Oof.

#CoSoTech #mozilla

https://twitter.com/jwz/status/1478022085737803776

#CoSoTech

2022 seems like another great year to not be an Exchange admin.

https://twitter.com/M0rePower/status/1477161567670124546

#JustVMwareThings...

😬

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2021/11/important-information-on-esxi-7-update-3.html

#CoSoTech

I've lately (belatedly) been getting *really* into tmux.

This looks handy.
https://tmuxcheatsheet.com/

#CoSoTech

Today I discovered Tailscale, an easier and more elegant way to deploy and manage WireGuard peers for a flexible and secure mesh VPN.

I think I'm in love.
https://tailscale.com/

#CoSoSec #CoSoTech

I swapped my OpenVPN setup for WireGuard, and implemented a site-to-site tunnel between my homelab and a server hosted in Google Cloud. My clients connect to the cloud server and traffic gets routed to the homelab or internet as needed.

Here's how:

https://virtuallypotato.com/cloud-based-wireguard-vpn-remote-homelab-access

#CoSoTech

Me when a misbehaving ESXi host refuses to restart gracefully so I have to forcibly reset it from the UCS console:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCNEzFpIrP8

#CoSoTech

"Powering on thin provisioned virtual machines may cause multiple hosts [running ESXi 7.0U3] in an HA cluster to fail with a purple diagnostic screen."

Maybe I'll hold off on upgrading just a bit longer...

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/86100

#CoSoTech #VMware

I'm studying to renew my Google Cloud cert in a few weeks, and I *just* learned about the Google Cloud Developer's Cheatsheet which describes (and differentiates!) every GCP service in just four words:

https://github.com/priyankavergadia/google-cloud-4-words

Yeah this will be handy.

#CoSoTech

Have you recently learned that BGP is a thing and would like to get a better understanding of it?

(Or brush up on knowledge you already had?)

Here's a great resource on what BGP does as well as what tools you can use to explore it further:

https://jvns.ca/blog/2021/10/05/tools-to-look-at-bgp-routes/

#CoSoTech

@ErrataRob has a pretty good explainer on what's happening with #Facebook today:

https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1445129721168158726
#CoSoTech

So counterintuitively enough, #VMware ESXi hosts may get better burst performance with the power policy set to "Balanced" rather than "High-performance".

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/80610

#CoSoTech

It's a good thing that Neeva *just* sent me a new mug to use. It's less bloated than that other one, and provides useful and accurate results with no ads or third-party tracking.

Okay that really applied more to Neeva's search engine rather than the mug. If you haven't tried Neeva yet, I honestly can't recommend it highly enough.

https://neeva.com/features

#CoSoTech

🚨ATTN: fellow #VMware admins🚨

#CoSoSec #CoSoTech

Time to patch your shit again.

https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2021-0020.html

vCenter vulns:
- file upload (CVE-2021-22005)
- local privilege escalation (CVE-2021-21991)
- reverse proxy bypass (CVE-2021-22006)
- unauthenticated API endpoint (CVE-2021-22011)
- improper permission local privilege escalation (CVE-2021-22015)
- unauthenticated API information disclosure (CVE-2021-22012)
- file path traversal (CVE-2021-22013)
- reflected XSS (CVE-2021-22016)
- and more!

#CoSoTech #CoSoSec

I love that this doesn't just say "don't copy encryption code from StackOverflow" but rather digs into examples to see exactly why they're wrong.

And along the way I learned about https://github.com/luke-park/SecureCompatibleEncryptionExamples, which provides secure encryption examples to use instead.

https://littlemaninmyhead.wordpress.com/2021/09/15/if-you-copied-any-of-these-popular-stackoverflow-encryption-code-snippets-then-you-did-it-wrong/

I wrote a post to document how I'm using #VMware vRealize Automation Action-Based eXtensibility (ABX) to run commands inside the guest of a deployed VM:

https://virtuallypotato.com/run-scripts-in-guest-os-with-vra-abx-actions

#CoSoTech

Hey that wasn't too bad.

- Reinstalled ESXi
- Configured management network
- Reconnected to vCenter
- Reconnected dvSwitches
- Configured vmk interfaces for vSAN, vMotion
- `esxcli vsan cluster join -u {UUID}`
- ???
- Profit

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2059091

A few minor tweaks to clear health alarms but everything came back up without too much fuss.

Sweet, now I can get back to the projects I had intended to work on this morning...

#CoSoTech

No dice. Looks like *something* is corrupted on this host. Going to have to reload it... And hope that it rejoins the vSAN cluster without too much of a fight.

#CoSoTech

And now I'm trying to use gparted.iso to reset the root password on another ESXi 7.x host which disconnected from vCenter overnight and refused to accept *any* of our known-good credentials.

What a day this morning has been.
#CoSoTech

Another morning of doing battle with an invincible undead VM...

Couldn't even get the host to shut down. Wound up having to reset the service profile from UCS.

On to the next battle...
#CoSoTech