Recent content on Bede Carroll
TL;DR Install llm, drop three small files into your dot‑files, and you get CTRL +ALT +l to send the visible screen, CTRL +ALT +L to select N lines of scroll‑back, CTRL +ALT +N to start a fresh chat. Replies appear in a right‑hand split running less, and each pane keeps its own independent conversation. Why? I spend a lot of time staring at logs and stack‑traces wondering “what on earth?
Over the past year I’ve been refining how I build small tools and websites with the help of large language models. Below is a quick overview of the workflow that has worked well for me. Create a GitHub repository – everything starts with a fresh repo so I can track progress and iterate quickly. Clone locally – once the repo exists I pull it down to my development machine. Kick off the OpenAI…
For years, my blog sat dormant, a relic of a different era of the internet. The content was still relevant to me, a snapshot of my thoughts and experiences in the tech world from over a decade ago. However, the format was outdated, a mix of inconsistent markdown, old HTML elements, and front matter that didn’t quite fit modern static site generators like Hugo, which I’ve since adopted.…
So the latest version of the Windows 10 tech preview is out and it is pretty snazzy! Being the daredevil rouge that I am I decided to try it out on my work laptop (being the only Windows PC I have) and have had great success. While I wanted to try it out I didn’t want to chance destroying all my data and I also wanted an easy back out if I didn’t like it.
Sorry all for the lack of posts, I’ve been lazybusy. But as you can see the site has had a new lick of paint but that is a whole different series posts. Instead I want to talk about my new NAS. Being the data conscious person that I am there is only one acceptable filesystem to use, ZFS. Thankfully there is also a nice appliance-like OS called FreeNAS that is based on FreeBSD and has ZFS as…
Damien Flynn has a good article on Petri about using System Centre Update Publisher (SCUP) to deploy the SCCM client with WSUS. Damien Flynn follows up with part two of expanding WSUS. Kristian Nese has a useful blog post on how to deploy SOFS using SCVMM. Lai Yoong Seng has a post about creating a Linux VM template for Hyper-V. This is a handy one, if you’ve noticed the difference between…
Chris M Evans over at ArchitectingIT has a good post on why he doesn’t want to see a ten year old flash array. I honestly don’t think to many organisations really keep ancient arrays around as their primary storage array, the support costs alone would be astronomical. Speaking of flash, the VMware vSphere blog has a useful post on VSAN hardware guidance with SSDs. I’ve linked to…
With all the brouhaha about VSAN (and I admit I’m looking very hard at it and how much it would cost to get a nice home lab setup) the requirement for one SSD per disk group should show the importance of SSD reliability. If you plan on using consumer grade SSDs or SSDs not from your hardware OEM (and even then) you are going to want to test them, hard.
Jeff Wouters has a handy script to find empty Active Directory groups. Another good one from Jeff Wouters, this time to find the users in the “authoritative groups”. I believe the authoritative groups Jeff is referencing are the BUILTIN groups. If you are looking to play tricks on your coworkers or have a legitimate reason to eject the CD-ROM drive, PowerShell Magazine have you…
One to look out for those of you with IIS based websites, Update decreases the page load time of web sites that are hosted on Windows 7-based and Windows Server 2008 R2-based web servers. I’m sure we’ve all see the trust relationship error with Windows computers however KB 2914472 details that this can be caused by an IIS issue. A hotfix is referenced. For you Hyper-V and SCOM users…
For all you SOE creators out there, you might find this post from Henk Hoogendoorn useful as he provides links to driver packages from Dell, HP and Lenovo. Should come in quite handy if you are using MDT/SCCM. I’ve been fighting with UEFI and WDS as of late so I know the pain of trying to get it going. If you are working with a device with no KVM you might want to look out for this bug with…
Good news everyone! F5 have dropped the price of their LTM VE lab editions to approx. USD$95. Here in Australia the going rate was about AUD$2000 so this represents a significant saving. With this price it is worth adding these VMs to your lab and I look forward to trying out NSX with these new VEs when I’m able to get ahold of NSX. I’ve bought two to test failover but I’m still…
I’m very happy to see that vCAC 6.0 is out and it looks much nicer to install now, being a vApp and all. I’d recommend have a read of the release notes on the VMware website. When I get a chance I hope to put it through its paces in my lab. Over at ElasticSkies there is a good blog post on the new release detailing the new features. I was surprised by the number of hypervisors…
In a pure example of the power of software-defined-whatever, over at Mauveweb there is a great blog post on unit testing load balancer configurations with Honeyd. Fantastic idea! A great post by AirBnB on their “SmartStack” service discovery software they have written to support their Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). I really like these posts as they give a great insight into how…
A bit of a troubling VMware KB, it seems E1000 adapters can cause a purple screen of death (PSOD). The remediation is to either use VMXNET3 adapters or disable RSS inside the VMs. I’ve tried to move away from E1000 to VMXNET3 but this is still one to watch out for. A Microsoft one this time, there is a potential for data loss when using SCSI disks with 2012 failover clustering in specific…
It seems that the blade server market grew at a nice clip in Q3 according to IDC as reported by Kevin Houston at Blades Made Simple. I wonder how long this will continue? With VSAN and associated technologies, blades don’t really make sense to me. Maybe they won’t be as big a deal as they are made out to be? I’ve been working a lot with Microsoft Word lately and quite frankly I…
Over at Network Janitor, Kurt Bales has a fantastic blog post on the “py-junos-eznc” Python library. It uses NETCONF for communication. Not everything out there uses REST APIs it seems… Speaking of programming, Cisco have announced their GitHub repo for the new Nexus 9k series. Well worth the look and I look forward to seeing it build out over time. Still at Cisco, the “Data…
Brian Madden has a great post on Windows desktop management. I’d argue that the utility of “curating” a Windows environment is no where near what it once was. Do we really care that all users have the same background or that the notification area shows all icons? I doubt it. Perhaps we need to quantify the cost of all these configuration elements? Now that would be interesting!…
For those using Nested ESXi, Andreas Peetz over at VMware Front Experience shows how you can use his great tool to turn the ESXi VMware Tools into a package suitable to put inside the installer. I’ve requested that they consider releasing the VIB as a bundle to make it even easier. Jonathan Medd has a blog post with his Puppet module “skeleton” creator using PowerShell. Even if…
Thanks to Vladan Seget over at Vladan.fr there are some cool new posters to hang on your wall. Poster one is [Hyper-V 2012 R2 architecture] (http://www.vladan.fr/windows-server-hyper-v-2012-r2-poster/) and poster two is [vSphere 5 memory management and monitoring] (http://www.vladan.fr/vmware-vsphere-5-memory-management-and-monitoring-poster/). This is quite the head scratcher for you SMB folks,…
How are those Windows XP migration projects coming along? Well I hope! A new 0-day is out for XP and it hits you right in the kernel. SANS has all the links and details for this one. If you use SCOM 2012 R2 and Dell devices there is a new management pack out now. You will want to head on over to the Dell TechCenter to see all the little goodies.
While it is all fun and games to laugh at Azure going down taking a whole bunch of public Microsoft websites with it, it also serves as a timely reminder that the “cloud” isn’t some magical beast that has 100% uptime just because there are lots of data centres scattered across the world. Monitoring your off premise availability is just as important as monitoring on premise.…
So the day has finally arrived where EMC have released the XtremeIO storage array. Josh Nash has a great blog post on what makes up an XtremeIO system. If you only read one post I’d recommend this one to get you up to speed on the XtremeIO. But it wasn’t all sunshine and unicorns for EMC, as this blog post over at ArchitectingIT will attest. Robin Harris at StorageMojo has his own take…
For those of you who require some kind of Microsoft guidance to make a decision I have a gift for you. Microsoft recommend not using RC4 and SHA-1. Honestly in this day and age if you are using RC4 I would be very worried. Over at TechNet Magazine there is a (semi) interesting post on not touching things that shouldn’t be touched, e.g magic registry keys. Honestly I found it a bit long…
For all you Microsoft admins out there, Redmond has release free ebook on Windows Server 2012 R2. I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet but it is free! Citrix have announced their EOL dates for the Citrix Web Interface products. Get the dates and a Doctor Evil picture over at the vCloudinfo blog. William Lam over at virtuallyGhetto has another great blog post on getting nested ESXi…
So you’re starting to get the hang of this PowerShell stuff and are able to pull off your own fancy tricks with the builtin cmdlets, but you need more! You want to be able to do things like create computer accounts, get VMware host information or turn on Cisco UCS and HP blades, cool stuff! Well, there is a way and that way is PowerShell modules. PowerShell modules come in two types, script…
This is going to be a bit of a different “The Internet Fishing Trawler” post in that I’ve seen quite a few interesting looking Microsoft KBs crop up on their RSS feeds lately. So for this edition I’ll just be presenting each KB, you can have a bit of a look at any that may apply to your environment. Good luck! Unsupported Sysprep scenarios FIX: More than 1,000 rules in the…
John Herbert over at Lame Journal has an interesting post asking what network engineers will be doing in five years time. For all the worry about automation there will still be people pressing buttons, just fewer of them. This might be a problem if you view IT as a job and not a career. Chuck Hollis has a bit of background on VMware+OpenStack. I think it is all pretty cool and if you have a spare…
Contrary to popular belief, VMware does work well with OpenStack and the VOVA is proof of that partnership. Basically an OpenStack controller in a virtual appliance. This is something I’d really like to see VMware provide support for, but I guess they will have to port it to SLES.
Ah management devices, the soft underbelly of your infrastructure. The good people over at Rapid7 have been doing some analysis of the IPMI implementation in SuperMicro servers and have found a few things. There will be some Metasploit modules released. While SuperMicro is the target here, if you watch your favourite hardware vendor’s announcements you will see this is something they all…
This idea comes from one of the awesome engineers I work with, Chris Tester. We’ve recently updated our laptops to Windows 8.1 and Microsoft in their infinite wisdom have removed the old Windows Experience Index page. Not that WEI was anything fantastic but it did give a nice easy way to compare computers without having to go through installing a third-party testing package. I can only…
Cisco have announced their Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) initiative. Over at the Cisco Data Center and Cloud blog they have a post that details where it fits into their overall strategy. Still at the Data Center and Cloud blog there is another post that details some of the partners that Cisco have lined up for ACI. I’m guessing these are all companies that don’t compete with…
Hard to believe it but yes, people are still using Windows XP (it is pretty popular in industrial applications). The SANS ISC has a good post on why you should move away and some metrics on the Swiss cheese security of the OS. Sometimes I think Brian Madden lives in the cloud but his post on the use of storage quotas in modern enterprises really got me thinking about how end user perceptions of IT…
Anthony Burke over at Cisco Inferno has a good blog post on what he believes the current state of play is with NSX. After reading it I have to agree. I believe that to reach any kind of scale we need tech like NSX. Overlays are here to stay. Scott Lowe has a great blog series on NSX (was NVP when it was Nicira) that I believe is a must read.
When PowerShell 3.0 was released one of the little “surprises” was that the help included in the download was a short stub. If you wanted the full help available in your PowerShell session then you need to use the cmdlet Update-Help. While i’ve now gotten over the shock (I’ve adapted to just using Google) it is still important to find out what is changing in the…
New versions of the Dell iDRAC have a feature to auto-lock the OS when the last virtual console has disconnected. I think this is pretty useful and I’d like something like this inside VMware but it is obviously more important for physical servers. John Allspaw at the Kitchen Soap blog has a really great post on being a senior engineer. This is one of those articles that I think everyone…
Seems there is a bit of a change in the way mailbox sizes are calculated in Exchange 2013. You can read a good argument on why it isn’t a big issue from Tony at Windows IT Pro. To me it is only a non-issue if the numbers in Outlook match up. If users find they’ve suddenly lost quota they tend to get pretty annoyed! Having upgraded to Windows 8.1 it is very clear Microsoft want you to…
I usually shy away from vendor battles as the technology should speak for itself but sometimes the FUD from vendors can be a bit much. Jamie Doherty at the Bits and Bytes blog takes down a recent HP video for OneView. Vendors shouldn’t purposefully misuse competitors products in a video on the *Internet,*it isn’t really a good look. Kevin Houston over at Blades Made Simple has a great…
This post is less of a tip and more of a general warning. As someone who does a fair bit of work with PowerShell, I’m always anxious to get my hands on the latest release. But this is a caution to really read the release notes as it turns out new PowerShell versions are quite incompatible with a fair few core Microsoft technologies (e.g. Exchange). This is very unfortunate and has been the…
It seems Kaspersky Anti-Virus is identifying tcpip.sys as malware. How can this be happening in 2013? This issue has been going on since AV was introduced and yet there has been no movement. Very sad. Every time an AV issue like this one crops up I feel the need to post this article by the SANS Computer Forensics blog. I feel that at this point AV simply checks a box and provides no real…
Duncan Epping over at Yellow Bricks has some thoughts that you should keep in mind for those of you looking at VSAN. I’ll be interested to see if things like VSAN swing people back to using rack instead of blade servers. Chris Siebenmann works in a very interesting environment (University EDU by the looks of it) where they build there own storage systems. While most organisations prefer to…
Interesting looking tool alert. If you’ve ever made a change to your public DNS records it can seem like an eternity for the changes to populate. DNSYO is a nifty little tool that will poll 500 DNS servers showing you the propagation of your records. Check it out! Over at Packet Pushers, Eric Flores has a good blog post on F5 deployment types. The post is designed for in-line mode but talks…
Have you got a nice New-Alias setup you wish were available every time you opened PowerShell? How about a cool function you’ve written that you’d like to not have to import at the start of each session? Well the PowerShell profile is for you! This little text file will allow you to put pretty much any PowerShell command in it and have it run every time you open a new PowerShell window.
At VMworld 2013 vCOps 5.8 was announced. There seem to be some pretty cool features in there. Eric Shanks at The IT Hollow has a great break down on the new features. By default you can’t really get data out of vCOps but there is a community PowerShell module to allow you to get the stats out. Brian Wuchner over at EnterpriseAdmins.org shows how to use it. Moving into the world of SCOM, 2012…
For the past few years at VMworld, rockstar PowerShell gurus Alan Renouf and Luc Dekens have given a presentation on PowerCLI. Before I’ve felt that they could go a bit deeper and in this presentation I think they have hit it right on the mark with the depth. Some pretty good tips makes this worth watching. WARNING: This isn’t an intro to PowerCLI, if you don’t know what an…
Characteristics of vmware’s own infra: 4000 non-production srvrs, 500 production, 290 physical hosts, 4 PB storage….nice #vmworld — Viktor van den Berg (@viktoriousss) October 17, 2013 Hope it is all virtualised! ;)
Unless it is a major new launch or a brand new product line I tend not to really focus on the spec bump launches from Cisco. However the Cisco Datacenter Blog has an interesting post on the new Nexus 3100 series. The highlight of the post is the platform architecture white paper, those tend to be very useful. The super unfortunate part is that you cannot download it without handing over your…
As per my post on the formal announcement of vCAC 6.0, this video shows the process in motion using a beta version. You can view the vCAC integration module on the VMware Solution Exchange. They also have a pretty good Word document available that goes through some of the concepts in the video. I really think this sort of integration where you can configure the service, ensure the service is as…
Is there a difference between vCPUs and the cores setting in a VM? Yes and no, from vSphere both are just logical data constructs but when looking at the physical side you need to take into account NUMA. The vSphere Blog has all the details and even some light benchmarking. Marcel Van Den Berg over at UP2V, who works with vSphere and Hyper-V, has a nice breakdown of the differences between vCHS…
For those that are unaware, VMworld Barcelona is currently going on and with it brings new product updates. In my quest for automation knowledge I’ve become quite interested in vCAC. The unfortunate downside is that (like all “automation” systems, I’m sure) it is quite involved in setting it up. With that in mind I’ve only spent a little bit of time trying to get it…