If you haven’t noticed the new content on this site has got a little scarce for the past few months. To be very honest my life seems to have been a bit crazy, both professionally and personally, and writing, unfortunately, has been back-burnered. On my drive home yesterday I was listening to Paul Woodward‘s excellent ExploreVM podcast episode with Melissa Palmer where she was speaking about the process of writing her excellent book “IT Architect Series: The Journey“. This served to remind me that I really should get back to writing as I’ve got a few topics I really need to blog about.

So as these things often happen in my head this led me this morning to think about why I blog in the first place. There are a number of reasons I do this and I thought for those that are passionate about any topic but in this case about technology maybe a little bit of the why would be the thing to get you started yourself.

1. So I can remember how I did something. Way back in the olden days (2004ish?) when my blog was called tastyyellowsnow.com this was the main reason I created the blog. I was 3 jobs into my career and all of my notes for how to do anything were saved in Outlook notes that I move from a work account to PST to work account to PST to work account. I was tired of doing it that way so I thought I’d try putting it out there. That hawtness ran on some asp based package with an Access database on the backend (I still have it!), and while some of the content was absolutely horrible the reason behind it is still my primary driver, to make sure if I figured out how to do something a certain way I could remember how to do it when I invariably had to do it again. Looking through some of those titles some like “Changing the Music On Hold Volume in Cisco CallManager” and “Recovering from a Bad Domain Controller Demotion” are still actually relevant. It’s nice to know where to find those things.

2. So that others can learn how I did something. I joked on twitter the other day that in preparing a Career Day talk for my daughter’s Kindergarten class that I should title it “SysAdmin: I Google things for those who will not”. If you are new to IT or aspire to work as an *Admin  I cannot express how much of my “how in the world do you know that” is simply being good at feeding errors into google and processing the results. There may be 20 posts on how to do a single task but one of them will make more sense to me than others. Because of that, I try to feed many things back into the collective Google, especially the things that I wasn’t able to find much on or that I had to piece together through multiple KB articles and blog posts. In doing so I really do hope that I help others get their job done without having somebody send them the sticker to the right.

3. Writing something down in a manner you expect others to understand can often provide clarity. There’s an old adage that says “the best way to learn something is to teach it.” While yes, it is cliché, speaking as a former adjunct college professor and current internal staff trainer when needed, it is absolutely true. When I am learning something new or I have just finished working through a complex issue I find that documenting it, either here or internally helps to solidify what the core issue was, what components led to the issue, how the problem was solved and finally how it can be prevented in the future.

Conclusion

Those are the reasons why you see new things here from time to time.  I do want to mention one thing you did not see above and that was to gain access to influencer programs. I’ve been very fortunate to be included in the vExpert and Veeam Vanguard communities and while many will say the way to get there is through blogging I disagree. I think the best way to achieve those accolades and keep them is the develop your own version of commitment to the Tech Community.  If you find that giving things back to the community at large is something you find value in then you will find a way to do it, blogging, tweeting, podcasting, or any other way. If that’s a goal of yours and blogging or writing isn’t your thing, there is any number of ways to meet that goal as long as you focus on why you are in the community to start with.

As life has its ups and downs so does the regularity of content here. What are your reasons for blogging? If you have thought about it and haven’t done it yet, why not? Let’s continue the discussion on Twitter by reaching out @k00laidIT and help the distributed mind grow.

Hi all, just a quicky to get everybody off the ground out there that are looking to use both PowerShell and PowerCLI from things that don’t run Windows. Today VMware released version 10 of PowerCLI with support for installation on both Linux and MacOS. This was made possible by the also recently released Powershell Core 6.0 which allows PowerShell to be installed on *nix variants. While the ability to run it on a Mac really doesn’t do anything for me I do like to use my iPad with a keyboard case as a quick and easy jump box and its frustrated me for a while that I needed to do an RDP session and then run a Powershell session from within that. With these releases I’m now an SSH session away from the vast majority of my scripting needs with normal sized text and everything.

In this post I’ll cover getting both Powershell Core and PowerCLI installed on a CentOS VM. To be honest, installing both on any other variant is pretty trivial but the basic framework of the difference can be found in Microsoft Docs.

Step 1: Installing Powershell Core 6.0

First, you need to add the Powershell Core repository to your yum configuration. You may need to amend the “/7/” below if you are running a RHEL 6 variant like CentOS 6.

curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/rhel/7/prod.repo | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/microsoft.repo

Once you have your repo added simply install from yum

sudo yum install -y powershell

Congrats! You now have PowerShell on Linux. To run it simply run pwsh from the command line and do your thing. If you are like me and use unsigned scripts a good deal you may want to lower your Execution Policy on launch. You can do so by adding the parameter.

pwsh -ep Unrestricted

Step 2: Installing VMware PowerCLI

Yes, this is the hard part… Just kidding! It’s just like on Windows, enter the simple one-liner to install all available modules.

Install-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI -Scope CurrentUser

If you want to check and see what you’ve installed afterward (as shown in the image)

Get-Module VMware.* -ListAvailable

If you are like me and starting to burn this through in your lab you are going to have to tell it to ignore certificate warnings to be able to connect to your vCenter. This is simple as well just use this and you’ll be off and running.

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -InvalidCertificateAction Ignore

Step 3: Profit!

Really, that’s it. Now to be honest I still am going to need to jump to something Windows-based to do the normal ActiveDirectory, DNS or any other native  Windows type module but that’s pretty easy through Enter-PSSession.

Finally, if you have got through all of the above and just want to cut and paste here’s everything in one spot to get you installed.

curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/rhel/7/prod.repo | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/microsoft.repo
sudo yum install -y powershell
pwsh -ep Unrestricted
Install-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI -Scope CurrentUser
Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -InvalidCertificateAction Ignore