PowerShell and AS3 I have been doing some AS3 content lately and in a customer environment I only had powershell available. Generally I use python, so this was a nice opportunity to sit down and use Invoke methods in powershell to post AS3 content. Here is the baseline script I developed. This is using Powershell 5.1 and is accounting for self-signed certificates, to allow the system to interact, as by default powershell 5.1 doesn’t have the ignore flag for the two Invoke requests I’m using. ...
NGROK
Background I use a decent amount of home automation products, some of them are the KASA branded smart plugs. KASA has an app, which works, but I like to control stuff from my PC without needing to break out the phone. IFTTT has some official integrations which work really well. The problem is that IFTTT needs to make money, so they are starting to heavily restrict how many active integrations you can have (currently it’s 2). I have more plugs than two, so I needed a new way to trigger these integrations. IFTTT also enabled webhook integrations, so I could effectively hit a URL which would toggle my KASA devices on/off. ...
eEOS in EVE-NG
I’ve recently started getting more involved with Arista deployments, and EVE-NG is my go to for lab simulation of customer environment. EVE supports Arista vEOS out of the box, which is a full KVM QEMU image of Arista’s EOS switch operating system. A co-worker has a requirement to lab up a very large Arista deployment, 25-30 switches worth. He gave me a screenshot of a 128 core 256G ram server, that was almost 100% full on CPU and had consumed half the memory of the system. ...
Ansible Module Part2
Here is my first post about modules. In that post I built what I’d call a legacy module, something to include in a basic playbook to prove a concept worked. Ansible has moved on and is now pushing content collections. This post will detail moving my module to a content collection. Content Collections Ansible content collections, as I understand them, are a way to group custom functionality into something that is unique. The problem with modules is the names could overlap, with content collections they cannot. Content collections also add roles and plugins, so you can collapse a bunch of different ansible functionality into one area to include. ...
Ansible Module Part1
I have been doing a lot of ISE deployments lately. One of my customers is doing a TACACS only implementation of ISE. I have also been studying up on Ansible and trying to use it in real world scenarios. One idea I’ve come up with is using Ansible to test ISE TACACS policies before actually using the real gear. The first part of this was trying to find a python module that can interact with TACACS. Thankfully, Ansible itself has a github repo with such a module called tacacs_plus. This module actually contains a standlone client which is pretty nice in on it’s own, but naturally I want to shoehorn this into Ansible. ...
Horizon AS3
I was introduced to F5 AS3 doing a migration for a customer recently. For deploying new applications on an F5 LTM, this seems to be a pretty slick solution when you’re considering infrastructure as code. The entire configuration can be contained in a json file, which will simplify checking it into some kind of repository. One application I’ve been tasked with helping customers deploy is Vmware Horizon. Vmware has a very prescriptive F5 deployment guide which spells out the steps in great detail. I figure this is an optimal app to deploy with an AS3 template, so that’s what I’ve done. Typically these customers deploy Horizon, and AppVolumes on the same F5, so this template deploys both. ...
Hugo Setup
Proof is in the pudding, Hugo is working since it published this blog post. I’m going to detail here what was required to get it all working. I blame Ivan Pepelnjak for this. GitHub I have a github account here. You can see that it has a pretty interesting mix of content, but Hugo integrates with github so I figured I’d use it. My first attempt was just creating a blog repo, and using the Hugo setup documents try to get it working. It did work, but my understanding of github pages was incorrect and everything was a subdirectory of my repo. I wanted a pretty domain, so I started over. ...
First
This is the first post to Hugo, using github pages. Just testing for now!