I wanted to blog about this because I couldn't find any info about it on the internet. Against the advice of everyone, I installed Proxmox on a USB thumbdrive. And, as predicted by everyone who gave that advice, the thumbdrive failed after a couple months. So I rebuilt my server with a new 1TB SSD disk and a backup of …

For those looking to ensure that their vSphere environments are DISA-compliant, VMware has created a pretty nice repo of tools which help address the nearly 500(!) compliance checks. The solution is a mixed bag of ansible and PowerShell for remediation and Chef inspec for evaluation. I never worked with inspec so I …

Recently, while exploring Chef's platform for "Compliance as Code" called InSpec, I ran into an issue when executing VMware's DISA STIG profile against a VMware host. Sorry, we are unable to detect your platform Train::PlatformDetectionFailed After connecting to my test vCenter server, I quickly realized why: …

Edit: Nevermind! Just follow Kendra Little's blog post if you're looking to move from WordPress to another platform. Doing it the way this tutorial suggets makes it impossibly hard to add new posts. After getting hacked one too many times, I've decided to move all of my blogs and URL-shortening sites from a Virtual …

Recently, I moved many of my blogs/shortlink domains to GitHub Pages. With that, the security of my sites increased dramatically, but I lost some functionality including search and 301 (Moved Permanently) Redirects using .htaccess, which I use extensively for shortlinks. Because GitHub Pages don't support .htaccess or …

After reading a number of Windows Terminal posts by Thomas Maurer and seeing Windows Terminal Preview available in my Windows App Store, I finally decided to dive in again. I was sooo excited when Microsoft first made the announcement but was disappointed when I found out I'd have to run a specific version of Windows …

Just ran into this issue and solved it by using powershell -ExecutionPolicy bypass C:\path\to\script.ps1. Seems there was an issue with the signed module so I just set it to not check the sign.

Recently, I ran into an issue after applying a few security updates and subsequent reboots: a number of the SQL services did not start successfully. After running the following script, I've had success with SQL services starting as expected after reboot. It's basically a built-in service start retry. You can read more …

about what I retired and what I was continuing to use. Since then, I actually started streaming about Cajun cooking for my website, RealCajunRecipes.com. I bought a couple cool things for that setup, including an awesome Madonna mic, which is called that because she made it famous in her Express Yourself video. I also …

I really abhor the new ad in the PowerShell 5.1 console and it seems there's no hope of Microsoft making it go away. After a long, involved Twitter conversation with the community and the PowerShell team that confirmed it's impossible for the advertisement (?!) to be easily removed, it looks like the only solution is …