Copying Home Assistant configuration to GitHub

After some issues with my Home Assistant setup, I looked at ways to save my configuration files to GitHub. I found a very detailed Youtube video that showed how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhv-WqGUy_o However, in the end, the automated solution used an option I did not want to use: “StrictHostKeyChecking=no“.…

Reporting on your Windows Server backup

A while ago I blogged about backing up my virtual home lab for free with Veeam Backup & Replication 10. The server on which I installed this is a Windows Server 2016 server that is also used for backing up my home PCs and laptops. And on this server I…

Using ADFS with vCenter 7

A while ago I wrote an article about using LDAPS to connect vCenter to Active Directory. In that article, I mentioned a second (secure) option to connect to AD: by using ADFS. In this article, I will give you the steps to change your vCenter Identity Provider from Embedded to…

Network Port Diagram vSphere

I was troubleshooting an issue with an ESXi host and Update Manager for which I needed the firewall ports. In KB2131180 you can find a PDF document with a beautiful diagram and reference table. But getting all the required ports between a specific source and destination was not easy. So…

Windows Server 2019 customization issue

I was asked by a colleague to help him with a problem he had customizing a Windows Server 2019 deployment. He had no problem customizing a Window Server 2016 VM so had no idea what the problem was. The first thing I did was a manual deployment. I created a…

Packer and WinRM – mystery resolved

A while ago I started exploring Hashicorp Packer in order to learn more about a new way of creating Windows template VMs. Traditionally, you create a VM, attach the Windows ISO file and of you go… But with Packer, you can define the whole thing in code and store that…