Building a TinyCore Linux OVA with Custom OVF Properties

I’ve recently been interested in creating a TinyCore Linux virtual appliance. This OVA would allow for some customization, like hostname, IP address, default gateway, and DNS settings. I’ve posted about TinyCore Linux before, most recently 2 years ago: https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/scripting/tinycore-15-virtual-machine-very-small-vm-for-testing/. I really enjoy this very lightweight VM as it works perfectly…

Telegraf Open Agent Updates and VCF Operations 9.1

About a year ago, I published a post covering how to monitor a Raspberry Pi using the open source Telegraf agent and VMware Aria Operations: https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/virtualization/monitoring-a-raspberry-pi-with-telegraf-and-aria-operations Recently, while rebuilding this configuration in a VCF 9.1 environment, I encountered a couple of changes that required updates to the original process: The…

Using PowerCLI with Federated VCF 9.1 Authentication

The VCF PowerCLI 9.1 release notes call out an interesting change to the Connect-VIServer cmdlet (https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vcf/vcf-9-0-and-later/9-1/release-notes/vmware-cloud-foundation-9-1-0-0-release-notes/what-s-new/whats-new-vcf-cli-api-sdk/vcf-powercli-changelog/vmware-vimautomation-core.html) Connect-VIServer– Added parameter ‘VcfApiToken’– Added parameter ‘VcfOAuthSecurityContext’ This change introduces native support for API token authentication in federated VCF environments, making non-interactive automation significantly easier than previous SAML-based approaches. In a prior post (https://enterpriseadmins.org/blog/scripting/how-to-use-powercli-with-federated-vcenter-logins/),…

An Unexpected Benefit of Application-Aware Backups: Finding and Fixing Database Bloat

While working on my recent post about why crash-consistent VM backups aren’t always enough, I ran into an unexpected but very useful side effect of adding application-aware database backups. Once I started creating regular database dumps for my phpIPAM instances, I noticed something that had been completely invisible when relying…

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