Category Archives: Scripting

Keeping pihole up to date with Aria Automation Config

I’ve recently begun keeping components of my lab up to date using Aria Automation Config. I’ve scheduled a daily job to inventory Linux packages that need updated and a weekly task to update Linux VMs and reboot if necessary. Both … Continue reading

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Keeping Linux up to date with Aria Automation Config — part 2

In a recent post (available here), we created a simple Aria Automation Config (formerly SaltStack Config) state file which reported on and applied available Linux OS updates. In this post we’ll revisit a minor change to this state file. After … Continue reading

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vSphere Custom Images & How to Compare Image Profiles

Occasionally there is a need to create a custom ESXi image as either an installable ISO or a depot/zip bundle. For example, when setting up a new host, you may wish to automatically include specific drivers for a particular network … Continue reading

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Aria Automation Internal IPAM reserve / release API

In the May 2023/8.12.1 release notes for Aria Automation, one of the what’s new items was the ability to reserve/unreserve an IP address to make it unavailable/available for deployment. In this release the functionality is supported via API only. This … Continue reading

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Using VI/JSON with Powershell

I recently saw a post on a new feature that is enabled by default in vSphere 8.0u1: https://blogs.vmware.com/code/2023/06/10/introducing-vi-json-a-modern-wire-protocol-for-vsphere-management. The article describes a new JSON-based, REST-like protocol named VI/JSON that allows access to all the familiar SOAP XML properties. It seemed … Continue reading

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