Published directly from my personal knowledge base.

Windows Terminal: Open New WSL Tab In Linux Home Folder

 Posted on 2021-08-30

The path you are in when opening a new WSL tab is determined by startingDirectory. This parameter needs to be a valid Windows path, which isn’t great if we want to end up in /home/kamner inside WSL. The nice thing about WSL is that it will resolve windows paths into their equivalent WSL/linux path if possible. For example, C:\Scripts would resolve to /mnt/c/Scripts. Using this and the neat trick that the WSL filesystem is exposed as a a hidden fileshare ([[technology/windows/wsl-hidden-fileshare]]) we can get to where we want. [Read More]
wsl  windows  windows-terminal 

Resolve .local Through Nameserver With Netplan

 Posted on 2021-08-13

When using netplan it is easy to force .local DNS requests to go to you nameservers instead of being only resolved locally (the default and standard).

This also works with all other strange .WHATEVER domains you may have lying around in your organization.

Snippet from netplan configuration:

 nameservers:
        addresses:
          - X
          - Y
        search:
          - local
          - myotherstupiddomain
dns  netplan  linux  sysadmin 

MongoDB Logrotate

 Posted on 2021-08-12

MongoDB does not rotate it’s log on it’s own. To get it to ratet we will use logrotate. First, we need to configure some things in mongod.conf to get the desired behaviour when we utilize logrotate. systemLog: destination: file path: /var/log/mongodb/mongod.log logAppend: true logRotate: reopen Afterwards, we can create a logroatet configuration going in /etc/logrotate.d/mongodb. /var/log/mongodb/mongod.log { rotate 5 # Keep the last 5 rotated logs, so 6 files including the currently active size 10M # Rotate once the log reaches 10MB in size, depending on your envrionment you could instead use daily, weekly, monthly, etc missingok # It's ok if the log file does not exist create 0600 mongodb mongodb # Permissions and ownership for the roatetd logs delaycompress # Don't compress on first rotation, so we have the current log and log. [Read More]
mongodb  linux  ansible  logs 

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  (Last modified on 2021-08-11)

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  (Last modified on 2023-10-18)

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. Info I have since rewritten and updated this tool: New version 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. [Read More]
obsidian  hugo  gitlab  writeup  productivity  pkm 

curl: Modify DNS Resolution

 Posted on 2021-08-08  (Last modified on 2021-08-12)

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  (Last modified on 2021-08-11)

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  (Last modified on 2024-04-16)

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  (Last modified on 2021-08-09)

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  (Last modified on 2022-07-01)

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  (Last modified on 2021-08-09)

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 

vCenter Cert Bundle

 Posted on 2019-05-13  (Last modified on 2022-07-01)

Errors connecting to vCenter or any ESXi server in the cluster without certificate errors?

  • Get CA cert from the vCenter: wget https://{{ YOUR VCENTER }}/certs/download.zip --no-check-certificate
  • Install where required

VMware KB

powershell  vmware