Assemble a Rasberry Pi Media Center (XBMC)

I have always been intrigued by the Rasberry Pi mini computer.  It was designed to be an affordable means for people to learn programming and Linux.  Starting at $29 and having sold millions, it has accomplished its goal and more.
When it was first released, there were waiting lists for months to get one  You can now get one any time from Amazon with free 2 day Prime shipping.  They have also released version B, which adds more RAM to the original's 256 megs.  Version B has 512 megs of RAM.

 

(click for larger view) Pictured is the Rasberry Pi and clear case with the following items added for scale: Last night's mostly eaten pizza, Miller High Life Tall Boy, 12 oz retro Miller Lite.

Here we will discuss setting a Rasberry Pi up as an XBMC (Xbox Media Center) computer for playing stored video files either locally attached to your Pi via USB or located on your network share.
Never heard of XBMC?  It is way cool and is the OS that the Boxee device is based on.  It is free Linux software.  Here is a mega guide for XBMC installation, tips tricks and customizations: Guide

Why do we want to do this?  Well, because we can and it is a learning experience.  Also, we love getting the most out of the least.  My Pi is streaming 1080p video in the form of the movie "Need For Speed 6" from my network storage device (Synology) perfectly right now.  During the streaming, the Pi is drawing between 2-3 watts of electricity according to the killawatt meter it is plugged into.  Using it this way, it is a living room device you shouldn't need another remote control for, as we will be using a cell phone for remote control functionality via the XBMC Remote App.

For our Rasberry Pi project, here is a list of what you will need:
-Rasberry Pi computer.  I recommend the B model with 512 megs of RAM for $39.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009SQQF9C

-Some case for your Rasberry Pi.  There are tons of options for sale on Amazon or elsewhere that cost a few bucks depending on your style.  I chose a clear case.

-A Flash Memory Card for storing and running the Rasberry Pi operating system.  (It must boot from this flash device) Here is one that should work, and is a Class 10 (fastest spec currently) access drive.  Capacity is not so much of a concern here since you will be streaming files over the network or attaching a separate USB drive with files on it for playback.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007M54E08/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

-An Android device cell phone charger with the Mini USB connector.  Most any modern, name brand charger will do. This is the power supply for your Rasberry Pi.

-An HDMI cable for connecting to your TV
-USB Mouse and keyboard for initial config and setup
-Memory card reader for initial loading of the operating system from your computer.  This one is cheap and should work:
http://www.amazon.com/Plugable-Windows-Certain-Android-Systems/dp/B008OZF9SQ/

-XBMC Operating system for Rasberry Pi
Here are instructions for installation:
http://www.raspbmc.com/download/


-Cell Phone or other device with an app store where the app: XBMC Remote is available for download (free).  This is what you will use for remote control of your XBMC system.

-Wired network connection that can get to the internet.  

-Chilled Beer of your choosing.  I like the retro Miller Lite cans as my personal preference at this moment.  Liquor works well too, or you can mix them.  I like to start the night off right with an Irish Car Bomb (1/2 glass Guiness with a shot of 2/3 Baileys Irish Creme, 1/3 Jameson).  Drink as a shot by dumping mix into Guiness and then pounding.  Nothing gets the party started quicker and easier.

Lets Roll!
Step 1: Collect your memory card reader, flash drive and beer
Step 2: Plug reader and flash drive into your computer
Step 3: Follow directions here for installing XBMC boot environment on your flash drive: LINK
Step 4: Plug Flash drive into Rasberry Pi and drag over to your TV.  Plug HDMI cable in to TV and Rasberry, plug keyboard and mouse in, connect network cable, and connect powerto your Pi.

Rasberry will boot up and present its status on the screen for you.  It will connect to the internet and download the operating system and any updates needed.  This will take 15 minutes.  It suggests drinking coffee.  Do this if you are lame or are on the 12 step program.

It will then reboot your Pi and present your shiny new XBMC user interface.  Boom you are there.  Pour some beer out for the homies that don't have a Rasberri Pi with XBMC because as of now, that aint you.

Now on to configure, customize and have some fun with.  Hook up your media by following the prompts and entering your relevant info, hook up your cell phone as the remote by entering the IP address of your Pi and you are home free.  See first Guide link up top for more in depth configuration and customization options.
Watch a movie.  I recommend something 1080p right off the bat to make sure your Pi is up to the task. 

Enjoy.

Affordable wall mount ESX 5.5 Cluster

Affordable wall mount ESX 5.5 Cluster.

I have been through several iterations of home ESX setups, but finally found what I consider the best compromise: quiet, performance and afford-ability.  The only moving parts in this setup are the 2 Seagate hard drives and (very quiet) cooling fan mounted in the Synology device.

Yes the cables look like crap.  This is a working lab, where I make changes and rebuilds.  Neater cables make this difficult.  You can make your own with highly managed cables and show me up.  Feel free.

A home ESX cluster can be very handy for testing, hosting web services, game servers, or anything that you want to play with yet have good reliability and passable performance for home use.

Here is a list of hardware:
-ECS Mini ITX form factor motherboards for space savings.  (Fanless, $30  after rebate each)
-Celeron G1620 Dual Core CPUs ($45 each)
-Arctic Cooling CPU heatsink.  Fan removed.  These are so overkill for the Celerons that they do not get hot even without cooling fans. ($20 each)
-PicoPsu for sleek look and no noise. ($30 each.  Amazon is a good source)
-16 gigs RAM per ESX Host ($50 each)
-Trendnet Green 8 port unmanaged 1 gigabit network switch ($30)
-Intel Pro 2 Port Gigabit nic ($50 each)
-8 gig USB flash drive for ESX to be installed onto ($10 each)
-Synology DS212j iSCSI capable NAS.  These things are workhorses.  ($150)
-2x Segate 7200 RPM 3TB hard drives operating as mirror in the Synology $80
-2TB USB Portable drive for Synology backups ($70)
-Belkin Powerstrip ($15)
-1/2 inch plywood.  Sanded and painted gloss black with spray paint
-APC UPS (Not pictured)

Total Damage for this setup: $735


Pictured but not involved in ESX work here is a Banana Pi running IPFire Firewall OS and the external Dlink USB Nic is for the IPFire Red interface that is coming from my ISP modem.  I am on 10 mgabit internet service, so the USB Nic is not a bottleneck here.  The Banana Pi has a 1 gig onboard Nic for the green interface.


Wall mounting allows for easy viewing, air cooling, cheapness, cables managed, and no floor space consumed.  The CPU heatsinks get barely warm to the touch even when the CPUs are working very hard.  As a failsafe, the BIOS is configured to shut down the systems if the CPU were to overheat.

This thing runs 24 hours a day, so power consumption is worth considering.  I typically run only a single ESX host for day to day operations.  I crank up the 2nd host if I need to do maintenance, ESX updates or need to do some work that consumes large amounts of RAM or CPU.
This config (1 host shut down) consumes less than 75 watts of power during normal operation.

Lets talk about the Synology, as it is the backbone of this operation and my entire home network.  This device is affordable at $150 without drives and is nearly limitless in its capability.  Even more features than free solutions like Freenas. (Which I ran for a few years as an iSCSI target too.)
Here is why Synology is better than Freenas: With Freenas, you can either do iSCSI datastore work OR the Windows shared file hosting, FTP server, and the other cool stuff Freenas can do.  This is the main problem with Freenas in my mind.
With Synology, you can do an iSCSI Target as well as have Windows file sharing, rsync, ssh, surveillance system, and every other feature that is available on this device.  (And their are tons!)  Including an app store with apps that I use on mine like Bittorrent sync, couch potato, sabnzbd, sickbeard, and Amazon Glacier Backup.
I have mine configured with 1TB allocated as an iSCSI datastore for the ESX hosts and 2TB configured as a Synology volume for Synology to do Windows file sharing and all of its other features from.
Performance is passable. It is not stunning, but it does an excellent job of running my VMs via iSCSI as well as streaming 1080p movies from its windows share to my Plex server and Boxee and all of the other stuff it can do.  My unit is near bottom of the barrel as far as CPU and RAM.  There are several Synology devices to choose from, most having better specs than mine.

VMs currently running full time:
-Windows Home Server 2011 for set it and forget it backups of Windows workstations
-Server 2008r2 for vCenter update manager database and VI Client that I access via RDP from my Linux Mint primary workstation.  Mint is 64 Bit and does not like the ESX 5.5 web interface because of 64 bit Linux and Flash incompatibilities.
-vCenter 5.5 appliance
-Ubuntu Server for Nessus scanning
-Ubuntu Server for Splunk log gathering and reporting
-Ubuntu Server for Plex that connects to the SMB share on the Synology where my media is stored
-Ubuntu Server for Splunk log gathering and searching
-Vmware Data Recovery sending backups to a Synology windows share that are then backed up to the USB drive weekly.



Here are more pictures of my setup in a previous iteration:

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Troubleshooting PHP and Apache

Does your browser ask if you want to download the php file instead of displaying it? If Apache is not actually parsing the php after you restarted it, install libapache2-mod-php5. It is installed when you install the php5 package, but may have been removed inadvertently by packages which need to run a different version of php.

If sudo a2enmod php5 returns "$ This module does not exist!", you should purge (not just remove) the libapache2-mod-php5 package and reinstall it.

Chuck's Car Buying Techniques

Techniques I use if I am buying a new car:

Always negotiate the out the door price.  (Price plus tax tag and title all worked in) This number is consistent no matter what dealership you are dealing with.  Invoice price and trade in values are used to confuse the situation by dealerships.

When you go into (Don't do this!) or call a stealership for a price, ask for the internet manager.  They can get the best prices because they are the volume guys.

Tell him you want the best out the door price for a given car with the options and color you want.  Tell him you are shopping via phone and are calling all the dealerships and buying from the cheapest.  Thank him and tell him you will call back of his is the best price.

Go to the car manufacturer web site and find the phone numbers for the dealerships in a 200 mile radius, or what you are willing to drive to pickup your car.

Call each one, ask for the internet sales manager and get his out the door price for the same car.

Once you have all of the prices, do the same thing if you have a Sams or Costco membership just to check them.  They are not always cheaper, but working the phone is quick and easy.

Doing this via the phone limits the sales tactics they can use on you.  Do not tell them you have a trade in or you want to finance or anything else about your situation.  You want their price and that's it.

Everything you tell a sales person will be used against you.  It is a battle of wits, and they will win because they do this every day and you buy a car once every 5 years.

While in a dealership, tell them nothing.  The less you talk, the smarter they think you are.  This puts them on the defensive.  Do not talk at the desk they sit you at while talking to the manager about price.  It is rumored that these tables have mics.  Be paranoid.  This will save you money.

While in a dealership, let them sell you the car and act indifferent. DO NOT LET ON THAT YOU ARE EMOTIONALLY MOTIVATED TO DO ANYTHING.  This is another reason you should settle on a price over the phone.  You can stay disconnected from the visual.

Be prepared, do your research and know what you want when you walk in.  They will upsell you and turn you into putty in their hands if not.  If you just walk into a dealership without doing your homework, you will get boned.

Ok so you have your best price via phone.  Call the closest dealership and tell them another or wherever will do less, and you undercut your best price by some bit of money that is reasonable.

So for example:

Proctor Honda says they will do 25k out the door (Tax, tag and title) for an Accord for example

Valdosta will do 24k out the door for the same optioned car.

Call Proctor and tell them that Valdosta will do 23,500 out the door and Proctor needs to beat that to get your business.  Tell them you will be down there in 30 minutes to buy if they can beat it.  They will start drooling and call you back.

Anything over 23,500 is not acceptable and you will take your business elsewhere.  Let them call your bluff. 

 

I helped a friend with this exact situation, she used this technique and saved 1500 on the CRV she was buying, plus Proctor has a low price guarantee and gave her 500 bucks because they couldn't beat Jacksonville's price.  She got a voucher for $500 to use in service and parts when she brought in the sales paperwork from Jacksonville.  Add to that that she sold the car that she was going to trade in to Carmaxx in Jacksonville for double what Honda was going to give her for tradein.

 

It is you against them.  You can win if you go in expecting and looking for a fight.

Construct A Portable Cooler Stereo

I saw this awhile back at a tailgate and decided that I wanted to make my own cooler modified into a speaker system capable of playing audio from any MP3 player.
Below is how I went about constructing this and will soon contain pictures of the end result.
Here is what you will need:
Cooler with a latching lid.  - I choose an Igloo brand sold at Target.  I wanted one with wheels for easy transport.  This one is one of the 5 day Ice models.
I got the amp and speakers off of Ebay for significant cost savings.  The Polk DB line of speakers is for cars, but are made with marine grade components.
Car Speakers - I chose marine grade 6x9 inch speakers made by Polk 
Car Amplifier - I chose a Pioneer model that was 2 channel and about 70 watts per channel.  You will want to be sure you get one small enough to fit in your cooler.  Watts output isn't such a big deal here, as more will suck your battery quicker and even 20 watts will put out lots of sound.
Battery - I chose a smaller sealed deep cycle battery from Battery Source.  You will want a sealed battery regardless since you will be transporting this rig and don't want an acid spill.
Some charging mechanism for the battery - I am using a battery tender that will charge and keep the battery charged as long as it remains plugged in.
Power wiring for the battery and amp including a fuse
On off switch
Caulk
Stick-on plastic wall hooks
Audio cable that takes your MP3 player's headphone output and converts it to RCA male for amp input


So let's get to building!
I laid out the 6x9 speakers on the front of the cooler to select positioning and space requirements and then marked their cutout with a sharpie.  Your speakers should come with cutout templates to use for marking and cutting holes.
I used a jigsaw to cut the holes.  This is a messy job and insulation went everywhere, so do this outside.
I mounted the 6x9 speakers initially with only caulk around the edges.  Be sure to allow for more caulk around the edges where the speaker edge meets a cooler ridge so that there are no air leaks.
I ended up getting 3 inch screws to use for screwing in the speakers after the caulk had dried.  This might be overkill for your install, but my cooler was thick and the speaker grills were as well.  Screwing into the plastic cooler holds fine.  I had considered placing something on the inside of the cooler for the screws to bite to, but the plastic was sufficient.  If you are planning on really beating your cooler around, you might want to consider this and use something to screw into.
Next I laid out the amp position and the battery position.  I decided to mount the amp to the wall of the cooler to allow for more room to place dry goods into the cooler for easy transport.  (The cooler can no longer be a true cooler once we are all said and done though.)
The battery is the heaviest component, so I chose to mount it to the floor of the cooler and as close to the wheels as possible to minimize wheeling weight.  I initially used the caulk to hold it down, but this did not hold, so I am going to switch to liquid nails next.
I laid out the wiring and used stick on wall hooks to stick to the inside of the cooler at various locations cooler and allow for wires to be zip tied to them for a neat installation.  This worked well and the wires are protected from disconnecting and are out of the way.
I drilled a hole in the center of the front of the cooler for the on off switch.  I chose this location since the grills stick out and I wanted to make sure the switch was semi-protected from being turned on during transport in a car or otherwise.  I think this location works ok and the switch has a light on it so I can easily tell when the power is on.  For long term storage, I will take the fuse out of the main power wire to avoid any accidents.
The MP3 to RCA cable and battery charging cable will be run inside the cooler by utilizing the water drain hole.

The sound of the cooler is pleasant and can get really loud. The bass is boomy with the cooler closed and latched.  Opening the cooler reveals just how much bass the cooler is creating by being a speaker box for the system.
The is a neat project and I am going to use mine as a stereo in the garage when it is not at the beach.  I am happy with the result and it makes for an interesting conversation piece.

More pictures of the end result:

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to build a wall mounted computer

Desired result: Space saving, quiet computing IPCop server. Extra points for cool looks the girlfriend doesn't mind looking at.

*EDIT 11-23-10 See below for version 2 of this wall mounted solution.  I build one for my home ESXi rig.
Details are at the end of this post.

Sitting around drinking beer one day a buddy and I thought we needed to make something cool to house his IPCop server. He had it in a case on a shelf in his laundry room, but this was not pretty, quiet or cool.
I said, why not mount it to the wall or something, and then we started drawing.
After much discussion and a discovery trip to the hardware store, this is the result:
Click any image for a larger view.


Build list:
Plywood
Acrylic sized to plywood
1/2 inch copper tube from the plumbing section
Various rubber washers from plumbing section
1/2 inch screws
4 inch screws
Wall anchors
Zip ties
Gloss black spray paint and primer
Double sided tape

Computer:
Intel Atom dual core
1 gig RAM
40 gig hard drive
PicoPsu 60 watt and AC to DC power supply
Zalman chipset heatsink for Atom chipset to replace stock heatsink and fan so it is quieter
PCI riser cable
Dual NIC

Photos of the build:

Laying out parts on painted plywood.

Motherboard and NIC mounted using rubber washers to make them standoff from the wood. We didn't want to but realized that we had to mount the NIC upside down. Oh well. Notice this NIC is older than dirt and has coax input. It is a 16 year old 10Megabit card, but it is still going strong. His internet comes in at 3 Megabits, so no speed bottleneck there.

Hard drive mounted with double sided tape. This hard drive will be replaced with a 3.5 inch drive at the last minute when we got lazy and used the drive that was serving IPCop when it was in the normal case so as to save time not having to install it to the laptop drive. (I got overruled here. I thought we should use the laptop drive to make it a quieter system that used less electricity. Ultimately, it was Steve's computer so his choice.)

Acrylic mounted using 4 inch screws and copper pipe as standoffs. There is room here to stick a hand in to do maintenance without taking off the acrylic.

Almost finished. Got it all installed, and need to drill holes for hard drive led and power switch.


Mounted to the wall using screw in drywall anchors. The computer weighs less than 20 lbs. Power comes from a laptop type power brick included in the PicoPsu kit.

Finished product.




Dude, that looks sweet.

The builders Steve and Chuck

Final thoughts:
Using the Atom saves electricity and allows for a fanless solution. There is enough room between the wall and the acrylic for air to pass through and heat to be dissipated. The hard drive is the only moving part. Next time maybe we will mount a CF card so that there are no moving parts. The old NIC is there due to the fact that the onboard NIC wasn't supported in IPCop, we would have had to add a 2nd NIC via the PCI slot anyways, and it was a nice excuse to put the old dual NIC to use. The PCI riser was what saved us and allowed us to mount it onto the wall nicer.

This would be a good solution for an ESXi box or a Windows Home Server box too.
Moving and maintenance are more of a pain, but it doesn't take up floor space.
The PicoPSU is a good solution where you aren't using a gaming PC since it provides solid power with no noise and good efficiency to lower wattage computer loads.

*Chuck's ESXi wall mounted computer. 
Take two of Steve's IPCOP wall mounted rig.  Simpler and quieter.
I decided to build one of these after staring at my ESXi box sitting on the floor and wondering why it is sitting on the floor.
Went through the same process as above, but simpler.  Didn't bother with the acrylic cover and used a rubber band hard drive mounting solution for the drives to reduce noise due to drive vibration.  The only moving parts in this solution are the drives.  No fans, no power supply fan either thanks to the picopsu power supply solution.
This rig pulls 25 watts of power at the outlet when idle.  It has 4 gigs of RAM and a dual core Intel processor.  Can't remember the model, but one of the ones that Toms hardware put up against the Atom processor as just barely pulling more watts, (for the complete system.  Not processor vs. processor) but blowing it away in performance.
2x 1TB Western Digital green hard drives.
These aren't as fast as other drives, and might not be the best choice for an ESX box, but when you look at the stats and don't get bogged down in numbers, the real world speed difference between these drives and others are minimal and accpetable for the power savings.
As you can see below, I decided to take the CPU fan off.  This CPU cooler is overkill when compared to the stock cooler, the processor is 45nm and power efficient, not overclocked, and I want it quiet and I enabled overheating processor throttling in the BIOS.  I also turned the cooler so that the natural heat rising is able to radiate from the cooler as efficiently as possible.
None of these things matter really though, as the CPU and cooler just don't get hot enough for any throttling or heat related issues.  It all works quietly and flawlessly.
This isn't for everyone though, you may not want to take this risk and will want to test this to be sure that it is acceptable for your installation.

Note those are 3 inch screws and the hard drives do not touch anything solid.  They are fully isolated by the rubber bands.  This is the same idea as some of the quietly designed Antec cases.  They mount the hard drives with similar rubber bands.

How to keep birds from running into your glass windows or doors

Here is an interesting product I ran upon that keeps birds from
running into large glass doors or windows.
My folks have a place in the mountains with lots of glass that birds
run into very often. They have tried placing decals on the glass with
mixed results. I sent them info on this product and they are going to
try it out.
Birds see UV light that we do not see. The decals reflect the sun's
UV light so that the birds see the glass and avoid it.
http://www.windowalert.com/windowalert.html

Xbox 360 - how to clear the cache to troubleshoot

I have been having some problems with my Xbox 360 playing Netflix movies.
I ended up calling Microsoft support to see what they had to say.
They had me delete the cache and this resolved my issue. I thought I would post the procedure of deleting your cache.
This doesn't delete any saved games or do anything harmful to your 360, this is equivalent of removing browser cache is what they said to me when we did it.
Go to system settings, memory, and then press Y to view devices. Once there, you will see format drive and another choice. At this screen, press the following buttons in this order:
x,x, left button, right button, x, x.
It will delete the cache for you after a few seconds and you should see some hard drive space is freed.
For me, it freed about 50 megs, but I am not a heavy gamer.

iTunes goes mostly DRM free

Apple just made this very much official, and announced that some 8 million songs from all the major labels will indeed be DRM free, with a full ten million planned by the end of the quarter.
More Details.

Review - Vmware ESXi

I have played with Virtualization software for awhile now.
They say that most servers are under 10% utilization nearly 95% of the time. Network Admins like to buy a server for every application to keep them seperate and avoid software conflicts and these servers collect and are grossly underutilized. We have been using ESX at work for years and have found that they are very stable and cost effective. We run mostly test servers on ours, however we have a few live servers, even Exchange running on an ESX server.
Vmware has been giving Vmware Server away for awhile now, and I just found out that they are now also giving away ESXi.
Vmware server runs on top of a normal operating system such as Windows or Linux. You install it like a normal application and it allows you to install and run Virtual Machines inside that operating system. This is very cool and I have used it quite a bit to play ith operating systems without having to provide a physical computer. This method of serving virtual machines works, but is not optimized for speed or reliability and therefore shouldn't be used in a production environment.
ESX and ESXi are what they call bare metal vitrualization servers. They run as their own skinnied down operating systems and provide an interface on top of this to install and manage Virtual Machines.
ESXi is ESX wiht a few features removed or unsupported compared to ESX. However, ESXi is free and we can work around its limitations.
ESXi is made to be run off of a flash drive or flash memory built on to a server's motherboard. Dell makes ESXi servers. This way, the OS doesn't waste hard drive resources and the functionality is as easy as possible for an administrator. Just boot up the server and add or mamage VMs from the interface. It also comes as an installable version similar to full blown ESX. This is the version I decided to run.
I got a 1 tb hard drive, Intel motherboard with dual core processor and 4 gigs of RAM to install and run this on. I am running in at home and in my bedroom next to my main computer, so I want speed, low power utilization for 24 hour use and quiet operation.
I decided to use the following hardware:
Asrock motherboard with gigabit ethernet and 8 gigs max RAM
Intel Core2 2.5 Ghz CPU
Western Digital WDGWD10EADS Green Power 1 TB hard drive
Antec Sonata case that I already had

Got the parts and assembled the system. It uses 40 watts of power at the wall outlet when idle and it very quiet. I got a good CPU cooler and can run the system under load without the CPU fan at all. The cooler gets hot, but not too hot.

In order to install ESXi on to a Sata hard drive, you have to do a trick during install. This page outlines how to install ESXi to an IDE or SATA drive.
After install, ESXi came up and I accessed the management interface from a Windows computer. There is no management interface that will run from Linux unfortunately, as the program needs .Net to operate.
I proceeded to install FreeNas, XP and various flavors of Linux to play with. They all run excellently, and I use an XP VM and Remote Desktop installed on the ESXi server to run the management interface since I don't run Windows day to day on any of my home computers. They all have been switched to Ubuntu.
I have been running stable for a month or so now and am quite happy that I now and running my file server on a computer that I can use for other things now. Before, I had a freenas box setup and it just killed me that I couldn't really use that computer for anything else. Now I have 5 operating systems running on the same computer with room to grow and add more.

9 out of 10, and you can't beat the price.
Caviats: You wil want to use mainstream parts for your ESXi build. I couldn't get it to install and run on AMD processors or Intel Atom boards and processors. Admittedly, the Atom is wimpy for this job, but I had it already for use as my freenas system.
You will want to install ESXi on a computer with over 1 gig of RAM. running with just 1 gig doesn't give you much RAM available for Virtual Machines and ESXi will throw up an error if you add more than two VMs.
You can't ssh to ESXi in a supported fashion, however there is an unsupported workaround. Details.

Review - 1971 VW Bus

1971 VW Bus
I grew up with a love for VWs. Maybe it was because I spent my early years in a 70's Beetle or maybe they were just so unique that they caught and kept my attention. I always told myself that I would have an old VW when I had the means. I decided on a Bay Window Bus due to its relatively reasonable cost compared to an older split window Bus, excellent size, and availability. The 71 is the year to get for the following reasons:
The first year with front disk brakes, the last year with the Beetle's Type 1 engine. Starting in '72, the bus got the Pancake engine. This engine is more robust, but more expensive if you have an issue. The Type 1 engines are everywhere and parts and repairs are quite affordable and plentiful.
I found my bus in a nearby town being sold by a father of two that needed something more modern and with A/C for his little kids to ride in. It had been somewhat neglected maintenance-wise and I spent a good bit of cash getting the maintenance up to snuff, fixing brakes, and attempting to make the tired engine run better. It started and ran reliably, but the engine was weak. I decided to get a new engine and ordered one from Blodgett's in California for a pretty reasonable $800.
My bus is the Transporter version with 3 rows of seats and 7 passenger capacity. I wanted to be able to haul friends and stuff for trips to the beach or whatnot, so I chose this version over the Westy camper version.
Old VWs are the essence of simplicity. Air cooled engine no AC, heat that works off of the exhaust, these things were made to be driven and are tough and simple. My mechanic loves working on my bus and calls it a lawn mower engine. You won't set any land speed records past the first 30 feet, but it goes and gets to where it needs to be.
Lots of room for people and the people's gear. I recently rolled it to Destin, FL with 4 girls and all of their gear for a weekend. We were loaded to the ceiling, but we had room enough for everything.
It is a little loud on the road at speed. Between the engine revving at a good clip at highway speeds and the shape cutting through the wind like a bread truck.

You can't beat the uniqueness of an old VW. The bus was the first minivan and one that doesn't make you look like washed up soccer mom.

10 out of 10 and I am biased.