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Deploy vCenter Server Appliance with Terraform

I’m a big fan of William Lam’s scripts to deploy nested vSphere lab environments. A few months ago, he published a script for vSphere 7.0 that deploys the usual suspects. It also deploys vSphere with Kubernetes. I’ve always wanted to see if I could build something similar using Terraform. I think it would be awesome to run a terraform apply and go from an OVA file to a fully deployed vCenter. I’ve messed around with this in the past. I even fixed a bug that made the VCSA as well as William’s Nested ESXi Appliances undeployable. Without any hacks you could deploy a VCSA and get it online enough for network connectivity. Due to limitations, you would have to manually configure the VCSA from the VAMI interface. As another option, you could manually edit the VCSA OVF file and change… Read More »Deploy vCenter Server Appliance with Terraform

HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 as home lab storage

I recently outgrew the local storage on my gaming PC. Rather than just get some bigger drives, I decided that I wanted a separate box for just storage and Plex so that it was easier to tinker on my gaming PC without impact to my family. I thought about buying a Synology or QNAP device, but the cost seemed relatively high for what you get. If I build my own device I have a bit more flexibility on hardware selection, operating system, and disk layout. I ended up getting an HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10. This system seems to get a lot of hate because it is lacking in features compared to the Gen8. Specifically, the fact that it doesn’t have an iLO and it has a soldered on processor. The new Gen10 Plus reinstates these features with added cost. I… Read More »HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 as home lab storage

Deploying MySQL on Oracle Clusterware – Part 5

Installing MySQL There are a few ways to get the MySQL software set up for clustering.  One option is to install the rpm for MySQL on both cluster nodes.  There is also a tar file containing what you need to create a yum repository that can be used by multiple servers.  You could also use a tar of the software and just extract it to a shared filesystem.  The benefit of the last option is that you can have multiple instances of MySQL hosted on the same cluster running different versions. I decided to have MySQL 5.7 installed from a yum repository, but also have a MySQL 5.6 home extracted from a tar in case you needed to run an older version concurrently. At the time of writing, I used the following patches from MOS as they had the latest versions of… Read More »Deploying MySQL on Oracle Clusterware – Part 5

Installing Qubes OS 3.2 on a HP Zbook Studio G3

I recently got a demo unit of an HP Zbook Studio G3 to play with.  It is a tricked out one with a 4k display and a NVMe drive.  I wanted to try out Qubes OS on it, but the installer would lock up when I tried to boot it. Getting Qubes to install and boot The rough steps for getting a HP Zbook Studio G3 to install Qubes OS 3.2 are: Get a copy of the Qubes OS 3.2 ISO Write the ISO to a USB Drive Mount the EFI boot partition of the USB drive Windows will automatically mount it if you plug in the USB drive – a Mac won’t recognize it at all Modify the EFI/BOOT/xen.cfg file so that all of the kernel lines contain acpi_osi=! acpi_osi=”Windows 2009″ I found this useful tip on the ArchWiki Disable Secure Boot… Read More »Installing Qubes OS 3.2 on a HP Zbook Studio G3

SSSD and Active Directory Primary Group

If you’re ever scratching your head because you’re seeing messages like this when trying to diagnose a sssd issue with an ad_access_filter for the user foobar:  [sdap_access_filter_done] (0x0100): User [foobar] was not found with the specified filter. Denying access. You just know that foobar is a member of one of the groups the ad_access_filter is looking for, so what is going on?   The issue is probably that foobar is a member of the group, but also has that group set as it’s primary group. The primary group of an account in Active Directory doesn’t appear under the account’s memberOf LDAP attribute.  You’ll have to add the primaryGroupID attribute to your ad_access_filter.