Escaping special characters in proxy auth passwords in vCenter

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EDIT: It seems that his was fixed in vCenter 7.0 U3.

While debugging a vCener Lifecycle Manager, which was unable to download updates, I’ve stumbled over a weird behaviour, which is (IMHO) by design.

Some of you might use a proxy server. And some of you might use a proxy server which requires credentials. In my case, my customer uses a Sophos SG appliance as a web proxy server with authentication. The customer creaded a user with a complex password. But I was unable to get a working internet connection.

Image by Ed Webster from Pixabay 

I played a bit with curl on the bash of the vCenter.… Read more

On the road to… nowhere?

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Its been four month since my last blog post, and the blog frequency was quite low before that. This blog is, to be honest, a giant pile of stuff that has not worked as expected. Okay, some random thoughts or howto’s, but most blog posts are about stuff that failed in some way. That’s a bit “depressing”. I should write more about the fun things in my life

Picture by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay 

For a pretty long time my focus was on infrastructure. And my focus _is_ on infrastrucutre – Networks, lots of storage, virtualization with VMware. And always full stack: Networking, Storage, Servers, Operating System, always with a little focus here and there.… Read more

Configure VMware Horizon View client device certificate authentication

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Adding a second factor to your authentication is always a good idea. Typically the second factor is a One-Time Password (OTP) or a push notification. But what if you want to allow the login into your Horizon View environment only from specific devices? This implies that you need some kind of second factore that also identifies the device. At this point the arch enemy of many of us comes into play: Certificates!

To be honest: It is not so hard to get client device certificate authentication to work. All you need is:

  • Unified Access Gateway 2.6 or later
  • Horizon 7 version 7.5 or later
  • A certificate installed on the client device that Unified Access Gateway accepts

Configure X.509 authentication settings

The first step is to configure the UAG to accept a device certificate.… Read more

VMware vCenter 7.0 U2 deployment fails at stage 2

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Today I had to deploy a new vCenter appliance. Nothing fancy, new deployment. Stage 1 was easy, but stage 2 failed several times. I re-deployed the vCenter appliance two times, but as the deployment failed for the third time, I took a look into the logs.

The deployment failed without any error, but it didn’t finished. It stopped during the start of different services without any error.

First of all: Log into the appliance using SSH or the console. Use the root account and the root password you have entered during the setup.

A good point to start are the logs under /var/log/firstboot. I used ls -lt to get the last written logs.… Read more

Veeam B&R backup failes with “No scale-out repository extents are available”

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One of my customers replaced the old Veeam environment with new gear. The HW was pretty simple designed:

  • two HPE ProLiant
  • per server two HPE D3610 enclosures with 6 TB disks
  • ~ 5km between backup server and backup copy destination

One server was designed to act as the Veeam backup server and repository, and the second server was designed to act as the backup copy destination. Both servers were running Windows Server 2019 Standard. We planned to use Windows Deduplication and ReFS, but it turned out that we have to adjust the filesystem size to get Windows Dedup working. Windows Dedup supports filesystems up to 64 TB.… Read more

WatchGuard Network Security Essentials Exam

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Yesterday, I passed the first exam of the year. In this case the WatchGuards Network Security Essentials exam. The exam covers basic networking and firewalling skills, as well as the necessary knowledge to configure, manage, and monitor a WatchGuard Firebox. If you were familier with networking and firewalls in general, this exam is a “low hanging fruit”. I had to take it due to partner conditions.

WatchGuards offers a pretty good study guide for this exam which you can get for free.. The exam is delivered by  Kryterion and can be taken in a test center or as online proctored exam.

The closed book exam consists of 70 questions.… Read more

VCAP-DCV Design 2021 – Objective 1.1 Gather and analyze business requirements

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This blog post covers objective 1.1 (Gather and analyze business requirements) of the VCAP-DCV Design 2021 exam. It is based on the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 in Data Center Virtualization Design (3V0-624) Exam Preparation Guide (last update December 2019).

When you get the task to design something , you will instinctively start gathering information about the requirements that have to be fulfilled. Everything IT is doing should support the business in some way.

The necessary skills and abilities are documented in the exam prep guide for the older VCAP6-DCV Design exam (3V0-622).… Read more

VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 – Data Center Virtualization Design Exam (VCAP-DCV Design 2021)

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In August 2018 I’ve passed the VCAP6-DCV Deployment exam. After a busy first half of 2019 it’s time to start preparing the VMware Certified Advanced Professional — Data Center Virtualization Design 2019 exam. But I lost focus and in 2020 I had a lot to do – but not VMW related and so I also missed my goal to take the VCAP-DCV Design exam.

I have to push myself, so I decided to re-cap my half finished blog series to get myself back on track.

There are many great study guides out there, but in most cases I need “my own study guide” to feel well prepared. I hope this blog series will keep me on track, and I stay focused.… Read more

Two registry changes to improve physical Horizon View Agent experience

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Using physical clients as Horizon View agents is pretty common for me. My office pc, as well as my Lenovo X250 are often used by using the Horizon View Client and the Blast protocol. But as good as the performance is, there were a couple of things that bugged me.

Bild von Mediamodifier auf Pixabay 

On my office pc, I encountered pretty often a black screen, either on first connect, or on reconnect. The typical issue caused by misconfigured firewall policies, but this was completly out of scope in this case, because my collegues never had issues with black screens. The problem occured with different versions of View Agent.… Read more

MFA disabled, but Azure asks for second factor?!

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I just had a Teams call with a customer to resolve a strange mystery about Azure MFA.

The customer called me and explained, that he has a user with Azure Multifactor Authentication (MFA) disabled, but when he logs in with this account, he is asked to setup MFA. He setup MFA and was able to login according to their Conditional Access policies.

Bild von Lalmch auf Pixabay 

The customer and I took a look into their tenant and checked a couple of things. The first thing the customer showed me was this screen:

As you can see, the MFA state for this user is “disabled” (german language screenshot). Then we tool a look using the MSOnline PowerShell module.… Read more