The ramblings of a computer geek
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:
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 … Read 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 … Read 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 … Read 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 … Read 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 … Read more
A fairly common error with a fairly easy fix. When adding the Service Pack for Proliant (SPP) I was seeing this error message: “some error occured while online deport registration” The error appears here, the “important notes” gives you the clue to the fix. You need to ensure that your iLO Amplifier appliance(s) are not … Read more
I have multiple monitors, it can be a pain to line them up using the Windows Control Panel too “Rearrange Your Displays”, sometimes you can’t quite get them to line up, what this means is sometimes your mouse will get stuck going between screens. A way round this is to use this neat little tool: … Read more
Tailscale is a great little tool to allow you to setup your VPN between all sorts of devices and without the worry about issues like Firewalls or setting up VPN servers/concentrators. There’s loads of documentation on how to setup Tailscale, so I won’t repeat that here, but i’ll run through a quick example of something … Read more
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is a protocol that can be used for monitoring and managing network connected devices. Personally I use it primarily for monitoring, it is a useful way to interrogate network connected devices for information about their status. For example querying to identify if a power supply has failed on a switch, … Read more