Cross-Platform Certificate Encrypted Strings
Password vaulting solves a very real problem: how do we leverage automation and avoid hardcoding passwords in source? We can use products like Hashicorp’s Va...
Automation
2018
Pipeline Mock-up
I have been toying with setting up a CI/CD Pipeline for PowerShell module development. Basic components and steps are as follows:
2017
Using CloudClient to bulk change vRA Reservations
What happens when you have ~500 VMs in vRealize Automation that need to have their reservations changed? You figure out a way to script that tedious process....
2016
Finalizing the lab infrastructure
In order for my home lab setup to be finalized, I needed to do two things:
Adventures in CoreOS: The Saga Continues
I’ve worked with CoresOs in the past, but thought that two years was enough of a gap before I attempted to deal with it again.
New beginnings
I’ve decided to drop ghost and switch to jekyll/github pages to reduce my monthly expenses with my previous cloud provider. I looked into continuing with som...
Domoticz and home automation
When I moved into my new townhome, one of the first purchases I made was a 2nd generation Nest thermostat. It’s been working fine - the last software update ...
2015
Moving, home lab status, and PowerShell reporting
Wow, so a lot to cover today. I recently moved out of my parents basement and into my own townhome with the wife and dog! Unfortunately, that means that we’r...
PowerCLI - configuring iSCSI from scratch
I threw this together a while ago, it will help configure iSCSI on a VM host using PowerCLI. Note that once you do a find/replace to set your iSCSI network (...
Adventures with Raspberry Pi
Amazon recently celebrated their Prime Day, offering amazing deals - most of which amounted to only a few dollars off their already reduced prices. However, ...
New job, new PowerShell
I’ve started a new job (thus the relative quiet lately), and one of the first tasks was to perform information gathering via PowerShell. Luckily, this is old...
2014
Ansible & VI Management
I’ve done it with Puppet, and with Chef - but I thought I would give it a go with Ansible. VI management! Today I spent an hour brute forcing my way through ...
Quick Post: Pbis Open
I use PowerBroker Identity Services PBIS Open to connect my home lab’s Ubuntu servers to my lab domain. There’s an issue where new domain users are not confi...
Setting round robin policy via PowerCLI
Another quick PowerCLI script for today. We recently discovered that multiple hosts had datastores configured with fixed path that should have been configure...
Finding concerts with PowerShell - Part 2
I had a few minutes to get back to that PowerShell code that found upcoming concerts in St. Louis, and I added a bit. Skip ahead for the code if you most - t...
Finding concerts with PowerShell and BandsInTown
The move to St. Louis was a success - nothing was broken in transit, and I’ve settled in pretty well. Now the game begins again! Let’s find suitable St. Loui...
Configuring NTP with PowerCLI
This is going to be another quick one. A new cluster was configured without any NTP settings. I threw this bit of code together to set our default NTP server...
Adventures with CoreOS - Part 2
In the previous article, I created three CoreOS VMs and got them to talk to each other using etcd. In this article, we’ll be going over cloud-config/config-d...
Home Lab storage performance
I have been noticing my Zabbix server had been alerting on high I/O and CPU wait times on several VMs when multiple servers were powered on or other concurre...
Adventures with CoreOS
I now have three CoreOS boxes setup in my home lab - following the steps here. But just having three CoreOS boxes doing nothing is boring, so I’ve decided to...
Home Lab Todo List
Quick list for home lab:
Chef - Transitioning from Puppet
Although I haven’t administered a full enterprise Puppet deployment, I do have some experience with it - both in the masterless configuration and with Puppet...
The lab lives again!
After moving from Rochester, NY to Missouri, I’m happy to report everything has made it to Missouri intact and in working condition! Some quick lessons for m...
PostgreSQL + PowerShell
I’ve been absent for quite a while. The home lab automation has taken a back seat to unpacking and setting up IKEA flat-pack furniture.
Micro Update
I have been super busy over the past week and unable to do my usual somewhat extensive updates. So I give you the first (of hopefully not many) Micro Updates!
Puppet & OpenSUSE
I’ve been using the Zabbix Appliance to handle monitoring/graphing of my home lab’s resources to much success, but after recently expanding my Puppet Enterpr...
Installing Chocolatey on Server 2008 R2 Core
While trying to install Chocolately on my Server 2008 R2 Core boxes, I ran into an issue where the .NET 4.0 download would fail repeatedly - “webpicmdline.ex...
Gitlab, Ubuntu 14.04, and LDAP
Time to install source control at home (mostly to organize my home lab’s puppet manifests). I started with my typical Ubuntu 14.04 server install and followe...
Puppet and the Home Lab
I’ve decided to try my hand at managing my ever-growing lab environment using Puppet. Mostly because I’m curious to find use cases at work, but also because ...
Standardizing coding environments with Dropbox
In a previous post, I showed how I rely on Dropbox for synchronizing a few Windows application data folders. I also use it for a rather ghetto source code re...
Thoughts on Ghost
I’ve been using Ghost for this blog for about a month (and the ghostium theme for a little less than a month). It works quite well for a lightweight blog, bu...
Git, Sinatra, and Auto-Syncing Source Control
I develop code (PowerShell mostly) from my work desktop - code/cmdlets/scripts that are destined to run on various remote servers. I got tired of manually co...