Zsoldier's Tech Blog

Art by Prakash Kurup  - still my favorite whiteboard art by a guy that is dead to me... AI Generated App Link:   Mic Music Pause Summary: Have been messing w/ AI mostly for triage of stuff in my daily work.  Has been fantastic and exciting.  A side project I've had in the back of my mind for awhile has been how can I get an app that automatically pauses Apple Music when joining a teams call, then resuming once the call was over.  So I asked AI and it delivered fantastically.    Details: All I really did was prompt starting w/ copilot-cli and have a conversation to build this solution.  There are many things that I just don't do on a daily basis that AI helped me fill in gaps in memory and knowledge.  Here are the prompts I provided to copilot-cli get to a solution you can find on github .  The model I used was Claude Opus 4.8 .  Could I have used a different, cheaper model, probably.   My actual inputs (minus some things...

Summary: Creating or Subscribing to a Content Library on vSAN is typical practice, but the annoying side effect?  Objects created on vSAN datastore that show up as "unassociated" objects and guess what, they simply inherit the Cluster's default VSAN policy at time of import.  Yeah, dumb right?  Also, by vSAN Operations Guide Standards section 6721 subsection 4 , you shouldn't do this. So then what? In Azure VMware Solution(AVS) , you have a couple of options.  You can do what the operations guide tells you that you shouldn't do or you can do something better.  Regardless of these options, the one thing you should do, is create a global content library.   Create Global Content Library:  here are instructions to create one on an Azure blob store. You should do this, makes life easier if you can. Also a fun little experiment to play w/ Azure Functions Centralized Storage of your ISO/OVF's etc. Attach external storage (Not necessary, but I'll explain ...

Summary: Basically had an expiring certificate registered in NSX-T that was associated to a node_id that is no longer valid.  Long story short, there wasn't anything obvious in API to delete or disassociate a certificate from a node_id for 3.2.2.  Not sure how things got in this state, but annotating for future reference.  This may change in future revisions, so always check API for latest. Details: Effectively had a stale node associated w/ a certificate that was expiring.  Could not delete certificate until that node was disassociated from the certificate. To get certificate details and associated node_id's, you can use the following curl call (UI works too): curl -k -X GET -H "Content-Type: application/json" -u admin https://<manager ip>/api/v1/trust-management/certificates/<cert UUID> Above will return something like this: Below must be run from one of the manager nodes via elevation to root: ONLY RUN THIS IF YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY SURE OF WHAT YOU ARE DO...

Time is Relative Summary: For some strange reason, my sleep focus, was activating based upon my home timezone of EST while traveling to Japan and Australia.  My phone's timezone was correct as was my apple watch that is set to mirror my iPhone. [ Update:   While resolution below may help in some situations, I found my issue to be that I left a device (macbook pro) logged in and running in my home timezone while in Australia. It seems that there is no 'primary' controller for initializing focus modes.  It's basically whatever device sends the "It's focus time" message.  Which now explains why I has having such issues. So Apple needs to fix this by defining a primary device (should be my iPhone/Apple Watch IMYHO) so weird people like me who have multiple devices can get proper sleep outside my home timezone. ] Workaround/Resolution: Check if you have another other Apple device logged in with your Apple ID in your home location.  Chances are, if you do, that ...

Summary: Azure VMware Solution (AVS) delivers by default w/ a pair of redundant Large NSX-T Edge VM's each running a T0 in active/active mode.  So why is my traffic only going out one Edge VM? Short answer: The default T1 that is delivered w/ AVS is an active/passive T1 where you connect your workloads to.  So while it could technically take either T0, it's always going to go out the closest T0 to the active "SR" T1.  Where do the SR's live?  You guessed it, on the Edge VM's.  As you can imagine, this can lead to a bottleneck if you try to shove all your traffic through a single Edge VM. Simple Diagram: Longer answer with Options:

Summary: Basically, whenever you reset vCenter, you might end up w/ a warning on a cluster running vSAN that's just annoying.  To circumvent, this from alerting, you need to disable quickstart.  Easy enough via UI, but API is a little weird here. Details: For one, code capture doesn't seem to understand this.  So no help there unfortunately.  Secondly, nothing named "quickstart" is in the API, so made this somewhat annoying to try and find.  Seems like someone had this question on the VMware communities forum 2 years ago w/ no answer.   Someone asked me internally, so I had to dig into it. Basically, two things: You can create a cluster w/ quick start disabled from the get go by passing a false boolean to a parameter named: "InHciWorkflow" via API/PowerCLI call Secondly, to "skip QuickStart" on an already created cluster, you can call a method called: "AbandonHciWorkflow" So yeah, you can see how "quickstart" and "HCIWorkfl...