Tips and Tricks

I heard about OpenRMF.io recently and decided to take a look. It’s deployed with docker containers so I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to get up and running. Turns out it was a little tricker than I expected, so I thought I’d write down how I did it. Eventually, I wanted a deployment with TLS certificates and using domain names instead of IP Addresses. To get to this point, I stepped through a staged process. This let me make sure I had everything work in each step. ...

If you’re looking for tools like ifconfig, netstat, route and are getting a command not found error, you are missing the net-tools package. This used to be installed by default, but since Ubuntu 18.04 it is not. Simple fix. Just install it: sudo apt-get install -y net-tools ...

Ever since Ubuntu, my Linux distro of choice, switched from ifconfig and /etc/network/interfaces to start using Netplan I have a mental block about how to configure a static IP. Hence this post. ...

I’m running Kali on an OLD Macbook Air. I ran an update today and was having trouble completing the initramfs update so I removed the old kernels and rebooted. Of course when the system came back up, the wifi adapter wasn’t working. Missing firmware. The Macbook is using a Broadcom 43224 device. After some troubleshooting and internet researching, I found I needed to install a brcmsmac package. Thanks to this debian wiki page. I grabbed an Alfa USB wireless adapter to get online in the meantime. ...

Since I use terraform to clone and provision VMs on ESXi, I need to use VMWare’s ovftool. However, I’ve been having errors lately. The OVFTool wants to install using python2, and I keep getting syntax errors. Seems like it’s using my Python3 install and I can’t get it to install. If we cannot install the ovftool via the conventional way, we have to find a detour or a workaround to get there. For this particular issue with the failed installation on Ubuntu 20.04, this means extracting the ovftool files from the installation .bundle, copying them to /usr/bin/ and configure an alias for the ovftool executable. ...

For my home network, I’ve been trying to transitioning to using an Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) approach based on a terraform and the terraform esxi provider plugin. I maintain a few “gold images” of the base line systems, then clone and provision as needed. I’m not sure where the root cause of this issue is, but I’ve seen it pop up a few times now so I figured I’d write down how I’ve fixed it. ...