DUPLICATE IPADRESS ON PACKER UBUNTU VM'S

After reading a blog post, from Cody’s blog thehumblelab.com, about how to create automated vSphere templates, using Packer.
I have been using it, for most of my vSphere templates in my demo lab at work.

But it has not been without problems. I have been having a problem with my Ubuntu templates.
After deploying them, they all came up with the same ipadress :-(

NEW PASSWORD MANAGER

I have been a (happy) long time user of Keepass.
It was the place to store passwords, notes etc, across many of the systems I use today.
That means mostly OSX, but also a bit Windows, and in some cases IOS as well.

The way I used it, was by having my kdb file, in a dropbox share, that I then accessed from all my devices.
The drawback to this, is that I could only have one open at the time. Not a big deal, but I had on 2 occasions, had a corrupted DB. No problem, since Dropbox files are easy to restore. But still a small gotcha.

FILTER EXTENSIBILITY SUBSCRIPTIONS IN CAS

For the last couple of days, I have been playing quite a lot with Cloud Automation Services.
That means deploying a lot of VM’s, just to destroy them again.

Some time ago, I got help, from some good colleagues, to setup a Python Slack notification, using the extensibility on AWS Faas. The subscription to this, was on a single project, and on all Post Compute Provisions events.

CLOUD AGNOSTIC BLUEPRINTS IN VMWARE CAS

VMware Cloud Automation Services went GA 2 days ago, on the 15/1/2019.
There is already a ton of blogs, describing the solution.

I thought that I would give my view on one of the things, that i find most cool about the solution.
Note that i’m no expert, but I already love the solution, and i’m looking forward to learning more  about what I, and the customers I talk to, can do with it.

GETTING STARTED WITH CLOUD AUTOMATION SERVICES - ALMOST

I finally got started on Cloud Automation Services (CAS), or at least Cloud Assembly.
Living in Denmark, where many customers are talking Azure all the time, and the local vSphere environments, are smaller, the SAAS offering makes a lot of sense IMHO.

I must admit I already love the product, even thou it requires some learning, to get the hang of it. But hey, that the fun stuff, and it did not take long, until I got something useful up and running :-)

HOMEKIT SUPPORT FOR NON HOMEKIT DEVICES

For that last 2 years, I have been playing around with Home Automation.
So far i’m running a mix of both an Openhab installation, based on MQTT, and some Homekit devices (Philips hue etc).
Openhab is a great product, but I was finding myself, more and more, using Homekit, controlled from my ATV4, to be the way i do home automation.
Most of the reason being, that I get locality, out of the box, and since all in my household (that matters for home automation) is using IOS devices, i can easily create rules, based on if people are home or not.
Also it’s easy to edit rules etc. when i’m not home.

MONITOR DOMAIN ADMINS USING VMWARE LOG INSIGHT

I had a customer asking me yesterday, if it was possible to use Log Insight, to monitor changes done to the Domain Admins group.

An interesting use case, that i had not thought of before.
The answer is off course yes, so i thought i would write a small post about it.

CLOUD MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCE DAY

A lot of my work time, these days, is spend on preparing a new thing we have in Denmark. It’s called Cloud Management Experience day.
We have already been running the same for VSAN, NSX and EUC.

The idea is to have customers participating in a full day og learning, where they can experience our products. In this case our CMP Products.
We (me and a collegaue) will then be presenting our solutions, while give the users access to Hands on Labs, where they can try, the things we talk about.

FINGBOX - NEW SECURITY DEVICE IN MY HOME

So i bought a new gadget. After hearing my collegaue, telling me about it, and I was sold.

Fing.io is a free network scanner app for IOS (and Android).
They extended it, by connecting it to a physical device, that connects to your router, and monitors your network.
It only need a cable in your router, and power, then you are done.

VREALIZE BUSINESS - DO YOU KNOW YOUR COST ?

Do you know the cost of your datacenters, and what the cost would be, if you had to move your workloads to the public Cloud ?

One of the products, that can help with that, is VMware vRealize Business.
It’s probably one of the most overlooked products, in VMwares portfolio.