I wrote this article to better understand all the pieces called "AD" or "Active Directory" in Microsoft Azure fit together. The pieces are as follows: Active Directory (AD): The is the classic on-premise Active Directory with LDAP, Kerberos, group policies and all that. Traditionally Windows machines in larger environments have been domain-joined to on-premise AD. […]
Vagrant has built-in support for connecting to Windows VMs using the vagrant rdp command. It does basically does the same as vagrant ssh for Linux VMs. There are a few shortcomings, though: vagrant rdp fails to automatically accept the host key of the VM it is connecting to, at least when using it from Linux […]
I've been doing lots of Windows automation recently. My goal has been to be able to reproducibly create a Windows Server 2019-based Buildbot workers, first in a Vagrant environment, then later in AWS EC2 using pre-built images created with Packer. This task requires installing Visual Studio 2019 build tools automatically and fetching the project's dependencies […]
The vagrant-hostmanager plugin is a really nice plugin which helps Vagrant VMs communicate with each other using names instead of IP addresses. Essentially it manages hosts entries for the VMs, acting like a poor-man's DNS. Now, on *NIX operating systems you typically use sudo, which caches your authorization. So, when hostmanager starts, you type your […]
This posting comes strictly from the land of esoteria. We have a Vagrant + Virtualbox environment that sets up Foreman used for PXE booting baremetal servers. The environment work fine on Linux and MacOS. But we needed to make this environment work also on Windows. Easy, right? Vagrant and Virtualbox are supposed to abstract all […]