The 2009 Apple Xserve, also known as the Xserve 3,1 (XS3,1), never supported the Intel Westmere Xeon family. However, the 2010 Mac Pro, Mac Pro 5,1 (MP5,1), did. Since their logic boards are similar, you can flash your XS3,1 with the MP5,1 firmware. This will enable you to use 6-core Westmere Xeons and after the …
As the title implies this is a pinout of the SSD cable used to add a SATA-LIF SSD drive to a 2009 Xserve. I put this together by doing a pin to pin ohm out of the connector and using various resources online to identify the 24 pins on the SATA-LIF side of the connector. …
Apple 2009 Xserve SSD Cable 821-0838 056-2937 051-7975 pinout Read More »
TL;DR: You must define your DNS server using an IPv4 AND IPv6 address. I have been using the built in VPNs on MacOS and iOS for years now. For a long time I used OS X server as the VPN server, but when Apple abandoned it I moved to linked and decided to harden the …
With ESXi 6.5 you have to manually update VMware Tools. Although it can be done rather quickly: Start by turning on SSH on the ESXi host you need to update. Then login and go to o the directory that contains the VMWare Tools “cd /vmimages/tools-isoimages/” and make a backup of the current tools. This is …
TL;DR: The issue is likely that the EFI for VMWare isn’t finding the Boot.EFI file. You just need to tell it where it is. Scroll to bottom of article for instructions. I have an old Xserve with ESXi 6.5 on it that I got Monterey running on, however when I used Nakivo to make backups …
Nakivo+ESXi Flash Boot and Backup Restore with MacOS 12 Monterey Read More »
I recently setup a Ubuntu Dev server and wanted to set it up so that it would use the Google SMTP relay to send emails. After fighting with it for a while I was able to setup Postfix to use Google SMTP relay. Here is how it is done: This config changes sender addresses from …
TL;DR: The Google Wifi router won’t forward consistently unless the target uses DHCP I recently moved to a standalone linux server for my VPN and set it up with a static IP. I was able to setup port forwarding on my Google Wifi, but it was completely hit or miss on if I would get …
Forwarding to a static IP not working with Google Wifi Read More »
I TL;DR: click the circle “i” icon in the Bluetooth menu to go to device information and select the device type as “speaker”. I recently ran into an issues when trying to play music on a Bluetooth speaker where the volume was super low. If it turned it down and then back up I would …
TL;DR: You can’t upgrade. Do a clean install with EFI ( it will do bios by default) and enable secure boot for efi. Boot from the Windows 11 ISO and use the BypassSecureBootCheck and BypassTPMCheck registry settings. Then install as normal. I have a Windows 10 VM on my Xserve 3,1 running ESXi 6.5 that …
Although the xserve is well past its prime I still have a couple that I use as part of my dev and lab environment. Although I don’t have a true need for production level uptime I do like to have it mirror a production level environment. As part of that I recently started playing with …