Virtually Jason

On my 3D Printing blog , I recently realized that Blogger made a change to the way that images are displayed.  It used to show the full size image when you clicked it, but it has changed to only show a slightly larger version of the image.  That has almost no impact on this blog since I rarely post images, but I frequently write tutorials that have screenshots from Blender or PrusaSlicer... and it's pretty important that the settings in those images be legible!  Well, some google-fu revealed an easy work-around; just change the href links to point to a different subfolder, so that the full resolution image will be displayed.  That's great, except that manually editing the HTML from my blog posts and changing the file path is a highly repetitive and boring task... well, you see where this is going.  PowerShell to the rescue! I've done a fair amount of string manipulation with PowerShell, so I thought this was going to be a trivial task... but this one had a bit o...

We've been doing a lot of work with the NSX Firewall recently.  Log Insight has become our go-to tool for troubleshooting to get real-time information about what the firewall is doing.  By far, the most common query that I run in Log Insight will be for all entries that have a vmw_nsx_firewall_src or vmw_nsx_firewall_dst of the IP Address that I'm interested in, and I'll often throw a vmw_nsx_firewall_dst_port or a vmw_nsx_firewall_action  into the mix to further refine my results. Unfortunately, these queries can be pretty slow.  They're great if you're looking at the last 5 minutes worth of data, and they're pretty good going back to the past hour... but when we went beyond a 1 hour window, we found ourselves needing to wait.  If we wanted to go all the way out to a 24 hour window, we'd need to go get lunch while the query ran.  That seemed unreasonable to us, so we opened a support ticket and the VMware engineer made some tweaks that absolutely hel...

Here's a quick PowerCLI one-liner.  I recently had to find all of the VMs in a customer's environment that had multiple IPv4 IP Addresses assigned to them.  Here's the command that I ended up using: Get-VM | Get-VMGuest | select VM, IPAddress | ? {($_.ipaddress = $_.ipaddress | ? {$_ -match '\.' -and !($_ -match '^169\.254\.')}).count -gt 1} That guy's a little dense, so lets break it down.  Get-VM gives me a list of all VMs in the environment, which is piped to Get-VMGuest which returns the VM name and all IPs associated with it (looking at the VM's extensiondata.guest.ipaddress only shows the first address).  From there, we select the VM and its IP Address and pass that to a Where clause that has some logic. That Where clause is going to return each VM that has more than 1 IPv4 address that is not an APIPA address.  It does that by finding only the IP Addresses that have a '.' in them (since IPv4 addresses use . delimiters whereas IPv...

This is another quickie (I've had a very PowerCLI rich couple of months!).  We've been doing a lot of mass ESXi host manipulations lately and typically grab the hosts in batches of 8.  As such, I've needed to be able to target a specific set of 8 ESXi servers with some of my PowerCLI commands.  The first 8 (named esx01-esx08) are really easy to grab with string matching: get-vmhost *esx0[1-8]* That command will return all ESXi hosts in that range.  That same trick doesn't work so well with other batches of ESXi hosts (until you get into the esx41-48 range), as the square brackets represent only a single character.  That means that get-vmhost *esx[09-16]* is not a valid construct.  Fortunately, this is a pretty easy match to make with a regular expression : esx(09|1[0-6]) That regex works because of a few important symbols.  The | is the key to it; it means "or".  A simple example would be "09|10" which matches anything with "09" or ...