April 2018 What’s Happening?

As I write this I have so many things in my mind I want to write about and create videos about!

Recently I’ve slowed down on the tutorials but it’s not through lack of content. I’ve had a big change in the software I’ve been using so have been trying to get it just right and how I want it to be as well as trying to plan into the future.

This month already I’ve started streaming a brand new game, it’s completely opposite direction from the AAA titles. I had thought about moving to Far Cry 5 but there are already so many amazing creators doing that I wanted to do something nobody else is (yet). War Brokers is my route to doing that, currently it’s kind of like a Minecraft/FPS but it’s great to play and easy to pickup. I’m looking forward to watching it develop and streamingmore of it, in my first stream one of the devs engaged with me so huge thumbs up for that.

In about 2 weeks the newest version of AMD Ryzen CPUs should release, I’m already gearing up for a change from my 1700X onto whatever the newest version will be (most likely a 2700X). Once they are released I’ll be moving over onto one of those and hopefully improving performance once again.

Im also hoping very much to get my hands on one of the recent MikroTik hardware releases, a small little box ideal for a traveller so I’m wanting to do a full unboxing and road warrior config for that.

Thank you if you are reading this and please do keep checking back for more.

More CHR router updates

My iDrac kit has arrived and a lot faster than I thought it would. I’ve got it installed and I’m ready to battle with it and try to learn how to get into it and access the iDrac interface.

Now to get it powered up and updated to latest firmware. Also I’ve been looking at OS for routers and OPNSense has come onto my radar, I may be tempted to spin up one of each on ESXi so I can switch between the two.

What’s happening? 04/03/2018

I’ve pumped out a fair amount of tutorials recently and then had a bit of a hard stop. The work is carrying on in the background. I have loads of plans for more tutorials primarily based on MikroTik but there will be some Ubiquiti elements thrown in.

Project home router is at an odd point, I’ve re-ignited it but not done any further work to it. I’m currently waiting for a full iDrac setup to come through from China to see if I can quiet it off and I’m also waiting for the opportunity to re-paste the CPU to make sure I’m getting the best possible thermal setup out of it. I’m still undecided what to do with it, I have a quad port NIC but reality is I wish it was an SFP card and I can’t run both. Either way it can’t be any worse (apart from noise) than the RB3011 which is dropping ports and getting a lot of hard CPU usage under load.

I’ve also had to reinstall my trusty laptop, Ubuntu was aggravating me and some apps just weren’t what I wanted so have reinstalled to Windows 10 and have spent a few days getting it set up exactly how I want it. Some new editions to my Windows portfolio include Notepad++ which I’d never used until now but is absolutely awesome especially when combined with a user defined RouterOS language and the biggest surprise was the Bash on Windows functionality that W10 offers, simply it’s brilliant and now I genuinely have no drawbacks to moving back to Windows. I may drop a few posts about that in the future as simple stuff like SSH tunnelling is now so much easier from the Windows desktop.

As time has been short I’ve not managed to put a lot up to YouTube however have had a couple of gaming sessions which I’ve streamed to Twitch. I’ve been playing with some frames and scrolling text and I think I’m about there with those now. I’ve also ony just discovered StreamLabs which I have set up but am still waiting to sit down and learn intimately and get it set up to the standards I want.

Having a great time with my tech at the moment, I never seem to have enough time to do what I want and I’m eagerly waiting the launch of the new Ryzen+ or Ryzen2 kit in a couple weeks time as I’m definitely upgrading. 4Ghz seems to be the way to go!

 

Exciting news for CHR in RouterOS 6.42RC

CHR has been the best way to deploy a virtual version of MikroTik’s RouterOS for a long time now. The dedicated virtual version includes some additional drivers and whatnot to make sure that it plays nicely with the popular virtualisation programs out there, Xen and VMWare being the 2 big ones everybody tends to go for.

Whilst some instances of CHR can now be found even on Amazon AWS there was still this niggle for those running Xen and VMWare that bugged them, traditionally on a “normal” VM you install it and then run the relevant “additional tools” installation so that the host cna pull out some information from the guest and also certainly in VMWare’s case, soft shut down or reboot the machine rather than a hard power off (we all know how RouterOS likes to log that as a fault!)

With 6.42RC things have changed though! Both xen-tools and open-vm-tools can now be found within the package and to ensure this wasn’t a joke I quickly span up a machine from the supplied OVA file and there it was feeding it’s name back to me as well as being able to soft reboot it. Good times!

A word of caution though, I personally would never recommend anyone use an RC for anything other than testing. New features introduce new bugs that need to be ironed out, whilst the wait for 6.41 to go to bugfix had started, now the wait is on for 6.42 to go to current!

you can download the latest version and see all the change logs openly on the Mikrotik website just here.