Today I ditched a feature-packed tracker-laden URL shortener in favor of a lightweight serverless solution deployed to Google Cloud Run. Links are managed in a Google Sheet doc, making it super easy for me to create new links as needed.

Check it out:
http://go.bowdre.net/shorterer

#CoSoTech

Continuing my efforts to document/share the solutions I've hacked together for my #VMware vRA project, I wrote up how I got vRA to register static DNS records in Microsoft DNS using a Windows SSH host as an intermediary.

https://virtuallypotato.com/creating-static-records-in-microsoft-dns-from-vrealize-automation

#CoSoTech

As excited as I am to see what's next for #WearOS, I can't help but mourn the card-based future that s/could/should/ have been.

"Wrist-based wearables could have been a chance to free ourselves from the phone-app paradigm, but instead, we continue to embrace it fully."

https://9to5google.com/2021/08/10/google-now-wear-glass-unsiloed-future/

#CoSoTech

#CoSoTech

https://gitlab.com/gpsd/gpsd/-/issues/144

> This code is going to trigger a 1024 week backward time jump from Saturday October 16, 2021 to Sunday March 3, 2002.

2002 was a pretty good year for me. I wouldn't mind revisiting it for a bit.

I started using Neeva (neeva.com) a few weeks back and have been extremely impressed.

It's surprisingly refreshing to search for a thing and be greeted by a page full of actual results with no ads, affiliate product links, or other promoted content. I can quickly find what I need and be on my way, and the search engine has zero incentive to keep me engaged on the results page or encourage me to click on certain things.

This is how search should be.

https://www.protocol.com/neeva-search

#CoSoTech

I went back and wrote a quick article about how I implemented this pseudo-series setup and some of the Jekyll things I learned along the way:

https://virtuallypotato.com/recreating-hashnode-series-categories-in-jekyll-on-github-pages​

#CoSoTech

Moving my blog thingy to Jekyll has given me more flexibility than I had with Hashnode... so I tinkered a bit today to recreate Hashnode's "series" feature to group posts on certain topics.

Here's my vRA8 series:
https://virtuallypotato.com/series/vra8

I know very little about web development stuff so I'm pretty pleased to have pulled this off. Learning by doing is the best way to learn!

#CoSoTech

New post on the (also new) blog thingy!

This one was going to be a lot more complicated before a recent vRA update. I'll trade 50 lines of JavaScript for 3 lines of YAML any day!

Joining VMs to Active Directory in site-specific OUs with vRA8 https://virtuallypotato.com/joining-vms-to-active-directory-in-site-specific-ous-with-vra8

#CoSoTech

I teased it a bit the other day, but now I've done it! 🎉

I have migrated my little technical blog thing from Hashnode to GitHub Pages, and I'm fairly pleased with the result. This move gives me a lot more flexibility and lets me write posts offline and then publish them with a `git push` so that's kind of cool.

Anyway, same URL, same content, just a different look and feel:

https://virtuallypotato.com/virtually-potato-migrated-to-github-pages

#CoSoTech

#CoSoTech

My brain every single time I click over to the FSM tab in Cisco UCS Manager:

#CoSoTech

I'm bad at regex and I feel bad, but I made a thing do the thing I needed to do and that makes me feel (somewhat) better.

https://virtuallypotato.com/script-to-update-image-embed-links-in-markdown-files

#CoSoTech

I ran into an issue with vRA failing to start after the 8.4.2 upgrade. I worked with #VMware support to get around the problem and complete the upgrade.

And I just found this great blog post which has the details on what's wrong and how to fix it - and those steps exactly mirror what support had me do - including the PL/pgSQL query I mentioned yesterday:

https://www.nukescloud.com/post/identity-service-app-initialization-failure-after-upgrading-to-vrealize-automation-8-4-2

I know I've found a good issue when I get on a call with support and they immediately want to ssh into the affected appliance and run a 2000-character PL/pgSQL script against the embedded DB.

Also, this happens way more often than it seems like it should.

#CoSoTech

I noticed yesterday that my {php}IPAM integration for vRA 8 (https://virtuallypotato.com/integrating-phpipam-with-vrealize-automation-8) was failing every time it tried to retrieve the list of available IP ranges.

Seems it's a known issue - updating to vRA 8.4.2 should fix it.

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/84027

PS: You need to apply Product Support Pack v8.4.1.1 in LCM, and then install LCM 8.4.1 PATCH1 before you can use LCM to upgrade vRA to 8.4.2.

#VMware #CoSoTech #IHateComputers

I just got asked to take a snapshot of a server.

A *physical* server.

"Sure thing, just let me grab my camera."

#CoSoTech

Now I am become Init_VMKernelShutdownHelper, the destroyer of all user worlds.

#VMware #CoSoTech

#CoSoTech

"If we can't even handle our own cloud migration program then why would any customer trust us?"

You make a very strong point!

https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/30/ibm_email_outage/

My other "how is it only Wednesday" adventure this morning involves an "CRITICAL" VM which stopped responding, on a host which disconnected from vCenter and refuses to reconnect.

SSH to the host try to restart hostd/vpxa; can't find the process.

`ps | grep vpxa` and kill the listed PID; no such process.

kill the hung VM; no such process.

Need to bounce the host. 10 other (prod) VMs on it are fine, but won't migrate while the host is disconnected.

Coordinating downtime now...

#CoSoTech

#CoSoTech

My computer hadn't finished logging in this morning when I got a frantic call from the network team lead.

"Hey, can you help? This site is reporting that they can't get any addresses from DHCP."

Huh, that's interesting, I can't even ping the BMC interface on the host where that DHCP server should be running. Did anything change?

"Oh yeah we swapped out the WAN link for that site."

...

How about you double-check the thing you changed before coming to me about DHCP issues.

*sigh*

#CoSoTech

WHEREIN I document the steps I took to deploy a federated Matrix server on Oracle Cloud's free tier using Docker and (the real star of the show) Caddy Web Server! (Seriously Caddy is incredible.)

https://virtuallypotato.com/federated-matrix-server-synapse-on-oracle-clouds-free-tier