souldo.net

The journal

Words, with room to think.

Essays and field notes on software, side projects, and the things learned along the way.

·4 min read

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…

·6 min read

A Quick Chocolatey Packaging Walkthrough

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…

·1 min read

New Puppet DSC Lite Module

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…

·3 min read

Convoluted Blogging - Part One

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…

·1 min read

Make Blogging Hard Again

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.

·1 min read

Getting Familiar with Windows Server 2016 Administration

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…

·1 min read

Internet Explorer - Disable First Run

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…

·3 min read

Windows, Powershell and Puppet Structured Facts (Slight Return)

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…

·1 min read

Hyper-V and the Virtual Floppy

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…