it’s base install. This process takes a little while, you may want to go make yourself a coffee and come back.
Untangle has now completed it’s long installation, click on continue and the VM will reboot.
With Untangle on Hyper-V I have found that it sometimes has the tendency to appear to be hung up on this spot. Don’t worry though, let it sit and it will come right up. It is not stuck.
When the VM boots up and launches the OS, you will be prompted to go through the initial setup phase. This is fairly straight forward. At this point, you have now installed Untangle on Hyper-V.
I hope this tutorial helps you understand how to get Untangle installed on Hyper-V. It is a fairly straight forward process. Although I ran into some issues initially because I had never done it before.
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2018/02/01/installing-untangle-hyper-v/
Jan 31
This tutorial will show you how to install CentOS minimal on a Hyper-V virtual machine. We will also focus on getting network connectivity.
Before we begin this tutorial, please head over to centos.org and grab a copy of the latest ISO of CentOS Minimal, link below.
Once you’ve downloaded your ISO, on your server or workstation running Hyper-V, launch the Hyper-V management console.
Within the management console, right click on your server, and select “New” and then “Virtual Machine”
Give your new VM a name and instruct Hyper-V on where to store the config files.
Select the amount of memory you want your virtual machine to have. In my case, I have chosen to give mine 1024mb or 1gig.
Pick your network connection (this is your virtual switch) and click “next”
Once you’ve assigned your new VM a network connection, you need to create a virtual hard disk for it. Select “Create Virtual Hard Disk” from the menu, give it a name, select the location you wish to save it in and the size.
Now we must tell Hyper-V where to find the CentOS ISO that we downloaded. Select “Install an operating system from a boot CD/DVD-ROM” pick the “Image File (.iso)” option. Click on “Browse” and locate the ISO. Then click “Next”
Finally a summary page will be displayed. This will tell you all of the options that you selected for your virtual machine. At this step, please click on “Finish.” Clicking “Finish” will bring you back to the Hyper-V management console.
In the Hyper-V management console, find your newly created virtual machine, select it and right click. Click on the “Connect” option that appears.
Go ahead and click on the green power button to fire up your VM.
Your virtual machine will now begin to read the ISO inserted into it’s virtual optical drive. Using the arrows on your keyboard, highlight the “Install CentOS 7” and hit the enter key.
Select your language. In my case, I left it as the default of English. Then click continue.
Select the disk on which you wish to install CentOS. I typically allow CentOS to use the automatic partitioning feature. Then click “Done”
During the installation, you are asked to set a root password and/or create a user. I have chosen to do both. You may click each icon and assign a password and create a user. CentOS will then set these during it’s installation.
Allow CentOS to complete it’s installation process. Once this step is complete, the virtual machine will reboot. Once it has rebooted, you will see the following prompt. Here you can login with either your root user or the user you had CentOS create during installation. CentOS is now installed.
CentOS minimal out of the box on Hyper-V will not get an IP Address. You can verify this by logging in and issuing the command “ip addr”
If you get an IP address, you should see it listed under “eth0” – in this case we do not see an IP address. This is because CentOS does not go out and try to grab an IP on boot. In order to change this, you must issue the command, “vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0”
To change this config, hit the “i” key to switch vi into insert mode. Arrow down until you get to the last entry, “ONBOOT”, you must change this from “no” to “yes” – when you’ve changed this, hit the : key and type wq to write the changes and quit vi.
Restart your network interface by issuing the command “systemctl restart network” – CentOS will hang for a moment and then restart the network adapter.
Now you can issue the command “ip addr” again and you should see an IP address listed for interface eth0.
You now have a base CentOS Minimal install with network connectivity. This will give you a great base to install Nagios. I will be writing a tutorial shortly on the installation and configuration of Nagios Core on CentOS.
Check out some of my other blogs on Hyper-V!
Permanent link to this article: https://achubbard.com/2018/01/31/centos-7-minimal-installation-hyper-v/
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