You might remember that I'm a pretty big fan of Tailscale, which makes it easy to connect your various devices together in a secure tailnet, or private network. Tailscale is super simple to set up on most platforms, but you'll need to install it manually if there isn't a prebuilt package for your system. Here's a …

VMware vCenter does wonders for abstracting away the layers of complexity involved in managing a large virtual infrastructure, but when something goes wrong it can be challenging to find exactly where the problem lies. And it can be even harder to proactively address potential issues before they occur. Fortunately …

Way back in 2020, VMware released vSphere 7 Update 1 and introduced the new vSphere Clustering Services (vCLS) to improve how cluster services like the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) operate. vCLS deploys lightweight agent VMs directly on the cluster being managed, and those VMs provide a decoupled and …

Now that VMware has released vCenter 7.0U3c to resolve the Log4Shell vulnerabilities I thought it might be fun to run a security scan against the upgraded VCSA in my homelab to see how it looks. Of course, I don't actually have a security scanner in that environment so I'll need to deploy one. I start off by heading to …

When I set up my Tanzu Community Edition environment, I did so from a Linux VM since the containerized Linux environment on my Chromebook doesn't support the kind bootstrap cluster used for the deployment. But now that the Kubernetes cluster is up and running, I'd like to be able to connect to it directly without the …

Lately I've been spending some time getting more familiar with VMware's Tanzu Community Edition Kubernetes distribution, but I'm still not quite familiar enough with the tanzu command line. If only there were a better way for me to discover the available commands for a given context and help me type them correctly... …

I recently migrated this site from Hashnode to GitHub Pages, and I'm really getting into the flexibility and control that managing the content through Jekyll provides. So, naturally, after finalizing the move I got to work recreating Hashnode's "Series" feature, which lets you group posts together and …

I recently ran into a peculiar issue after upgrading my vRealize Automation homelab to the new 8.3 release, and the error message displayed in the UI didn't give me a whole lot of information to work with: I connected to the vRA appliance to try to find the relevant log excerpt, but doing so isn't all that …

It's a good idea to take a snapshot of your virtual appliances before applying any updates, just in case. When you have multiple vCenter appliances operating in Enhanced Link Mode, though, it's important to make sure that the snapshots are in a consistent state. The vCenter vmdird service is responsible for …

There are a number of fantastic Windows applications for creating bootable USB drives from ISO images - but those don't work on a Chromebook. Fortunately there's an easily-available tool which will do the trick: Google's own Chromebook Recovery Utility app. Normally that tool is used to creating bootable media to …

Do you (like me) find yourself frequently searching for information within the same websites over and over? Wouldn't it be great if you could just type your query into your browser's address bar (AKA the Chrome Omnibox) and go straight to the results you need? Well you totally can - and probably already are for certain …