Dennis Faucher's Blog

Dennis Faucher's Blog

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Easy, Working, KVM Remote Console

Why? In my last post, I was lamenting that there really are not any lovely remote management interfaces to VirtualBox. I thought I would investigate nice remote management interfaces to KVM next. This investigation was more of a success. What? * Linux * KVM (See this post for KVM install) How? There

All the Ways VirtualBox Remote Access Fails 🙂

Why? So, over the past few years, I have moved my Home Lab from ESXi & Proxmox to Kubernetes on Linux and finally to Docker on Linux. I have very little need for virtual machines these days, except to try out cool distros (like Garuda) or desktop environments (like Budgie)

Home Lab Featured

Self-Hosted Google Docs Alternatives

Self-Hosted Google Docs Alternatives Why? Google Docs has been my "External Brain" for years and years. I keep my customer meeting notes, recipes, home lab details, Linux stuff I can't remember, and docker stuff I can't remember in there. I love Google Docs. Easy,

A Working Kubevirt Tutorial 🙂

A Working Kubevirt Tutorial 🙂 Why? Well, after failing 27 ways to install RedHat OpenShift Virtualization (You can read that post here), I decided to add kubevirt manually to Kubernetes. The tutorials out there mostly don’t work. I finally found a process that works and thought I would write the

100 Ways to NOT Install OpenShift Virtualization

100 Ways to NOT Install OpenShift Virtualization

100 Ways to NOT Install OpenShift Virtualization Why? Well, the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, and subsequent packaging and pricing changes, have caused customers to look for options. To be the most help to my customers, I have been getting my hands on as many “VMware Alternatives” as possible – Nutanix, Proxmox,

SUSE Harvester for Dummies

SUSE Harvester for Dummies Why? Well, the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, and subsequent packaging and pricing changes, have caused customers to look for options. To be the most help to my customers, I have been getting my hands on as many "VMware Alternatives" as possible - Nutanix, Proxmox,

KVM VMs & Networking Quickstart

KVM VMs & Networking Quickstart Why? Well, the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, and subsequent packaging and pricing changes, have caused customers to look for options. To be the most help to my customers, I have been getting my hands on as many "VMware Alternatives" as possible - Nutanix,

Automagical vCenter Documentation with MkDocs

Automagical vCenter Documentation with MkDocs ❓ Why ❓ Everything as Code has been a very popular topic over the last 5 years or so. Mostly, as IT continues to move faster and automation is needed to meet business timelines and guaranteed quality. This past week, I have been helping a customer set

Building an (Evil) Android Phone Bot Army

Building an (Evil) Android Phone Bot Army Why? So, like you, I have a bunch of old, mostly-working phones. These are small, capable, computers that could be doing something - something good or evil 🙂. What if I could somehow build them into a parallel compute cluster to break up large

Monitoring Plex in VMware vRealize Log Insight

Monitoring Plex in VMware vRealize Log Insight

Monitoring Plex in VMware vRealize Log Insight Why This week, I have been migrating from a nice FOSS logging solution (GrayLog) that became corrupted (my fault) back to the lovely, solid, and easy to use VMware vRealize Log Insight (Now called VMware Aria Operations for Logs). Part of this process

Pushing vSphere Events to Phone Notifications

Pushing vSphere Events to Phone Notifications Why I’m embarrassed to say, I created this hacky hack because I’m not smart enough to get the email functionality of ghettoVCB working 🙂 I use the free Pushover service for other notifications in my Home Lab, so I thought I would give

Brute Force vRealize Network Insight Cloud & vCenter

Brute Force vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) – Part 2: Install a vCenter Data Source Why? (Recap from Part 1) Well, two reasons actually. One, I have always thought vRNI was really cool and valuable and two, I signed up to teach one of the VMware Customer Connect webinars on vRNI Cloud.

Brute Force vRealize Network Insight & AWS

Brute Force vRealize Network Insight Cloud (vRNI) – Part 1: Install an AWS Data Source Why? Well, two reasons actually. One, I have always thought vRNI was really cool and valuable and two, I signed up to teach once of the VMware Customer Connect webinars on vRNI Cloud. I know enough

Managing Tanzu Community Edition with vRealize Operations

Managing Tanzu Community Edition with vRealize Operations Why I’ve been spending many hours working with VMware Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) since TCE was released. This has been an excellent education in Tanzu as well as in Kubernetes. You can find my first experience installing TCE in this blog post

Hands-On with VMware Tanzu Community Edition - vSphere Option

Hands-On with VMware Tanzu Community Edition vSphere Option (Image Credit: This Page) Why VMware Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) was just released the other day. Tanzu is one of the best heterogenous, multi-cloud Kubernetes platforms today. Now that there is a free version, I wanted to install TCE in my Lab

VMware Monitoring on Apple/Android Smart Watch

VMware Monitoring on Apple/Android Smart Watch Why A few years ago, I was very active in the Android Watch Community including designing custom watch faces with programmatic actions. I eventually moved back to actual watches where I did not have to worry about battery life. Recently, I have been

Apple Mac Backup with Rsync and Postfix

Apple Mac Backup with Rsync and Postfix Why Well, I have been happily using BackBlaze to protect all laptops in our family for years. This week, Information Security at my company decided that cloud backup is a risk as I might be sending corporate secrets somewhere and blocked BackBlaze on

Untangle PostgreSQL Grafana Dashboards

Untangle PostgreSQL Grafana Dashboards Why I just installed an Untangle firewall appliance in my home network. I like it a lot. Great functionality, easy to use, great reports, very low resource usage. As a typical Grafana user, I needed to GRAPH ALL THE THINGS! Untangle is open source and even

Discovering and graphing network flows with ntop, MariaDB, LucidChart

Discovering and graphing network flows with ntop, MariaDB, LucidChart Tool Comparison and LucidChart Creation Video Tutorial Why Mapping the network flows between servers, VMs, and applications can be very useful for application dependancy mapping, data center migration, disaster recovery planning, and network congestion. My learning journey took me to for-fee

Demo: VMware Tools Guest Content Distribution

Demo: VMware Tools Guest Content Distribution Why (Image Source: Oreilly.com) vSphere 7 U2 was released on March 9, 2021. You can find the release post here. Update 2 is a huge release with many impressive features for customers. When you have the time, I suggest reading the VMware post

Grafana 101 - Part I

My Initial Journey with Grafana, Telegraf, InfluxDB, Prometheus to Monitor VMware, Linux, Chickens Part I – The Basics Why Well, two reasons actually: 1. As a vExpert, I have been digging into VMware’s monitoring tools such as vRealize Operations and vRealize Log Insight. Wonderful tools and relatively easy to use.

Automatic "On-Air" WebEx/Zoom Light

Automatic “On-Air” WebEx/Zoom Light Disclaimer There are much more elegant ways to achieve this same result with WebEx/Zoom REST APIs, but this method works for me. Learning new REST APIs is always a steep curve. I used REST for the Philips light, but simple bash commands for WebEx