Having seen a few discussions on Twitter recently highlighting security issues with blogs and them being hacked by various means I decided it was time to be a bit more proactive about this. I typically upgraded the version of Wordpress some time (maybe months) after it went to the x.x.1 release and plugins probably less regularly, usually taking a backup before going through the process . Given the amount of effort that has gone into blog posts over the past few years this data is probably pretty valuable when you start to think about it, even if it’s just in terms of remembering problems you overcame at some point.

Recently I’ve been writing a lot of Puppet modules. Usually this starts for me by creating a folder structure which typically looks something along the lines of this: dir | tree Creating this each time via Explorer soon became pretty tedious, so I put together the following function New-PuppetModule. This is along the lines of the puppet command to generate a module structue: puppet module generate name By default New-PuppetModule will create the top level module folder, a manifests folder and a blank init.

Update 30/10/2013: There’s an updated post on the PowerShell Team Blog which now describes this situation with .NET 4.5 as a pre-requisite in more detail. -———————————————————————————————- PowerShell 4.0 which shipped as part of Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 is now available for down-level Windows versions via the downloadable Windows Management Framework 4.0. WMF 4.0 contains updated versions of the following features: Windows PowerShell Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) Windows PowerShell Web Services (Management OData IIS Extension) Windows Remote Management (WinRM) Windows Management Infrastructure (WMI)

The agenda for this year’s UKVMUG has been published and a pretty fine line up it looks too. What’s really great is that during each section of sessions, there’s a community slot with real world info from people working with VMware technologies at the coalface. You’ll be able to pick sessions from @sammcgeown @maishsk @etherealmind @rickyelqasem and me. I’ll be talking about some of my experiences of PowerCLI automation in the field and examples of how to break your code down to make it more flexible to use in different scenarios.

So the final day of VMworld Europe 2013 for me and since I needed to leave not long after lunch I decided to try and get a couple of sessions in before time to go home. First up was an OpenStack using VMware session with Scott Lowe as one of the presenters. I found this very informative as I didn’t have much of an idea about OpenStack yet and it was very useful to see the integrations with vSphere in the Havana release and good discussion points were raised around where the two might be used together or apart.

Day 2 and back to the Hang Space to tune into the General Session. This was practically a word-for-word repeat of SF as far as I could tell, so I won’t bother going into much detail here. If you want to watch it in full you can see it here: The session I was most interested in today was that around the integration of Puppet and VMware. PuppetLabs CTO Nigel Kersten was one of the presenters.

Day 1 started with the General Session. I expected this to be pretty much a repeat of SF so decided to watch it from the Hang Space. There were some new announcements around the acquisition of Desktop As A Service provider Desktone, vCAC 6.0 and GA of VMware NSX. You can watch the full session here: I had a fair few sessions lined up for today. First up was a session around Log Insight.

Having arrived in Barcelona yesterday for VMworld Europe 2013, I made it to the vRockstar event at the Hard Rock Cafe where everyone who’s anyone appeared to be there - you couldn’t move for those Xtravirt guys, they’re everywhere. Not travelling on the Monday meant a full day of labs for me today and thankfully it was a highly successful experience after last year’s fiasco messed up my planned schedule.

Needed to configure a new Puppet Enterprise server to use a proxy server so that it could search and install modules from Puppet Forge since initial attempts to download were failing with: [root@test01 /]# puppet module search motd Notice: Searching https://forge.puppetlabs.com … Error: Could not connect to https://forge.puppetlabs.com There was a network communications problem The error we caught said ‘getaddrinfo: Name or service not known’ Check your network connection and try again

The other day I noticed some comments on Twitter around the time taken to install VMware vCloud Automation Center 5.2 Being of curious nature I decided to check it out further and in doing so discovered this extensive installation guide from Jad El-Zein. Seeing as a lot of the pre-requisites are installing Windows Roles / Features and configuring IIS, I figured this would make a good candidate for some PowerShell work and might save you some time if you need to do this yourself.