I recently had to rebuild my PC, and as a result the environment I was using for my website updates with Jekyll was lost. Rather than going through to process of reinstalling Ruby on Windows (which felt dirty the first time!), I decided it was time to work out a better solution. Enter CodeBuild. My code was already sitting on CodeCommit, as it was a good way to have a private Git repository. All I...
As mentioned in my last post, Sneddo.net is now a static HTML website hosted on AWS. As part of the migration I wanted to keep the ability for people to contact me via a form on my website. Rather than shipping this off to another product, I thought this could be a good excuse to play with a few more services on AWS. My requirements we as follows: Have some sort of CAPTCHA to reduce...
Another year has rolled by, and another “I’ve updated my website” post! This time, we’ve gone full circle to the old days of the Internet and gone back to static web pages…sort of. There’s still some dynamic elements, powered by Javascript- most notably the contact form and comments. This posts marks a couple of changes: A move from Wordpress to Jekyll A move from my previous web host, to AWS. So why the change? Mostly...
One of the great features of Server 2012 R2 is the concept of DHCP Failover. Unfortunately, one of the crappy features of this is that DHCP reservations are not automatically synced between failover partners, unlike scope configuration and leases. Seems odd that the one thing that has personally caused headaches amongst DHCP administrators- the laziness of other admins not creating reservations in split scopes- was left out, but anyway… After a little Googling, I found...
Having recently had a vCenter Appliance database corrupt following an all paths down scenario, I went looking for a way to backup the database. I found KB2034505, which details the steps of doing exactly that! The only issue with this approach is that it is a one-off process. However, since the VCSA is just a Linux appliance, we can leverage this to implement a cron task to backup regularly. To do this, I first created...
After over a year since the last update, RVTools 3.7 is here! If you don’t already use this fantastic tool, now is a great time to start :) Version 3.7 (March, 2015) VI SDK reference changed from 5.0 to 5.5 Extended the timeout value from 10 to 20 minutes for really big environments New field VM Folder on vCPU, vMemory, vDisk, vPartition, vNetwork, vFloppy, vCD, vSnapshot and vTools tabpages On vDisk tabpage new Storage IO...
After deploying the vCSA with SSL certs, I decided it was time to finally fix up all the other services that are running on self-signed certs. Next up, vRealize Operations Manager AKA vCenter Operations (vCOps). Although there is a KB Article for this, it is pretty limited. For this guide I assume that OpenSSL is installed in C:\OpenSSL_Win64 - update to the relevant path for your environment. I have followed the folder structure from Configuring...
Today I was deploying the VCSA and thought I’d be smart enough to generate trusted certs for each of the services. Simple, right? There’s even a KB Article for it. The issue I had when I got to the end of the process was that the “VMware vCenter Storage Monitoring Service” and “VMware vSphere Profile-driven Storage Service” were showing as failed in vCenter Service Status. After confirming the services were running, I noticed that web...
If you have ever had to setup a proxy server on the vCenter Server appliance, you will fast run into some limitations when it comes to the username field.For example, our service accounts are named with the “svc_” prefix, which is apparently invalid due to the underscore. The solution? just set the proxy details from the commandline! SSH to the vCSA</li> Edit /etc/environment: vi /etc/environment Modify (or add) the following line: http_proxy=http://username:password@proxy.fqdn.com:3128 Save the changes:...
Long ago, I posted my DFS replication report. This has had a lot of interest of the years, but has not been maintained much in the last few. Enter vCheck, the HTML report framework that I mentioned in one of my previous posts. I have written a number of DFS plugins which can be used with vCheck in order to report on DFS and DFS-R status. At the moment there are the following plugins: 01...