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Showing posts from April, 2015

Working with PowerShell & Multiple Azure Contexts

When working with multiple Azure subscriptions, the PowerShell Az.* modules allow for easy context switching. This means that you can run commands agains multiple subscriptions, or you can run commands against subscriptions without changing your default context. An Azure Context object contains information about the Account that was used to sign into Azure, the active (for that context) Azure Subscription, and an auth token cache is not actually empty, it just can't read from here for security reasons, though you can read it with the Get-AzAccessToken command. Here's what is in an Azure Context object: PS> Get-AzContext | fl * Name : TK-PRD (yyyyyyyy-yyyy-yyyy-yyyy-yyyyyyyyyyyy) - tim@timkennedy.net Account : tim@timkennedy.net Environment : AzureCloud Subscription : yyyyyyyy-yyyy-yyyy-yyyy-yyyyyyyyyyyy Tenant : zzzzzzzz-zzzz-zzzz-zzzz-zzzzzzzzzzzz TokenCache : VersionProfile : ExtendedProperties : {} If y...

Building OpenVPN on Solaris 11.2 for use with PIA VPN

I recently had a desire to get OpenVPN working on Solaris 11.2, to allow me to connect to a Private Internet Access (PIA) VPN . For more information on using a VPN for general internet access, as well as some insight into why you might want to look into it for yourself, see: The Best VPN Services Updated for 2017 http://lifehacker.com/5940565/why-you-should-start-using-a-vpn-and-how-to-choose-the-best-one-for-your-needs A bit outdated for 2017: http://lifehacker.com/5935863/five-best-vpn-service-providers A quick Google turned up a blog post from Stefan Reuter detailing how to set up OpenVPN on OpenSolaris 2008.11. For Solaris 11.2 the basic steps are still pretty much the same, but some of the minor details have changed. We still need the TAP driver for solaris , and we obviously need to download and build OpenVPN, but we don't need to edit the TUN/TAP Makefile anymore, and we don't need any patches for OpenVPN. One step I added was to download and compile the LZO co...

pyTivo on Solaris 11.2

We are a TiVo household, so a quest has been underway to build a suitable place for long term storage of the family's favorite TV shows and movies. One indisputable requirement is that the shows and movies have to be visible via the TiVo menu. pyTivo (the William McBrine fork) is the logical tool to do this (in my house). William McBrine has been maintaining his fork of pyTivo more regularly than the original package (sourceforge) . To get pyTivo working on Solaris 11.2, only 2 dependencies needed to be resolved. I needed to build ffmpeg to support on-the-fly video transcoding. and, ffmpeg wanted yasm (an open source rewrite of the nasm assembler) or nasm itself. This is what happened when I tried to build ffmpeg without yasm: bash-[121]$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local yasm/nasm not found or too old. Use --disable-yasm for a crippled build. If you think configure made a mistake, make sure you are using the latest version from Git. If the latest version fails, report the...