VMWare VSphere Center Server Appliance (VCSA) updates failing

I was trying to update from VCSA 6.5 U2 20000 to 6.5 U2 22000 and was being disconnected during the "running pre-scripts" phase and the web GUI would not come back up.

It turned out to be an expired root password. The user "cabernocht" on the VMWare community forums figured it out.

I used SSH to log in to the VCSA system, get to the shell, and run chage --list root to check. Then I reset the root password with passwd and disabled password expiry and cleared password history with chage -M -1 root; echo "" > /etc/security/opasswd

After the fix, I tried the update again. The web GUI still disconnected during the "running pre-scripts" phase, but when I connected with SSH I was able to verify the log with less /var/log/vmware/applmgmt/software-packages.log and see that it had been applied. It had tried to output that the update had succeeded and that I should reboot but it had turned the web GUI off during the update so I'm not sure how that was supposed to work. Anyway, I ran reboot at the shell and after a few minutes, I was able to connect to the web GUI at port 5480 again and it reported the new version.

See https://communities.vmware.com/message/2815256#2815256

Chrome not able to find Chromecast device

After way too long trying to figure out why my phone was able to find and cast to a Chromecast device on my local network but the Chrome browser running on my mac desktop and laptop were not, I came across this "Experimental" setting:

chrome://flags/#media-router-cast-allow-all-ips

By default now, if your network is not using private addresses typical of home routers (such as 192.168.x.x) or corporate users (such as 10.x.x.x) and instead using an internet routable public IP range, then Chrome simply won't find it. If you enable this option to allow it to communicate with non-private address spaces and try again (you might need to restart chrome) then it will see and cast fine.

This is a change in default behaviour that Google introduced at some point in the last year or two because it wasn't a problem in the past.