WilliamLam.com

Customizing the NSX-T Login UI

10.29.2019 by William Lam // 1 Comment

I have been doing some automation with NSX-T 2.5 lately and for troubleshooting and validation purposes, I obviously make use of the NSX-T UI. After each new deployment I need to login to verify a few things. Out of pure laziness, I really would like to be able to login with just a single click for development purposes. I certainly could use password manager but it would still be a couple of clicks but I was looking something slightly quicker and that could easily work in a number of environments that I have.

Looking around the filesystem of the NSX Unified Appliance, I found the structure for the login UI to be fairly similiar (thanks to VMware Clarity) to that of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I found that I could apply the same techniques I had used to customize the VCSA Login UI including setting up pre-filled credentials (no recommended for obvious reasons) on the NSX-T Appliance.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware, use at your own risk. Please make sure to perform a backup of all original files prior to editing in case you need to restore back the system defaults.

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How to debug NSX-T API Automation with PowerCLI?

10.25.2019 by William Lam // 1 Comment

I recently needed to deploy the latest version of NSX-T (2.5) for some work I was doing with Project Pacific and of course it was related to Automation 🙂 It has been some time since I have touched the NSX-T Manager API (2.0) and although most of my existing code still worked, there were some things that broke due to API deprecation and also net new functionality that I needed to use.

I normally use PowerCLI for my Automation work and/or for prototyping purposes, not only is it easy to do but PowerCLI is still one of the most popular tool used by our customers and it means that they can easily benefit from my work. However, one of my pet peeves when working with the NSX-T APIs and PowerCLI is simply the lack of useful error messages. Here is the generic error message that you would normally see even checking the $Error[0].Exception.ServerError variable, it generally does not contain anything useful or actionable.

A server error occurred: 'com.vmware.vapi.std.errors.invalid_request': . Check $Error[0].Exception.ServerError for more details.

Here is a concrete example where I am attempting to create a new Transport Zone but I am purposing leaving out a required parameter and as you can see from the output, the same generic error message is shown and not very actionable.

I normally debug NSX-T API issue whether it is a syntax or usage problem by SSH'ing to the NSX-T Manager and monitoring the actual API logs to figure out what is actually going. It usually has exactly what I am looking for in terms of the actual server error message along with details on how to fix the problem.

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Automate disabling @channel & @here notifications using private Slack API

10.17.2019 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

Slack is a popular communication and collaboration tool which has been adopted by many organizations including the one I work for. I am a fan of Slack and use it on a regular basis. Like most users, I am a member of several different workspaces and a ton of different channels.

I think most Slack users would agree that one of the most commonly miss-used feature of Slack is the @channel and @here notifications which allows a user to broadcast a message that notifies everyone within a specific channel. I most often see this when a user is looking for immediate assistance and think that this is the best way to get help, it is not. In some cases, inpatient uses end up spamming multiple channels which can have up to 1K+ members! As you can imagine, this type of behavior is usually not well received.

This is the modern day "reply-all" email storms that I am sure many of you have at experienced at least once if not many more times within your organization 🙂 Slack does provide a few ways of disabling notification, either within the workspace but this would disable the feature completely and I do see value in this feature when used correctly or disabling notifications on a per-channel basis as shown in the screenshot below.

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