Posts

Dear Puc, I am not a big fan of writing about personal items, for you I make an exception. You changed my world. I deeply miss you already. Since 2014 you had been our companion. Our first dog, our sweetest dog. Named after “Pug” the magician from Raymond E. Feist, you were our pride. You came to our house almost 11 years ago to the date (23rd of november 2014). We were so proud to bring you back home. We redecorated the house for you with rugs all over the bottom floor. When we came home, or downstairs you were there waiting for us, impatiently and happy to see us, always without any opinions, just happy and in for a cuddle! ...

Introduction When I worked for Snow, I once a year visited the BSD Conferences and went to BSDCan one time. There are equal kind of conferences for VMware related groups, like the VMware User Group (VMUG). This year the VMUG-NL Conference had been hosted in Den Bosch, in the 1391 venu. How was it? It was good to see fellow colleague’s heading over there, you talk about different things then at work and in general you have fun together. ...

Introduction At work, we have a central configuration build, that we pick parts and pieces from for our ‘deployments’. As you can read in my resume I am working as a Virtualisation Engineer. There I am building most of the deployment code. Our base structure looks at our vCenters as primary key. What does that mean? Well, if you take a vCenter as main key, then everything that builds a vCenter (ESXi hosts, clusters, distributed switches, storage, etc.) are parts under the vCenter configuration. So you target a vCenter and not specifically the hosts underneath a vCenter. ...

Introduction In my previous article, I was writing about Mermaid and that I wanted to experiment with generating documentation from the actual sources. I was recently able to focus properly on this and I think I had a blast breakthrough at least for myself. The state now Last time I wrote that I was still investigating how and what, especially because of the compression that takes place when you do a graph TopDown(TD). There is a very simple solution to that, make it Left to Right! ...

Introduction In a previous article, I wrote something about Azure Devops and how I see it. I also wanted to play with automated documentation generation, which basically means that I am considering a template, and get bits and pieces from a configuration that I also use to deploy stuff, into a markdown file and present that on a ‘host’. One of the things that ‘annoyed’ me is that documentation always lags behind. Why? Because you need to modify it to remain relevant. See it is an instruction manual for your car, as long as the car itself remains the same, the manual remains relevant. But if you lets say, change the navigation unit in it, you either need to write a new part for that in the documentation (and add it as addendum or something), or reprint the instructions, else it will not fit anymore. ...

Introduction Azure Devops is the ‘Github’ of Microsoft basically. It contains container registries, pipelines, git repositories, an test framework, sprint/task boards and many more things. For many companies this is the defacto standard when it comes to doing DevOps based work. Lately I have been working a lot with the Azure Devops Git/Pipeline options within Azure DevOps and must come to the conclusion, that a lot of the things we are using, are not easy to find in the courses online. For this I tried to combine the options that I use in this blog post. This blogpost will be periodically updated when I found out new things, so that this combines all my knowledge in this region. I will probably address the newer items in a seperated blog entry as well. ...

Introduction Working at a financial institute ofcourse requires the use of using secure access to usernames and passwords and the like. For some period that had been out of reach for home consumers or smaller companies, but now with Hashicorp Vault, Ansible Vault, or smart access to applications like 1Password gives the opportunity to use these kind of smart access yourself. Scope This specific blog post, will focus on how I am using 1Password to access external applications, using their integration. If you use 1Password, you should have already setup the integration yourself. See this link to get started with setting up your own integration to one of your vaults. ...

Introduction I started writing this blog post back in May, where I (a bit late) wanted to tell where I went after working for Snow/Sue for 15 years. But I got distracted by other things, amongst them a lot of cool things at work.. so perhaps I should finally finish the entry. A year ago (wow, time flies!) I rejoined ING. I was looking for a job where I could continue my Coaching experience and continue to learn, and of course using my strong technical background where possible. ...

Introduction During my time at Snow or later Sue, I was allowed to drive various types of cars. I mainly drove Volkswagen’s, from the Golf to the Golf Variant, but also an Audi, a Skoda, a Prius (jikes) and in the end I was allowed to drive a Tesla Model3. As a computernerd that is an awesome thing to drive, it has all kind of connectivity options, you can monitoy it from remote with applications like teslamate and store essential data from it. ...

Introduction Since some time our kids to to daycare, and the occassionaly place photos on the secured environment. It’s a bit problematic to download the photos. On the phone it feels a bit weird how that works and online you can only fetch one photo at at time. But since they are there for a longer period already, that would mean manually download a lot of photos. So, I decided to write a little python wrapper. Using proxyman in between I analyzed the requests and contents and was able to determine how the login procedure works. We first POST a request to the LOGIN URL and bind a session to the ‘requests’ structure , which we will use later to POST to the album URL (you need to do that first, it seems that the PHPSESSID is then placed on the allowed list or something), which will result in a list of available photos. We can then fetch the items by iterating over the dict and nested list and download the images. We do our best to not overload the server so we delay every other request like a regular browser would also do. ...