Customize Freshervice User Portal

 Posted on 2021-08-10

It is possible to customize almost all of the user portal but you better know what you are doing. Otherwise you may end up like me, spending way more time than you ever should on customizing this damn portal. Let’s hope this one helps you, otherwise feel free to reach out to me on Twitter. Page Header Place a variation of the below at Admin > General Settings > Helpdesk Rebranding > Requester Portal Branding > Customize Portal > Layout And Pages > Portal Pages > General Pages > Portal Home [Read More]
freshservice 

DNS Resolution Everywhere

 Posted on 2021-08-10

Usually at leas one of those is present on any system dig nslookup host But sometimes the usual suspects don’t work, especially in container-land. After trying them you may try some more involved/unknown things: getent Part of glibc, this will probably work on nearly every system. getent hosts example.org Or, if you specifically want to query A or AAAA records. getent ahostsv4 example.org getent ahostsv6 example.org Using Python2 Or Python3 Given this depends on glibc it is more of a alternative than another real solution [Read More]
sysadmin  dns  linux 

Publish Parts Of Obsidian To My Personal Site

 Posted on 2021-08-09

The idea at the start was simple. Do something like Obsidian Publish , so read frontmatter and if it contains published: True put it up on a website to view. The Basics I started with taking a look at different static site generators but after a bit of testing I ended up back at Hugo, which I already use for ps1.guru and a few other projects. First I placed a Hugo project loosely based on the GitLab Pages template in . [Read More]
obsidian  hugo  gitlab  writeup  productivity 

curl: Modify DNS Resolution

 Posted on 2021-08-08

You can intercept normal name resolution in curl with the --resolve parameter allowing you to do things like talk to a specific site of a DNS load-balanced setup or talk to a new deployment not yet made productive. You can specify the resolve option multiple times so you can even catch redirects and move them to where you want as well. It’s important to note that this intercept does only work on the ports you specify in the entries. [Read More]
curl  sysadmin  productivity 

How SELinux screws with scripts when run over VMware Tools

 Posted on 2021-08-08

SELinux by default prohibits certain things from working through VMware tools (Ansible connection or plain API).

This can be solved two ways:

  • Disabling SELinux: BAD, but easy
  • Writing a custom SELinux policy: complicated but more secure

Note: Adding/Changing this policy through a VMware tools connection is thankfully possible

Example policy

This policy is the base for a VMware tools policy and allows entering the rpm context (yum).

module custom-vmtools 1.0;

require {
        type rpm_script_t;
        type vmtools_unconfined_t;
        class process transition;
}

#============= vmtools_unconfined_t ==============

allow vmtools_unconfined_t rpm_script_t:process transition
vmware  selinux  ansible  security  sysadmin  automation  linux 

Replace Line In YAML While Keeping Indentation Using Ansible

 Posted on 2021-08-08

In theory Ansible should be declarative and have full control over the systems we touch with it. In practice, this is unfortunately not always the case. With this nifty task we can replace the value of a key (given as yaml_key) to a new value (given as new_value) while preserving it’s indentation. - name: Replace values in YAML file while keeping their indentation lineinfile: backup: true backrefs: true state: present path: foo. [Read More]
ansible  yaml 

Looping Dates macOS

 Posted on 2021-08-07

date on MacOS does not support --date, so a workaround is needed. Converting Date to unix epoch, adding one day in epoch and converting back. The Scripty Way Taken from a blog post #!/bin/zsh start=$year-01-01 end=$year-12-31 currentDateTs=$(date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d" $start "+%s") endDateTs=$(date -j -f "%Y-%m-%d" $end "+%s") offset=86400 while [ "$currentDateTs" -le "$endDateTs" ] do date=$(date -j -f "%s" $currentDateTs "+%Y-%m-%d") echo $date currentDateTs=$(($currentDateTs+$offset)) done The Brew Way As I found out long after writing the above you can simply brew install coreutils and get a date command with the --date option. [Read More]
macos  bash 

Download Full Website Copy

 Posted on 2021-04-01

Sometimes it’s nice to download a best effort version of a website, for example before completely redesigning it.

domain=WEB.SITE
wget $domain --recursive --no-clobber --page-requisites --html-extension --convert-links --restrict-file-names=windows --domains $domain
wget 

Vmware Tools Copy Files

 Posted on 2020-09-17

Docs

Copy To Guest

$vm = Get-VM -Name TEST
Get-Item "X:\yourfile.txt" | Copy-VMGuestFile -Destination "c:\temp" -VM $vm -LocalToGuest -GuestUser "Administrator" -GuestPassword "Pa$$w0rd"

Copy From Guest

$vm = Get-VM -Name TEST
Copy-VMGuestFile -Source c:\yourfile.txt -Destination c:\temp\ -VM $vm -GuestToLocal -GuestUser "Administrator" -GuestPassword "Pa$$w0rd"
powershell  vmware 

Ansible VMware Connection Plugin & Become

 Posted on 2020-07-02

When using VMware as the connection plugin to connect to remote hosts you commonly set two facts for username and password: ansible_vmware_tools_user: "mkamner" ansible_vmare_tools_password: "Super Secret PW" This will work just fine for windows and with many tasks on linux. However, if you want to use become: true on linux it will fail with the strangest error messages. For example: apt will fail, because it can’t acquire the lock file [Read More]
ansible  vmware