May.27

May 27, 2013
0 Ben

IPv6 and the Dancing Turtle

So I recently attended a LOPSA meeting where I got to listen to a rather familiar presentation about IPv6, how to pitch it to a business and how to get started with it. The silly/fun motivation for getting it to work is to load up http://www.kame.net/ – if you are IPv6 enabled, the turtle will dance (more like swim). Otherwise it sits there like a bump on a log.

Well, this weekend I courted the fickle turtle, but after a day and a half (plus a router upgrade), the turtle now dances to my whims. I encountered some trickiness that others hopefully wont, regarding ATT’s uVerse service and the 2WIRE modem/router/combo unit:

  • The 2WIRE won’t give you native IPv6
  • There is no way to configure an IPv6 tunnel on the 2WIRE
  • There’s no bridge mode that drops the NAT to let a downstream router that IS capable be in charge of your network

The solution was to buy an Apple AirPort Extreme (my Linksys didn’t support IPv6 and I’m too lazy to keep up with and constantly support a DD-WRT setup). Here’s the list of steps I performed to get up and running, hopefully written so anyone can follow suit.

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May.15

May 15, 2013
0 Ben

Flip The Switch

I made a new PowerShell script at work recently. It’s not as big as it looks – all it does is shut down a VMware guest. This assumes you have the PowerCLI modules loaded and are already connected to a VIserver.

Since the “Shutdown-VM” command just initiates a shutdown of a VM guest, I wanted to script something out that would actually pause until the VM is completely shut down.

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May.07

May 7, 2013
0 Ben

SuperBowl v2

Whoops! Since my last “IT Superbowl Party” I updated my RAID drivers and lost the drives holding my awesome Server 2012 Core environment I build out. And I lost the notes on how to build it to boot! But my birthday recently came and went and I treated myself to some extra RAM so I could run more virtual machines. It’s time to rebuild, and just so I don’t lose my notes, here’s what I have now.

Apologies for the very raw format. Oh, and I decided to up the ante and make sure that everything is IPv6 compatible, complete with DHCPv6 and what not.

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May.02

May 2, 2013
0 Ben

The Wall of Shame

It’s weird talking about The Wall of Shame not in relation to something I’ve screwed up myself. Not that I screw up often – it’s just that I never thought I’d be the one maintaining said Wall.

At work I’ve been struggling to focus hard on certain projects and everyday work. In my last post I talked about standing up for myself and making a name for myself as someone other than the Virt Build guy. I’ve already seen great progress in this regard, but it’s only partially fixed the uphill battle I feel every time I set out to get work done.

I wasn’t sure why until today when I thought about how upset I was that certain Windows deployments weren’t being sysprepped and I was part of the problem. I’d sure put myself on the Wall of Shame for that, but only one other person at work seems to comprehend the problem with it – and unfortunately he’s not in a position to help solve it. So if I’m the only one who knows enough to be worried and do something about the situation, that means it’s up to me to declare it an offence belonging on the Wall.

I added a total of 14 things to the Wall (actually to the white board by my desk) but I already feel a little better about things just having enumerated the problems. These aren’t trivial – they’re objectively important infrastructure and security components that should be part of any strong IT foundation. They might not be part of my current projects or responsibilities but as I make time to chip away at them little by little, things will continue looking up.

Now I’m off to become a Deployment Wizard and cast Smite against the very building block that started my Wall of Shame.

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