I rediscovered this gem this morning, and I'm havening laughening as a result.

#CoSoTech #TalesFromIT

https://www.chroniclesofgeorge.com/

I'm in the market for a new bookmark manager.

Anyone here use raindrop.io? Or another that you'd strongly recommend?

#CoSoTech #Tech

I finally had the brilliant idea to install #SaltStack minions on all my various servers (both in my home lab as well as scattered across several cloud providers), and I set up a #Tailscale ACL to let all those minions reach back to the master.

This is going to dramatically simplify how I manage those systems, and I'm pretty thrilled to have done it without having to punch any holes through firewalls. Tailscale is such magic!

#CoSoTech

#CoSoTech

A few more days of tinkering and my initial #Vagrant setup has evolved to a nice little #Saltstack lab environment.

So I renamed the repo accordingly:
https://github.com/jbowdre/vagrant-saltlab

I'm having a lot of fun figuring things out, like how a top file is used to automatically assign states to minions. Having this ready-to-go-at-the-drop-of-a-hat lab is going to be a big help on my learning journey.

#CoSoTech

A few weeks back, I posted how excited I was to get #Vagrant set up to run VMs on my Chromebook since I was intending to use it as a way to test/learn/generally-fool-around-with Salt:

https://www.virtuallypotato.com/create-vms-chromebook-hashicorp-vagrant/

I finally circled back to create a Vagrantfile to define an environment with a Salt master and four Salt minions running on different Linux distributions. I'm eager to play with this!

https://github.com/jbowdre/Vagrantfiles/blob/main/salt/Vagrantfile

#CoSoTech

Protip: don't use the conventional '/' as an expression separator in a sed command if you're hoping to parse/insert/replace a URL...

I only wasted about 20 minutes trying to figure out why my script to template an XML file was working for everything but the URLs.

#CoSoTech

I found this #VSCode extension a few weeks ago and its Auto-Align action has quickly become one of my most-invoked commands.

It's saved me so much time, and made my code look a lot nicer too!

/nosanitize

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bladnman.auto-align

TIL that when Cisco sends you a MLOM card to replace yours that died during a UCS firmware upgrade, they may have helpfully shipped it with a setting which keeps the link from coming up until you jump through several hurdles to flip the setting, reset the network configuration, reset the entire CIMC, and finally reboot the server and let it be discovered by UCS-M.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/hyperconverged-infrastructure/hyperflex-hx-series/215094-checklist-for-troubleshooting-hyperflex.html#anc7

We'd only been fighting this production outage since Saturday. Thanks for the support, guys.

#CoSoTech

I was today years old when I learned that #ChromeOS
has a built-in `@tabs` operator to search your opened tabs.

This is a game changer.

#CoSoTech

https://blog.google/products/chrome/search-your-tabs-bookmarks-and-history-in-the-chrome-address-bar/

I just spawned a Windows 11 VM on my Chromebook.

I might have a problem.

But hey, I took notes so you can be just like me:

https://www.virtuallypotato.com/create-vms-chromebook-hashicorp-vagrant/

#CoSoTech #ChromeOS #Vagrant #Linux

🚨Heads up, #vSphere admins!🚨

Microsoft KB5022842 update for Windows Server 2022 will cause #VMware VMs with Secure Boot enabled to not boot - securely or otherwise.

Yikes.

I threw together a quick #PowerCLI script to identify which VMs in my environment might be impacted (just a couple hundred!).

#CoSoTech

https://www.virtuallypotato.com/psa-microsoft-kb5022842-breaks-ws2022-secure-boot/

#CoSoTech

I've been playing a bit with #Tailscale's experimental golink service lately, and I am quite impressed by how simple + powerful it is.

I jotted down some notes on how I set it up and shared some of my favorite shortcuts (so far):

https://www.virtuallypotato.com/tailscale-golink-private-shortlinks-tailnet/

The birthday present I bought for myself finally arrived! And yes, I immediately cracked it open to upgrade the memory and NVMe storage. 32GB/ 1TB should serve me well for a little bit.

#Chromebook #ChromeOS #Framework #CoSoTech

#CoSoTech This looks like it could be handy:

Born from the ashes of Stadia, this repository contains tools for syncing and streaming files from Windows to Linux. They are based on Content Defined Chunking (CDC), in particular FastCDC, to split up files into chunks.

https://github.com/google/cdc-file-transfer

Because I'm a special kind of crazy (or maybe just obsessed?), I installed #Tailscale on my #SteamDeck.

Here are the instructions I wound up following so that tailscaled would automatically start at boot without having to enter desktop mode:

https://gist.github.com/legowerewolf/1b1670457cfac9201ee9d67840952147

#CoSoTech #CoSoGaming

#CoSoTech

I deployed #Tailscale's slick little golink utility today, and I'm having a lot of fun thinking up clever ways to use it. Being able to use Go templating in the URL is pretty handy.

For instance:
- go/vc is a shortcut to my vCenter instance
- go/vc/compy486 searches my vCenter for a VM named compy486
- go/ts/go searches the Tailscale admin portal for a machine named go

I'm pretty entertained.

https://tailscale.com/blog/golink/

#CoSoTech #AI

The Neeva search engine just launched a new "Neeva AI" feature, which uses magic (machine learning) to summarize a response for your search query and (importantly!) include references for where it got the information.

This might save you a few clicks when trying to familiarize yourself with a topic!

https://neeva.com/blog/introducing-neevaai

#CoSoTech

Anyone have a strong recommendation for an outdoor security camera system? Looks like it's about time to replace the wireless Arlo cameras I've had for years. Would like to go for something hardwired this time so I don't have to swap out rechargable batteries every 3 months. Bonus points for integration with #HomeAssistant.

#CoSoTech

I just got a beefy new Windows 11 laptop for work, and I've spent most of today working to get it set up the way I need it. Part of that (naturally) includes configuring an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS environment in WSL. And then I need all my Linux tools...

Anyhoo, I was really excited to find this post on how to install #Docker in WSL without needing to use the bulky Docker Desktop app:

https://medium.com/geekculture/run-docker-in-windows-10-11-wsl-without-docker-desktop-a2a7eb90556d

#CoSoTech #CoSoSec
I know you're already using a password manager like BitWarden to generate and store unique, complex, and random passwords for all your various web logins, but what do you do for the passwords you might need to manually type in on a regular basis? Typing 'UcQECUgZ8y&$YZNLzfsfhQik' every time I need to unlock my computer is a bit of a chore.

May I recommend https://diceware.dmuth.org/ ? It generates a passphrase of random words which is secure yet still easy to remember/type.