I was pretty excited to get WSL2 and Docker working on my Windows 10 1909 laptop a few weeks ago, but I quickly encountered a problem: WSL2 had no network connectivity when connected to my work VPN.
Well, that's not entirely true; Docker worked just fine, but nothing else could talk to anything outside of the WSL environment. I found a few open issues for this problem in the WSL2 Github with suggested workarounds including modifying Windows registry entries, adjusting the metrics assigned to various virtual network interfaces within Windows, and manually setting DNS servers in /etc/resolv.
Do you (like me) find yourself frequently searching for information within the same websites over and over? Wouldn't it be great if you could just type your query into your browser's address bar (AKA the Chrome Omnibox) and go straight to the results you need? Well you totally can - and probably already are for certain sites which have inserted themselves as search engines.
The basics Point your browser to chrome://settings/searchEngines to see which sites are registered as Custom Search Engines: Each of these search engine entries has three parts: a name ("Search engine"), a Keyword, and a Query URL.
Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 was recently updated to bring support for less-bleeding-edge Windows 10 versions (like 1903 and 1909). WSL2 is a big improvement over the first iteration (particularly with better Docker support) so I was really looking forward to getting WSL2 loaded up on my work laptop.
Here's how.
WSL2 Step Zero: Prereqs You'll need Windows 10 1903 build 18362 or newer (on x64). You can check by running ver from a Command Prompt:
I manage a large VMware environment spanning several individual vCenters, and I often need to run PowerCLI queries across the entire environment. I waste valuable seconds running Connect-ViServer and logging in for each and every vCenter I need to talk to. Wouldn't it be great if I could just log into all of them at once?
I can, and here's how I do it.
The Script The following Powershell script will let you define a list of vCenters to be accessed, securely store your credentials for each vCenter, log in to every vCenter with a single command, and also close the connections when they're no longer needed.
I've got an Ender 3 Pro 3D printer, a Raspberry Pi 4, and a Pixel Slate. I can't interface directly with the printer over USB from the Slate (plus having to be physically connected to things is like so lame) so I installed Octoprint on the Raspberry Pi and connected that to the printer's USB interface. This gave me a pretty web interface for controlling the printer - but it's only accessible over the local network.
I found myself with a sudden need for parsing a Linux server's logs to figure out which host(s) had been slamming it with an unexpected burst of traffic. Sure, there are proper log analysis tools out there which would undoubtedly make short work of this but none of those were installed on this hardened system. So this is what I came up with.
Find IP-ish strings This will get you all occurrences of things which look vaguely like IPv4 addresses:
A friend mentioned the BitWarden password manager to me yesterday and I had to confess that I'd never heard of it. I started researching it and was impressed by what I found: it's free, open-source, feature-packed, fully cross-platform (with Windows/Linux/MacOS desktop clients, Android/iOS mobile apps, and browser extensions for Chrome/Firefox/Opera/Safari/Edge/etc), and even offers a self-hosted option.
I wanted to try out the self-hosted setup, and I discovered that the official distribution works beautifully on an n1-standard-1 1-vCPU Google Compute Engine instance - but that would cost me an estimated $25/mo to run after my free Google Cloud Platform trial runs out.
