BcContainerHelper 3.0.0 just released and as something new, you will see this message when importing the module:
BcContainerHelper emits usage statistics telemetry to Microsoft
What does that mean? Can you avoid that? Who can access the emitted telemetry data? How? Can you use telemetry for troubleshooting? Can you use telemetry for other things?
This blog post will try to answer these questions.
Continue readingWith a total of over 300000 downloads, NavContainerHelper is no more. As of this weekend, NavContainerHelper cannot be used to create containers anymore. There has been a lot of blog posts here on my blog and others that indicated that this day would come and now it is here… – all specific images are gone and with those all the “old” generic images, which was used by NavContainerHelper.
I will contact PowerShell Gallery to get the entry removed.
RIP NavContainerHelper, Long Live BcContainerHelper.
Continue readingOn October 27th 2017, I posted the first announcement which introduced NAV on Docker. For approx. 3 years we published Docker images first to Docker Hub and later to Microsoft Container Registry for both Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019. Many 1000 images was pushed to the container registries until we during the summer of 2020 changed strategy to use artifacts together with the generic image.
The various versions of specific images on different container OS’ amounts to more than 100Tb of docker images and now is the time to cleanup…
Continue readingVersion 2.0.1 of BcContainerHelper was shipped with a number of very exciting new featuers. This blog post will list the features and I will have to document them elsewhere.
Continue readingWhen releasing the first version of Run-AlValidation in BcContainerHelper, i did a quick blog post about the function here. This blog post serves to explain some common scenarios of how to run the function. The blog post will also explain the parameters of Run-AlValidation a bit more in depth, for people to have a good chance of using the function before submitting for AppSource Validation.
The important part of this blog post: Please make sure to upgrade to BcContainerHelper 1.0.18 or reconfigfure the timestampServer in your existing version.
December 30th 2020 we got a number of apps for validation failing due to a wrong timestamp signature. Some partners discovered this before submitting and filed an issue on github here, complaining about this error: “The timestamp signature and/or certificate could not be verified or is malformed.“
I was enjoying a nice walk in the forest with my dogs, but my phone would reveal increased activity on github and emails from partners running into this strange issue.
Continue readingFriday morning around 6am. I had just kicked off a few validation builds when they started failing. Failing builds can happen and typically there is a valid reason for this, but in this case – ALL builds was failing and looking in the logs I quickly realized that this problem was something different.
PowerShell Gallery was down, PowerShell Gallery had an outage and it took a stunning 18 hours before it was back online…:-(
Continue readingThis blog post is not really a troubleshooting guide (although there is a small TSG at the end). It is more like a brain dump of what I have seen over time and how I would approach a trouble shooting session. I have divided it into 6 sections:
Going forward, I will add a link to this blog post to all issues on https://www.github.com/microsoft/navcontainerhelper/issues, where the answer to the issue is in this blog post.
Continue readingThe one thing most people have complained about in NavContainerHelper is that you cannot decide where it places it’s temporary files. With the shift to artifacts that got even worse because also artifacts was now placed on the c: drive.
With the shift to BcContainerHelper – this is now possible.
Continue readingWARNING: Very boring long blog post ahead…
Run-AlPipeline is a new function in BcContainerHelper. It has been in preview for a number of releases while being worked on, and a number of partners have already tried to use it. My apologies for changing things under your feet, but to my defense – I did write that the function was in preview.
With version 1.0.8 of BcContainerHelper, Run-AlPipeline is ready for real-life usage… (I think)
Continue reading
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