I spend a lot of my time and energy answering technical questions, both professionally and "for fun" as a way to scratch that troubleshooting itch. How a question is asked plays a big factor in how effectively I'll be able to answer it.
Years ago I came across Eric Steven Raymond's How To Ask Questions The Smart Way and it really resonated with me. I wish everyone would read it before asking for technical help but I recognize it's a pretty large doc so that's an unrealistic wish.
It's super handy when a Linux config file is loaded with comments to tell you precisely how to configure the thing, but all those comments can really get in the way when you're trying to review the current configuration.
Next time, instead of scrolling through page after page of lengthy embedded explanations, just use:
1egrep -v "^\s*(#|$)" $filename For added usefulness, I alias this command to ccat (which my brain interprets as "commentless cat") in my ~/.
Fix available
VMware has released a fix for this problem in the form of ESXi 7.0 Update 3k:
If you already face the issue, after patching the host to ESXi 7.0 Update 3k, just power on the affected Windows Server 2022 VMs. After you patch a host to ESXi 7.0 Update 3k, you can migrate a running Windows Server 2022 VM from a host of version earlier than ESXi 7.
You might remember that I'm a pretty big fan of Tailscale, which makes it easy to connect your various devices together in a secure tailnet, or private network. Tailscale is super simple to set up on most platforms, but you'll need to install it manually if there isn't a prebuilt package for your system.
Here's a condensed list of the steps that I took to manually install Tailscale on VMware's Photon OS, though the same (or similar) steps should also work on just about any other systemd-based system.
You may have heard that there's a new vSphere release out in the wild - vSphere 8, which just reached Initial Availability this week. Upgrading the vCenter in my single-host homelab is a very straightforward task, and using the included Lifecycle Manager would make quick work of patching a cluster of hosts... but things get a little trickier with a single host. I could write the installer ISO to a USB drive, boot the host off of that, and go through the install interactively, but what if physical access to the host is kind of inconvenient?
VMware vCenter does wonders for abstracting away the layers of complexity involved in managing a large virtual infrastructure, but when something goes wrong it can be challenging to find exactly where the problem lies. And it can be even harder to proactively address potential issues before they occur.
Fortunately there's a super-handy utility which can making diagnosing vCenter significantly easier, and it comes in the form of the vSphere Diagnostic Tool Fling.
Way back in 2020, VMware released vSphere 7 Update 1 and introduced the new vSphere Clustering Services (vCLS) to improve how cluster services like the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) operate. vCLS deploys lightweight agent VMs directly on the cluster being managed, and those VMs provide a decoupled and distributed control plane to offload some of the management responsibilities from the vCenter server.
That's very cool, particularly in large continent-spanning environments or those which reach into multiple clouds, but it may not make sense to add those additional workloads in resource-constrained homelabs1.
Now that VMware has released vCenter 7.0U3c to resolve the Log4Shell vulnerabilities I thought it might be fun to run a security scan against the upgraded VCSA in my homelab to see how it looks. Of course, I don't actually have a security scanner in that environment so I'll need to deploy one.
I start off by heading to tenable.com/products/nessus/nessus-essentials to register for a (free!) license key which will let me scan up to 16 hosts.
When I set up my Tanzu Community Edition environment, I did so from a Linux VM since the containerized Linux environment on my Chromebook doesn't support the kind bootstrap cluster used for the deployment. But now that the Kubernetes cluster is up and running, I'd like to be able to connect to it directly without the aid of a jumpbox. How do I get the appropriate cluster configuration over to my Chromebook?
Lately I've been spending some time getting more familiar with VMware's Tanzu Community Edition Kubernetes distribution, but I'm still not quite familiar enough with the tanzu command line. If only there were a better way for me to discover the available commands for a given context and help me type them correctly...
Oh, but there is! You see, one of the available Tanzu commands is tanzu completion [shell], which will spit out the necessary code to generate handy context-based auto-completions appropriate for the shell of your choosing (provided that you choose either bash or zsh, that is).
I recently migrated this site from Hashnode to GitHub Pages, and I'm really getting into the flexibility and control that managing the content through Jekyll provides. So, naturally, after finalizing the move I got to work recreating Hashnode's "Series" feature, which lets you group posts together and highlight them as a collection. One of the things I liked about the Series setup was that I could control the order of the collected posts: my posts about building out the vRA environment in my homelab are probably best consumed in chronological order (oldest to newest) since the newer posts build upon the groundwork laid by the older ones, while posts about my other one-off projects could really be enjoyed in any order.
I recently ran into a peculiar issue after upgrading my vRealize Automation homelab to the new 8.3 release, and the error message displayed in the UI didn't give me a whole lot of information to work with: I connected to the vRA appliance to try to find the relevant log excerpt, but doing so isn't all that straightforward given the containerized nature of the services. So instead I used the vracli log-bundle command to generate a bundle of all relevant logs, and I then transferred the resulting (2.
It's a good idea to take a snapshot of your virtual appliances before applying any updates, just in case. When you have multiple vCenter appliances operating in Enhanced Link Mode, though, it's important to make sure that the snapshots are in a consistent state. The vCenter vmdird service is responsible for continuously syncing data between the vCenters within a vSphere Single Sign-On (SSO) domain. Reverting to a snapshot where vmdird's knowledge of the environment dramatically differed from that of the other vCenters could cause significant problems down the road or even result in having to rebuild a vCenter from scratch.
There are a number of fantastic Windows applications for creating bootable USB drives from ISO images - but those don't work on a Chromebook. Fortunately there's an easily-available tool which will do the trick: Google's own Chromebook Recovery Utility app.
Normally that tool is used to creating bootable media to reinstall Chrome OS on a broken Chromebook (hence the name) but it also has the capability to write other arbitrary images as well.
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.
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:
