There are countless memes available on the internet that suggest that the cause of various IT issues is normally always DNS. There are plenty that suggest NTP as a cause too. And, in light of Facebook’s snafu last year, probably plenty around BGP now as well. …

In case it’s useful for anyone else, I encountered an issue after a recent firmware upgrade on the UniFi Dream Machine Pro (UDM-PRO) that handles my home networking and routing. Ubiquiti released version 1.11.0 of their firmware for the UDM late in 2021 and prior to starting back to work…

vRealize Automation 8.6.2 became generally available (GA) on January 18th 2022 and I don’t like to leave it long to update it as there are monthly releases. However, alongside vRA 8.6.2 is an important update for VMware Identity Manager to 3.3.6. It’s a fairly minor release, as you can see…

I have written several times before about the Packer process that I use to create VM images for my homelab. What I haven’t spent as much time on is the pipeline that I use to execute that process. …

I stayed up quite late the other night to get BGP working on my UniFi Dream Machine Pro (UDMP) and I thought I’d share how I did it as I know that at least two followers on Twitter are very interested. But first, a little background… The UDM Pro was…

I’ve been spending a little time with Ansible in my homelab of late, as you may have gathered from my previous post. Like Mark, whose posts I reference as a guide / inspiration, I have placed all of my credentials in to a secrets manager (HashiCorp Vault). The idea behind…

One of my customers recently asked about the difference between a SecureString and an EncryptedString in vRealize Orchestrator. I’ve used SecureStrings many a time but not EncryptedStrings, so I set out to find an answer for myself and my customer. I’m going to assume that I don’t need to explain…

If you follow this blog or have stumbled upon it through a web search then you could be forgiven for thinking that this post looks a lot like one that I published back in May 2021. It sort of is, but it’s much shorter! Back then I created a simple…

I’m a few days late (about 20), but I wanted to take this opportunity to celebrate my 6-year anniversary at VMware. I joined from a partner company here in the UK and I never imagined that I would be lucky enough to work for VMware, a company whose products I…