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Automating bulk OPNsense Unbound DNS host overrides

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I recently deployed OPNsense in my homelab, which I will be using it to setup my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environment. A critical part infrastructure service that is often miss-configured is DNS and OPNsense provides a simple way add your custom DNS entries (forward/reverse) called Host Overrides, which uses Unbound DNS behind the scenes.

Like most, I have a number of DNS entries that I would like to pre-create and the UI is not exactly the quickest for any type of "bulk" operation as each entry is added sequentially.


Luckily, OPNsense does have a REST API for Unbound functions, but the documentation was not very useful as it just direct users to use the browser to extract the JSON payload, while something I am comfortable with, I think that is not what I expected from something called an API Reference ...

In any case, this was a simple enough API, that I was able to create a quick PowerShell script to parse a CSV file that contains the list of FQDN, IP Address and Description and then perform a bulk create since the API itself was also sequential in nature 🙁

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Quick Tip - Suppress in-guest VMware Tools update notifications

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If you have a Virtual Machine that has VMware Tools installed and a newer version is available, end users within the guest operating system might see a status bar notification with the following message:

A newer version of Tools is available for this VM

Most organizations already have a well defined process in rolling out new software updates including VMware Tools, so while the in-guest notification about a new version of VMware Tools can be useful for some, it either not applicable or adds unnecessary distractions for their end users. I recently learned that you can disable these in-guest notification by applying one of the following configurations:

Windows

  • Disable VMware Tools notification at system Level
    • Set the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware Tools\ShowTray to 0 (REG_DWORD)
  • Disable VMware Tools In-Guest Notification at the user Level
    • Set the following registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware Tools\ShowTray to 0 (REG_DWORD)

Feedback has already been acknowledge to add this information to the official VMware Tools documentation and that it may be possible to configure these notification settings using the VMware Tools configuration file (tools.conf) in the future, further simplifying any configurations related to VMware Tools.

Quick Tip - Using PowerCLI to query VMware Tools Configuration at scale 

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One of the most powerful and versatile VM management capability in vSphere is the Guest Operations API, providing a rich set of operations from transferring files to/from the guest to running commands directly on the guest as if you were logged in!

An easy way to consume the Guest Operations API is via PowerCLI and using the Invoke-VMScript cmdlet, which I have extensively written about, showcasing all the creative ways this can be used to solve various automation challenges.

I recently came across a Reddit thread where the OP wanted to check to query for a specific VMware Tools configuration as part of the vSphere Security Configuration Guide and was looking for some help as logging into each and every system did not seem like a good idea, which it is NOT! 🙂

Any time you have a use case where you need to scale a specific operation (reading or writing) a change, you should consider Guest Operations API, you can easily use a single API to perform this operation at scale!

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