So; chef windows bootstrap doesnt have an install as service option. Dang it; that would be too convenient. Even the official docs dont say anything about it..

Super quick post, but one I wanted to throw down - here’s how to get Visual Studio Code working for the ChefDK in Windows; and I’ll also share my Visual Studio Code preferences file!

As I continue to experiment with my chef environment, I’ve run into an interesting limitation with the dsc_script resource.

While the video covers most of this material, here is the accompanying write-up. Let’s run through setting up a DSC Pull Server!

Hey guys; as I mentioned - I wanted to come back to run through the workflow I have setup for this blog, CI, and source control!

So previously discussed cmder before: Cmder - Changing the Lambda

However, with the newest releace of Cmder there were some file structure changes that were made that need to be updated for fixing the lambda.

Over the holiday weekend I’ve made some major changes to this blog! Retroactive apology to anyone who had bookmarked anything on this site!

DSC is truly one of my favorite things to come out of the PowerShell team to date. The power for idempotent infrastructure and deployment is great. However, one relatively minor roadblock is getting an MOF delivery pipeline in place for getting the MOF configurations to a pull server.

So, a brief tidbit if you’re not using Azure automation for your Azure VMs (we have a subset that are managed with a pull server that are not Azure automation controlled. So, at provisioning time we wanted to look at provisioning the VM with the LCM meta configuration, to avoid additional work by hand. It’s pretty simple, but required a different approach between WMF 4.0 and WMF 5.0 (read: Server 2012 and Server 2016). Let’s discuss:

In building out some Azure templates recently - once again - documentation turned out to be a bit thin. The goal was to inject custom data into a VM with data from the output of a resource created in the same deployment

I’ve been working with Azure RM Templating quite a lot lately. It’s actually pretty staggering in how versatile it is, but some of the documentation is a bit less than awesome.

Woohoo; now we’re cooking with fire. The cDscDocker resource has been updated to include giving the ability to expose the docker daemon on an interface address of your choice.

So; lets talk about a docker host on Windows Server 2016, and building an abstraction API with Python/Flask. This will be a multi-part post as my time permits.

If you know me, you know I like what DSC does. What recently came to my attention is that Chef can leverage DSC and that’s pretty cool.

Now with docker swarm support!

With the RTM of Server 2016 and beginning testing in my environment; we needed to update our SCCM device collections.

So, first and foremost - this is a first take. I already have plans to add docker swarm provisioning, better system checks (e.g. verification that appropriate system patches are in place) and an option to select docker version (or latest) to install.

Docker is so cool; and supporting Windows and Linux alike is even cooler. High availability is a thing though, so I was delighted to find out I can create a swarm in Linux; join Windows Server 2016, and have it managed. Awesome! But…

So with the RTM of Windows Server 2016, with it comes official support for docker; and with that - containers. Awesome. In this post, we’ll talk about container introspection, via the Docker Daemon / API. First and foremost, I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of installing and configuring docker.

Another little tidbit I cam across in setting up a Raspia Raspberry Pi 3 (model b) for use in a kiosk setting (actually just an always on system monitor, but same idea). After X minutes, the screen blanking setting will come into play;

Here’s one little trick that I recently came across when performing a DPM 2012 R2 redirected SQL recovery.

So I have to say, I’m just enamored with Cmder It’s phenomenal. Elegant, clean, and just truly the best console application I’ve used. Throw it in a dropbox and you’re _set. _SSH, git, grep… all my *nix aliases in one portable package? Sure thing - I’m sold. And it’s pretty. Let’s customize it a teeny, tiny bit. I wont re-write the featureset, so:

So here we go. A finalized script that will create the VPN profile, as necessary, for Meraki VPN deployment. This should enable complete deployment of a Meraki VPN profile to clients, using just PowerShell 4.0 and enable split tunneling.

Well, humble pie time. But this is good stuff here. Turns out I missed one little teeny tiny flag in the Add-VpnConnection cmdlet. Oops. But this is good!

Grumble. We’re in the process of replacing our infrastructure with Meraki products - in fact, we’ve been extremely pleased with this so far. Except for that one thing. Deploying the Client VPN sucks.

Scenario: The development team needs periodic copies of all databases in a protection group distributed to a share across a site link.

Dashing.io; super cool, and pretty fly. Easy enough to configure a quick and small linux VM to host it. But how about pushing data to it, from Powershell? The key is Invoke-RestMethod- Let’s look at two of the simple built in widgets:

So I’ve been working through the process of putting together a new Windows 8.1 image for OSD Deployment within our organization.

With Server 2012 R2 out; I had to make a few updates to my SCCM Collections to take this into account. Quick and Dirty, for Server 2012 R2, WQL Statement:

This one comes via needing to deploy via GFI Remote Management and DropBox. This scenario was needed for a deployment of a VPN client in a GFI managed environment where there was no Active Directory present. Very simply put; PowerShell pulls from a public DropBox link, and silently installs.

I had a need for a quick and dirty password generator for an AD user creation script. There’s likely a better way to do this, but I wanted to have it fairly modular so it can be customized on the fly to meet organizational password requirements.

I’m of the mind that many small businesses can benefit greatly from extending their IT systems into the cloud. AWS is price effective (especially on a 1 year reserved term), and offers built-in VPN connectivity options via their VPC. It’s really a quite powerful environment to work with.