So the next two days I lost some of my content for hence the delay in posting but I want to get some of this up there! Mainly so I can also reflect prior to hopefully attending next year.
For me this below was one of my personal highlighted sessions but I don’t think it was recorded as I got to see some of my heroes
I was also fortune enough to take party in the vExpert daily chat with the amazing Angelo
I then popped over to a few sessions and then mentally prepared myself for my next talk! Also since doing this I have refined (I think) and I have now done it at the UKVMUG. I am sure there will be one final version of this with some more exciting code someday
The day did not stop there and the party was not too far ahead but we recorded a new vMashup edition where can be found here and this personally was a great thing for me as I love the Virtually Speaking guys podcast
This then proceeded for a quick dash to the Rubrik booth as I was on their #vRockstar cards this year and I wanted to sadly get the full collection to display at home
It was then party time! We all dropped off our bags and for once it was a VMworld party I could enjoy! No rushing off for a flight or jet lag and we have some great memories from it, one of mine are here below
Now if you are here for the VR bits here they are, I think they turned out well especially when the confetti falls! It looks great on my Oculus. I would have gotten more but shall we say I think the UKVMUG or all of the UK VMUGs/vExperts were trying to drink the bar dry and cause a scene near the photo booth! You can use your mouse to look around too if you click on them and open them on YouTube!
Whilst we were waiting I did get this awesome caricature done though
The next day I am sure we all felt a little fragile but I managed to get some more sessions done and follow up great talks I have with people! I also managed to get this VR Tour done around the solutions exchange. I did this during a quiet time as usually it very busy and I didn’t want to trip over people so usually its much more busier than this
After this a few of us did the last few sessions and then a vendor crawl to see what we could get for the UKVMUG Charity Bag
One awesome stand was the VMUG stand where they were printing T-Shirts
I have a few more separate posts still to come such as the vExpert Shirts and also a few tips about conference and specifically VMworld but this year they made it for me. I will just leave a small gallery of any of the photos I haven’t used just for memories really and to try and inspire the next person to go!
I just hope I can make it next year and I will be much more on point with the uploads!
So last week I attended the UKVMUG and I was fortunate enough to speak there (which is another blog post) but myself and Rob Bishop decided to auction off some of our ‘swag’ bags to raise some money for Charity. I also think this is great as I know some people can’t make it to VMworld as I know I alway wanted to go at the beginning of this awesome journey I am on! Either way here is some pictures of the bags below, we had some awesome prizes such as a keep warm coffee mug, SNES and signed books
After a quick run around at lunch and between all of our sessions we managed to raise an amazing £177 which far exceeded my expectations and a massive thank you everyone who donated and to Kev for donating this for us as VMware would double it
that’s £177 donated to Aquabox as raised by the awesome folks at @UKVMUG on Thursday. Matched funding through the @vmware Foundation should double that – thanks to everyone who took part, and my employer for doubling the amount going to charity! @MyVMUG#UKVMUG#vExpertpic.twitter.com/gYXtxMYmFC
I certainly hope I can do another one of these soon and maybe do it online next time as so many people wanted to pay by card! Or maybe this is another VMware Code project in the making 😉
Also a massive congratulations to our winners of the bags! I never managed to get a photo!
I have recently been introduced to Uber Conference along with many others that could be named but this is a great way to join up with people on browsers or people I know in the US. One of the features that made me giggle is a particular music on hold you can choose which is Rick Astley so you get to #RickRoll people whilst they wait for you.
The only downside is there is no free UK dial in number but I found this service that allows me to use my inclusive minutes to dial US numbers https://www.freecallstousa.co.uk
I know that I like to have many of my conference bridges to auto dial if I don’t have access to the app or weak data or even if I am driving. With this method I can ask Siri to start UberConference and it adds me as the host automatically and enters my PIN
What you need to do is enter the following into a contact card
You can get the details from your settings page within your account.
If it take ages to connect you can play with the , as each carrier adds different delays and find the sweet spot for yourself. Below is a demo of this working
DISCLAIMER:- I have not tested the security of either service and I am not liable for any loses or charges. Also please check with your telephony provider this number is included as again I am not liable for any charges
So this week I have been performing an Office 365 migration and part way through federating my domains and getting ADFS up and running I came across this error below
First thing I did was go have a quick look at what was going on within the Event log and there was a rather odd error. This can be down to your service account losing its groups or the DCOM components losing their permissions too but mine seemed to be ok
Scheduler::SchedulerThreadMain : An error occured and scheduler run failed to perform all operation.
System.Management.Automation.CmdletInvocationException: Run profile ‘Full Import’ does not have run steps. —> System.InvalidOperationException: Run profile ‘Full Import’ does not have run steps.
at Microsoft.DirectoryServices.MetadirectoryServices.UI.WebServices.MMSWebService.InvokeRunProfile(String connectorName, String runProfileName)
Firstly do try a repair of the install and ensure you are at the latest version, as I said before this may be permissions related but if not after much head scratching for some very very odd reason all my rules had been dropped in the Synchronization Service Manager. To be honest I never got to the bottom of quite why they vanished during switching over the federation but to get things working again launch the application and goto the connectors tab
You should see you main AD and any others you wanted to sync in your forest. select your local AD Domain Services and then select configure run profiles on the right hand side
Within this window it will probably now look rather bare and this is what the cryptic error is going on about. It basically doesn’t know what to do!
Repopulate all the option including the export which is pretty much simply select the matching type to the profile and ensuring your base DN/partition is correct
Do make sure your Export one is populated as I found my password sync stopped working and had to do this and then use the Wizard to remove ADFS and flip back to password hash and then re-integrate. If you don’t do this you will see errors in the 365 Portal stating Password sync hasn’t occurred and get this error in your event log despite things now looking like they are syncing
Scheduler::SchedulerThreadMain : An error occured and scheduler run failed to perform all operation.
System.Management.Automation.CmdletInvocationException: Run profile ‘Export’ does not have run steps. —> System.InvalidOperationException: Run profile ‘Export’ does not have run steps.
at Microsoft.DirectoryServices.MetadirectoryServices.UI.WebServices.MMSWebService.InvokeRunProfile(String connectorName, String runProfileName)
at Microsoft.IdentityManagement.PowerShell.Cmdlet.InvokeADSyncRunProfileCmdlet.ProcessRecord()
— End of inner exception stack trace —
at System.Management.Automation.Runspaces.PipelineBase.Invoke(IEnumerable input)
at System.Management.Automation.PowerShell.Worker.ConstructPipelineAndDoWork(Runspace rs, Boolean performSyncInvoke)
The final thing to do now is run the sync by right clicking the AD connector, selecting run and then the relevant task. I did select full first just to make things are working.
Hopefully you will now see nice informal messages in your event log like below and your 365 portal should update within the hour to say its all back in sync
So I have been working on parts of this post for a while but I though I should really break this what was a massive post into some smaller chunks and relevant areas as a few people have asked me about this but in this post I am going to cover how to post your Podcast with WordPress but have this on the Apple Podcast channel. I will cover off recording & editing, video types and also submitting to other stores in other posts.
Also skip to the end for once if you are integrating with a current blog as this can ensure media is not picked up by accident.
Before you start go sign up here as sometime Apple require the address to be approved with of course a subsequent approval after. https://podcastsconnect.apple.com/
Firstly head over to your WordPress admin page and select add new plugin
From the plugin screen search for BluBrry and install and active the plugin
Hit the setting button to be taken to the main screen for the plugin. Fill in your Podcast name, the subtitle and any other required fields. I also suggest doing the image at this point but it must be 3000×3000 or you will get an error later
On your WordPress menu select PowerPress and then Audio Player, Select the player that best suits your style
Perform the same for Video by selecting the PowerPress Menu and then Video Player
We now need to collect a few details from the advanced tab so that we can submit this to Apple for approval
Within here select iTunes and scroll down to find your feed info and make a note of this for later
Head back to and select the + icon at the top
Enter the feed address you noted previously
Press validate and then assuming there are no errors below press submit. The most common is the artwork is the wrong size or format
You will now get the below screen and you have to wait for the approval email from Apple, at this point if you have one recorded lets get your first podcast there ready for go live
First add a new post just like usual
The above text is embed in the Podcast description and title but scroll down and you will see this windows for the podcast episode, I host mine on my server but this can be a content server or AWS or Azure just as long as its served by HTTP/HTTPS. If this is a video Podcast I usually upload a low-res (sub 480p) version here and then upload a high res version to YouTube as you don’t want to send over 1GB file to the users phone or device.
Finally submit and publish the post
Now hopefully if you have been approved in the time you have been getting all this ready go back to https://podcastsconnect.apple.com/ and click on your podcast picture
On this screen select refresh feed to pull through any new episodes, it does do this every 24 hours if you are happy to wait.
Now sit back and wait for it to appear in the Apple Podcast app, if all has worked you should see the below
Integrating with a current blog
If you already have a blog and wish to integrate this I suggest turning on category podcasting and when you select the category follow the steps as if you were creating a main podcast just don’t set this at the top level or it may miss interpret media from your normal post, just remember to tag them when you publish. This can be enabled in the advanced menu at the bottom of the main screen by selecting category podcasting and pressing save
This then enabled the menu on the left so select this
Finally select your category such as podcast and then add podcast settings to category feed, you will see I had already added one and this is where you get your feed URL from. Some people also find its best to tick the Podcast only feeds to keep things even more clear.
