infrequent musings go here. http://www.souldo.net Using Chocolatey Templates This is a bit of a following up to the previous post, A Quick Chocolatey Packaging Walkthrough. In this post we’ll walk through making a template that can simplify and accelerate your package creation process. Get your Powershell prompt ready! Prerequisites Chocolatey installed on your machine A... Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0700 http://www.souldo.net/2020-09-28-using-chocolatey-templates/ http://www.souldo.net/2020-09-28-using-chocolatey-templates/ A Quick Example of Creating a Chocolatey Package With the new school year and a gaggle of “virtual learning” children in the home, I’ve been spending a lot of time rebuilding and repurposing laptops lately. What was previously an awful, time-consuming process has been pretty simple by using tools such... Sun, 27 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0700 http://www.souldo.net/2020-09-27-a-quick-chocolatey-packaging-walkthrough/ http://www.souldo.net/2020-09-27-a-quick-chocolatey-packaging-walkthrough/ Puppet released a “lite” version of the DSC module today (release here. I’ve recently hit a wall where I needed to add a couple of DSC resources that weren’t in the main module and figuring out the previous process was a bit beyond my time constraints so I’m looking forward... Wed, 21 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0700 http://www.souldo.net/2018-03-21-new-puppet-dsc-lite-module-copy/ http://www.souldo.net/2018-03-21-new-puppet-dsc-lite-module-copy/ So as mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately trying to vet different cloud technologies for hosting a simple web app, and I’ve opted to use this blog as the guinea pig. It’s been quite the journey thus far as I’ve intentionally made this... Tue, 20 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0700 http://www.souldo.net/2018-03-20-convoluted-blogging-part-one/ http://www.souldo.net/2018-03-20-convoluted-blogging-part-one/ Why blog after so long? Well, mostly as a use case for working on various automation tooling and to dig more into containers on Windows. Short version, this blog moved from a hosted WordPress site to a statically built Jekyll site running in a Nano server container on AWS. Long... Sat, 10 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0800 http://www.souldo.net/2018-03-10-make-blogging-hard-again/ http://www.souldo.net/2018-03-10-make-blogging-hard-again/ Late last year I was asked if I had interest in making a video on the basics of Windows Server 2016 system administration for Packt Publishing. It has been a great experience and I’m happy to say that as of last week the first of two courses has been released!... Mon, 26 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0800 http://www.souldo.net/2018-02-26-getting-familiar-with-windows-server-2016-administration.1/ http://www.souldo.net/2018-02-26-getting-familiar-with-windows-server-2016-administration.1/ Call this group policy fail #436.   I have Windows 10 Enterprise.  I need to install a vSphere client that requires .NET 3.5, which is a 'feature' in Win10 instead of an installable item. Trying to add the feature I get hit with an error that Windows Update failed to... Mon, 21 Mar 2016 20:21:09 -0700 http://www.souldo.net/2016-03-21-windows-10-and-net-3-5/ http://www.souldo.net/2016-03-21-windows-10-and-net-3-5/ I’ve been dealing with building packages in Chocolatey quite a bit lately, and one of the things I’ve run into is trying to get ZIP files to play nice when they need to be retrieved from Invoke-WebRequest.  When provisioning systems from scratch I keep running into an error message: Invoke-WebRequest... Sat, 07 Nov 2015 17:22:10 -0800 http://www.souldo.net/2015-11-07-internet-explorer-disable-first-run/ http://www.souldo.net/2015-11-07-internet-explorer-disable-first-run/ At the end of part one, I built a custom Puppet structured fact to relate the Powershell and .NET version information from a Powershell Object to a Ruby Hash that was readable by Facter. The end result was, well, a pile of info. PS C:\Users\vagrant> facter -p psversiontable {"psversion"=>{"major"=>4, "minor"=>0, "build"=>-1,... Fri, 06 Nov 2015 17:25:20 -0800 http://www.souldo.net/2015-11-06-windows-powershell-and-puppet-structured-facts-slight-return/ http://www.souldo.net/2015-11-06-windows-powershell-and-puppet-structured-facts-slight-return/ The Goal: I need to return the versions of PowerShell and the latest .NET framework installed as facts. I’ve done this before and I’ll do this again, but one of the bigger aggravations I have about puppet development on Windows is the reliance on many PowerShell calls to find simple... Thu, 05 Nov 2015 17:23:28 -0800 http://www.souldo.net/2015-11-05-windows-powershell-and-puppet-structured-facts/ http://www.souldo.net/2015-11-05-windows-powershell-and-puppet-structured-facts/ (for use with creating additional compilers) If you aren’t using the curl method, use the puppet certificate generation method (note: make sure the ssl dir is clean): puppet certificate generate <fqdn> –ca-location remote –dns-alt-names <comma separated dns alt name list> Then approve through the same methods on the master puppet cert... Wed, 23 Sep 2015 17:17:35 -0700 http://www.souldo.net/2015-09-23-how-to-generate-a-puppet-certificate-with-dns-alt-names/ http://www.souldo.net/2015-09-23-how-to-generate-a-puppet-certificate-with-dns-alt-names/ I’ve been working on automating builds in Hyper-V using Powershell and given that for some reason every OS seems to need either a PXE setup or a floppy disk to auto-provision, I took the road that took fewer additional servers/services. To create virtual floppy disk, perfect for kickstart and unattend.xml... Fri, 21 Aug 2015 17:13:04 -0700 http://www.souldo.net/2015-08-21-hyper-v-and-the-virtual-floppy/ http://www.souldo.net/2015-08-21-hyper-v-and-the-virtual-floppy/