Author: Brian

Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, Systems Engineer, Papa, and eccentric individual.

I am constantly conflicted with building my LinkedIn and online persona, and my desire for privacy and anonymity.

If all my tech “work” could be done in a lab…

I’ve been back at work for 4 days since the winter holidays, and I’m already feeling burdened by how much I need to learn to stay relevant, and how much I am letting this impinges upon my personal life outside of work.

I have a lot of good things to say about VMware and I am grateful they have the new Lab environment. And… I must admit that I haven’t been doing myself service since I haven’t really been using them.

If I could move all my vSphere, Horizon, K8s learning to their labs… what would I gain, and what would I lose?

 

Gains:

  • I would move to my phone as my primary device significantly faster
    • This would encourage finding a really good backup solution
  • I could donate the T20, z220 and not have to cry about TPM upgrade woes, or CPU incompatibilities when using vMotion
    • Although this would lose that nice (but dated) GTX 780 card.
  • I could return the really nice, but not really useful Intel NUC from work
  • My work remains… my work!
  • My personal tech burden is significantly reduced

Cons:

  • I would still need to care and feed for the same same VMs I have now
  • I would end up re-emphasizing my need to move from Google Workspaces over to O365
  • I would lose everything if VMware pulled the plug on my lab for whatever reason.

 

I think its about time I do something about this and start building in the labs. I’m never going to get where I want to be if I keep getting bogged down in trying to resurrect old hardware.

Brian and Sikhumbuzo working on a computer
Don’t forget the wisdom of the Professor.

The unbelievable difficulty in watching Bluray on a computer

For a very long time I didn’t care much about the quality of my movies. DVD has generally been fine. This all went downhill –albeit slowly at first– when I got a really nice TV. The TV was the free one my friends gave me from the loading dock at their apartment. It was broken, but a DC capacitor switch out fixed that. It was HD, and I liked it.

Skip a few chapters and we arrive at my current state.

I have attempted several paths to watch my brand new Ultimate Matrix on Bluray collection. Yes… the Matrix. Matrix Resurrection is coming soon and I felt that was worth watching everything again, afterall the Matrix series was a very significant part of my youth. As nice of an idea as this was, I sincerely regret my decision to not just buy more bits from Amazon.

I have tried to watch this on:

  • 2016 macbook pro
  • Win10 VM in VMware Fusion
  • Linux Mint
  • Win10 bootcamp on the macbook

Please note I have not actually tried this on a true Windows PC, because oddly enough I don’t really have one. Time changes everything.

In short I have learned the following:

Essentially I get the frustration tractor owners feel when they can’t fix their own equipment. I have more appreciation now for the FTC Ruling for Right-to-Repair. The FTC Votes Unanimously to Enforce Right to Repair | WIRED

 

 

I burned $40 on eBay to buy these disks. I burned 4 hours of time trying to get this to work. I have too many hobbies, and can’t pick this one up. I’m going to buy the trilogy on Amazon and try to not think about making Jeff Bezos any richer.

 

PowerShell One-liner to find out what iOS updates are available for MDM-managed devices

Apple has continually enhanced their enterprise update paths over the last several years. The most recent change came with iOS 14.5 which allowed MDM administrators to send a custom command to that allows organizations to decide whether to stay on an older iOS Major version (iOS 14.x) or allow devices to access a newer major version (iOS 15). This custom command has many challenges to its adoption, and it the release of iOS 15 on 09/20/2021 was really the first time this could be tested in a production deployment.

Although recommendationCadence is a fascinating subject, the purpose of this quick post is the PowerShell one-liner I identified to pull information to know when the update was made available to enterprises. Any simple up/down monitor for a webpage could also track this information, I just happened to have a PS terminal open when I wanted to check this.

(Invoke-RestMethod https://gdmf.apple.com/v2/pmv).assetsets.ios

This command will produce a very simple list of what versions are available.

ProductVersion PostingDate ExpirationDate SupportedDevices
-------------- ----------- -------------- ----------------
8.0 2021-09-20 2021-12-19 {Watch3,1, Watch3,2, Watch3,3, Watch…
15.0 2021-09-20 2021-12-19 {AppleTV11,1, AppleTV5,3, AppleTV6,2…
5.3.9 2021-09-13 2021-12-19 {Watch3,1, Watch3,2, Watch3,3, Watch…
7.6.2 2021-09-13 2021-12-19 {Watch3,1, Watch3,2, Watch3,3, Watch…
14.8 2021-09-13 2021-12-19 {iPad11,1, iPad11,2, iPad11,3, iPad1…
7.6.1 2021-07-29 2021-12-12 {Watch3,1, Watch3,2, Watch3,3, Watch…
14.7.1 2021-07-26 2021-12-19 {iPad11,1, iPad11,2, iPad11,3, iPad1…
14.7 2021-07-21 2021-10-24 {iPad11,1, iPad11,2, iPad11,3, iPad1…
14.7 2021-07-19 2021-12-19 {AppleTV11,1, AppleTV5,3, AppleTV6,2…
7.6 2021-07-19 2021-10-27 {Watch3,1, Watch3,2, Watch3,3, Watch…
14.7 2021-07-19 2021-10-24 {iPhone10,1, iPhone10,2, iPhone10,3,…
12.5.4 2021-06-21 2021-12-19 {iPad4,1, iPad4,2, iPad4,3, iPad4,4…}
14.6 2021-06-21 2021-10-19 {iPad11,1, iPad11,2, iPad11,3, iPad1…
14.6 2021-06-21 2021-10-17 {iPhone10,1, iPhone10,2, iPhone10,3,…
5.3.9 2021-05-24 2021-12-19 {Watch2,3, Watch2,4, Watch2,6, Watch…
6.3 2021-05-24 2021-12-19 {Watch2,3, Watch2,4, Watch2,6, Watch…
7.5 2021-05-24 2021-10-17 {Watch3,1, Watch3,2, Watch3,3, Watch…
14.6 2021-05-24 2021-10-17 {AppleTV11,1, AppleTV5,3, AppleTV6,2…

 

The server gdmf.apple.com is the resource provided by Apple to dictated what iOS versions are available. Since this site only provides a JSON-formatted list, it’s very easy to use the invoke-RestMethod to grab relevant data.