Sunday, February 24, 2019
Why a pihole?
PiHole is a easy slick solution for helping keep your home environment a little safer from various URLs out there. My personal implementation removes a plethora of bad URLs including spam, advertisement sites, porn, etc and attempts to keep my home more secure from bad websites. If your end users are even a little internet savey then they will find it easy to get around this but generally speaking most people won’t understand what is going on.
The PiHole is a quick install and runs on a Raspberry Pi, you configure it with various blacklist items and any DNS query for the bad URLs simply gets routed back to nothing. For example, lets say we don’t want to have any more advertisements from company ABC123.com. We log into the PiHole and blacklist ABC123.com, now any DNS queries to this URL will automatically be returned as nothing, so your device is no longer able to connect to the real website. You can do this with other DNS servers as well, I simply went with the PiHole because I wanted a fun project to do on my Raspberry Pi.
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Saturday, February 2, 2019
Synopsis
While using the vCenter Upgrade process to 6.7 Update 1b I ran into an issue where the space calculation results were incorrect in the upgrade interface. The GUI stated it would need 2.78GB but the actually capacity needed on the source appliance was much greater.
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Sunday, November 11, 2018
Synopsis
There are many times when we will want to schedule VM clones within our environment. Doing this for one or two VMs is easy enough through the various clients but if you are needing to do this on dozens of VMs then this can become highly tedious. I found some examples on the internet but nothing that was effective on specifying resource pool and exact time when scheduling out the work. This script allows you to specify those items and fulfills my requirements.
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Sunday, October 21, 2018
Synopsis
PowerCLI has been a mainstay for automating all things VMware for a very long time. PowerCLI can be an extremely powerful tool but highly frustrating if you don’t understand it. As I have progressed through my career I have gone from someone who was confused and frustrated to someone who completely loves PowerCLI. I hope this document can take some who are in the first group and move them into the second group. As you get into PowerCLI you will find the information I have included here just scratches the surface, for more information please reference VMware’s [Cmdlets reference guide].
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Thursday, October 11, 2018
Synopsis
To ensure compliance and reduce vulnerability vectors we need to frequently update our ESXi hypervisors. If you setup your configuration with SDDC then that process is simple. However, as soon as vCloud Director (VCD) is utilized the environment it causes some additional steps to be taken. In order to ‘properly’ patch a hypervisor within VCD V8 or older you should disable the host and then redistribute VMs. If ignored then this can cause problems, while on newer versions of VCD this is handled rather gracefully, on older versions of VCD that is not the case. In order to ensure that proper patching process is done I opted to write a script that did all of the proper steps with the hypervisor in all services.
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