I've used ExpressVPN for years and it's worked great on all my devices until one day, when it stopped even trying to make a connection from my Mac Mini. As soon as I'd hit the connect button, it said it couldn't detect an internet connection -- even though I totally had an Internet connection. So I uninstalled, …

Years ago before I learned PowerShell, I was using T-SQL to do things it just wasn't meant to do, namely SQL Server estate management. T-SQL is incredibly efficient when managing data, but it's not very efficient when managing SQL Server instances. For example, say you need to perform a task against each database. The …

This post is about Import-DbaCsv, a command within the dbatools PowerShell module for SQL Server. I've been writing about CSV imports using PowerShell for a pretty long time and in VBScript for even longer. Initially, my primary concerns were ease-of-use and speed. Over time, I realized that what mattered most was: …

Recently, I had to rebuild my proxmox cluster after a disk failure. Against all advice, I installed Proxmox on USB keys. It worked well for ESX so I thought I could get away with it with Proxmox, but alas. Both of my nodes failed after a few months. Rebuilding the cluster was easier than I expected, but probably …

If you're curious about the $Env:PSModulePath for GitHub Runners, here's what I came up with after running this workflow. Knowing the $Env:PSModulePath of each runner can be useful for making specific types of GitHub Actions. I used it within my own GitHub Action, psmodulecache which makes caching PowerShell modules …

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 suggests 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 …