VirtJunkie

Virtualization, Automation, and anything else that might be on my mind

Category: Servers

Jitsi for Just in Time Conferencing using Terraform on Vultr with Route 53

Posted on by Jon

With everything going on in the world with COVID-19 and the social distancing that is happening, people are looking to connect with friends, family and co-workers via Video conferencing more than ever. Recent vulnerabilities in Zoom have made people more cognizant than ever that security needs to be considered when using these platforms no matter what you are using them for.

Jitsi is an open source video conferencing platform that I’ve been hearing about a lot lately, and finally had a chance to look into. In this post I’ll explain how to use Terraform to provision a Jitsi instance when you need a conference and tear it down when you are done. We’ll be using Vultr and their Jitsi “application” and AWS Route 53 for DNS.

Continue reading “Jitsi for Just in Time Conferencing using Terraform on Vultr with Route 53”
Set Up Enpass With HTTPS Protected WebDAV and Ditch LastPass

Set Up Enpass With HTTPS Protected WebDAV and Ditch LastPass

Posted on by Jon

It’s time to ditch cloud based password managers. There.. I said it. What we are doing when we use them is giving ownership and management of our trusted secrets to someone else, and hoping that they will be able to protect them from bad guys, and make sure they are available when we need them.

VMware Horizon Workspace – Part 2 – Configure Nginx as Frontend with Microsoft CA

VMware Horizon Workspace – Part 2 – Configure Nginx as Frontend with Microsoft CA

Posted on by Jon

So yesterday, VMware released Horizon Workspace 1.5. HUGE improvement over the GA release… Holey smokes. Any further tutorials will reference this version.

Anyways, more to the point. In this post I will demonstrate how to do a base configuration of Horizon Workspace using an internal Microsoft Certificate Authority with Nginx as a frontend. This setup is only acceptable for setting up workspace in a lab environment, since in a production environment you’ll need a trusted third party cert. Doing this in a lab environment is important because it will allow you to set up and test every feature you’ll be using in a production environment.

Requirements:

  • Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services
  • Linux Machine running Nginx
  • Horizon Workspace 1.5 Downloaded and installed with no configuration.
    • We’ll be using the workspace FQDN of hzn.test.in (This obviously assumes the domain of test.in)

Continue reading “VMware Horizon Workspace – Part 2 – Configure Nginx as Frontend with Microsoft CA”

VMware Horizon Workspace – Part 0 – Intro

VMware Horizon Workspace – Part 0 – Intro

Posted on by Jon

I’ve been working with Horizon Workspace since it went GA in March. At this point in time, I’m happy to say that I’ve got Workspace set up in a production environment.

In this series, I will be covering how I configured each part of this suite. I would expect that this process will become exponentially easier as time goes on. One thing to note is that I will write these posts assuming that you are at least moderately familiar with linux and Workspace. I will not go into details on how to install packages, deploy the VA, use the web interface. Use Google if you’re looking for that boring stuff 🙂 Here we go!

Continue reading “VMware Horizon Workspace – Part 0 – Intro”

NetApp: Get Statistics from Multiple Filers With One Command

NetApp: Get Statistics from Multiple Filers With One Command

Posted on by Jon

Does anyone actually find NetApp OnCommand System Commander to be fast enough for normal operation? I’ll admit, I still create a good amount of Volumes and LUNs using it, but it leaves a lot to be desired in the performance category.  If you follow my blog at all, you know that I’m in the middle of a migration from a non-ha exchange environment to a DAG. Being the sensible admin that I am, I have multiple copies of my Exchange databases on different storage arrays, controlled by different NetApp filers. Using System Manager to monitor the space usage of the Volumes hosting my mailbox databases is way to slow for my comfort.

Continue reading “NetApp: Get Statistics from Multiple Filers With One Command”

Use PowerShell to get Service Auto-Start Status Along with Human Readable Service Name

Use PowerShell to get Service Auto-Start Status Along with Human Readable Service Name

Posted on by Jon

This falls into the “Come on Microsoft” category.

I have been writing a script that will gather a bunch of information from servers, and returns an object with the information.  Part of what I’m gathering is the servers that are set to auto start, and have their corresponding service stopped.

While you can get a list of services that meet part of this criteria like this:

Continue reading “Use PowerShell to get Service Auto-Start Status Along with Human Readable Service Name”

Use PowerShell to Update Specific AD User’s Description Field with Last Login Time

Use PowerShell to Update Specific AD User’s Description Field with Last Login Time

Posted on by Jon

I encountered a challenge today that was fun to fix.  There’s an Organizational Unit in my AD setup that has historically been used to store disabled AD objects instead of deleting them.

When an employee leaves the organization, our standard procedure  is as followed:

  1. Disable User Object
  2. Move to separate OU (IE AD://internal.msd/disabled/users)
  3. Update Description field with something like: Disabled by [username] on [date]
  4. Retain user object for x amount of days, then tombstone it.

Best laid plans of mice and men… yada yada…

Continue reading “Use PowerShell to Update Specific AD User’s Description Field with Last Login Time”

vCenter 5.1 – Unable to Log in to vSphere Web Client

vCenter 5.1 – Unable to Log in to vSphere Web Client

Posted on by Jon

In a new installation of vCenter 5.1, when trying to access the vSphere Web Client for the first time, you will encounter the following message:

[text]
In order for this direct link to work, you must first log in to the
vSphere Web Client at least once from https://{webclient
-host}:{webclient-https-port}.
[/text]

You can resolve this error and fix the issue using the following steps:
Continue reading “vCenter 5.1 – Unable to Log in to vSphere Web Client”

Copyright VirtJunkie.com © 2024