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Background VMware wants us to prepopulate an Excel-Sheet with SSH-Keys and SSL-Thumbprints of all ESXi-Hosts, who have been freshly deployed minutes before, which effectivly protects against man-in-the-middle-attacks – maybe a problem in US-datacenters. Beginning with VMware Cloud Foundation Release VCF 4.2 the Cloud-Builder-App verifies the „CN“ of all ESXi-SSL-Certificates, which is in default-setup set to „localhost“ (to be overwritten when connecting to the vCenter so this is seemed to be no issue) – not accepted, CN has to be set to <server-fqdn>. Solution plink.exe „plink.exe“ from the Putty-Suite allows to be called from PowerShell in automated fashion without interactive Password-Prompt. (In May 2021 there seemsRead More →

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Disclaimer I don’t think, „hiding“ a webserver behind a non-standard TCP-Port is a security feature („security by obscurity“) but on the other hand restricting access to non-standard Ports seems to not increase the personal security measure, it just wastes time of anybody who needs to access such a service – and – it’s absolutely allowed to run a web-server on any port which isn’t used by another service 😉 Solution (if you (think, you) know what you’re doing) As always Add as „String“ if it’s missing: Add the Service you want to acccessRead More →

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Business Case My QNAP-NAS (TS-431X2) is slow this must not be QNAPs fault, maybe the drives (4 disks, RAID5, between 147..167 MB/second for sequential read) are the root cause adding a SSD-Cache didn’t improve performance when I had a 3-disk RAID 5 many people around the world are troubleshooting this without success so I decided to use the QNAP-NAS as a Virtual-Tape-Library for Backup-Purposes etc use my ESXi-Host as Storage-Server „Storage Server“ VM I regularily use „Nested ESXi“-Hosts for Lab Environments which should access the storage, so I decided to first give NFS a try – ESXi has no built in NFS-Server, so a smallRead More →

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According to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/best-practices-availability-paired-regions there is a Regional-Pair to „Germany West Central“ called „Germany North“ which is missing at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/geographies since access is restricted to support specific customer scenarios, for example in-country disaster recovery. These regions are available only upon request by creating a new support request in the Azure portal Germany North could be found in the list (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/geographies/#new-regions) so it might be coming soon for general availability. List available Azure-LocationsRead More →

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Resize Page to Fit Contents, Set Zoom to Fit Page When the drawing is ready, the size of the page will be too large or too small – „fit to contents“ might be the solution. Additionally, I prefer the Zoom of the active Window to be set that it shows the whole drawing. ResultRead More →

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Visualize Data from Python in Visio I needed to illustrate some data discovered by a python script in Microsoft Visio. As a starting-point i found two sources of infomation in the Internet: (1) Python => COM => MS Excel How to access a Windows COM-Application from Python: https://pbpython.com/windows-com.html MS Excel not Visio but 50% of the information needed (2) PowerShell => COM => MS Visio How to access Microsoft Visio using the COM-Interface https://www.powershellstation.com/2016/01/20/powershell-and-visio-1 PowerShell the other 50% needed. Result: „Python => COM => MS Visio“ Putting both pieces together, will allow a Python-Script to control MS Visio. (3) MS Visio „Object Model“ Without theRead More →