The ramblings of a computer geek
VMware vCenter can use a multitude of authentication methods, such as LDAP, Active Directory and SAML (ADFS), however since vCenter 8.0 U1 the ability to integrate with OKTA for authentication has been added, which allows for adding MFA (multi-factor authentication) for enhanced security and detaching the vCenter appliance from Active Directory. When switching to use […]
More...DISCLAIMER: Ensure you consult with a certified electrician, the below is for information only and is not to be taken as guidance on what you should or should not do, it is merely a detail of what I found. Our Ei Electronics Ei166RC smoke detector started to go off at random intervals, we have 3 […]
More...
Setting up network bonding between two 10Gbit NICs within a physical machine; this assumes Active-Standby bonding so a link down event on one NIC will cause the other to become Active, no LACP or switch side configuration is required in this case. The documentation assumes you are running under root, stick sudo in front of […]
More...We had some older VMware hosts where there is a warning about a host being vulnerable to a particular CVE relating to the processor type, in this case the fix was not possible, but we still wanted to suppress the warning. When applying the normal Host Profile it was grumbling about this shell warning, so […]
More...Creating a user account with a home directory and setting the default shell as BASH, can be done as follows, add “sudo” to the front as required. If you need your account to have sudo rights, you can specify the “sudo” group upon creation, as follows:
More...There are a number of ways to protect secrets you wish to use in your Playbooks. I’ll show a simple example here of how you can encrypt a string, copy it into your Playbook for use and then run the Playbook, where the string is de-crypted in-line and used without exposing it in plain text […]
More...
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is managing infrastructure using a DevOps type methodology. Where the current configuration of your infrastructure is represented in code, any additions, changes or deletions are also made through this code. There are various methods to codify your infrastructure, some proprietary like AWS Cloudformation, others are generic like Ansible or Terraform. The […]
More...I’m not sure if this is best necessarily best practice (so please comment below). I had the need to be using SSH key based authentication a lot. So rather than manually running the SSH Agent and then adding my private key (which then meant entering the passphrase on each use), I added this to my […]
More...A quick example on Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS. I had the need for a particular user to have “passwordless” sudo ability. Its not best practice to do this, however if you are restricting the command or commands that a user can run with “passwordless sudo”, you are balancing functionality and security as well as you […]
More...Keeping a VMware ecosystem up to date is a challenge. Ensuring you are running a supportable and stable combination of VMware ESXi, device drivers, extensions and hardware firmware is a lot of moving parts to keep “in synch”. Essentially the version of the device drivers needs to be supported by VMware ESXi, the version of […]
More...