Updated Solutions to Classic Challenges
A personal website dedicated to helping IT professionals review where we've been, where we are, and maybe where we are headed.
Problem: I recently ran into an SSH Timeout error while trying to execute a “packer build” for an AMI on AWS. This was very confusing to me because the files were tested successfully in a different AWS account.
Read MoreHashiCorp’s Packer has proven to be a useful tool for those working towards those management goals. Packer in an AWS Cloud enables administrators to create customized AMIs by using Packer’s scripting process. This blog post walks through the installation of Packer on an Amazon Linux EC2 Instance.
Read MoreSolution to Amazon EKS kubectl error: “Unable to connect to the server: dial tcp x.x.x.x:443: i/o timeout”
Read MoreBlazor is a feature of .Net that allows for client-side web applications to be built via CSS, HTML, and C#. Apps written in Blazor can be written on almost any platform, including the Mac. This blog post walks through the installation process as documented on the MS Blazor Tutorial website.
Blazor’s tech stack is part of Microsoft’s .Net developer platform. Because of that, the first thing we need to do is install the .Net Software Developer Kit (SDK).
Read MoreThere are a number of good practices to follow when setting up and maintaining systems. Some of these rules are obvious and some not so obvious. One of these rules is to make sure your monitoring tools have no dependency on the thing being monitored. While this may seem obvious, lots of organizations still make this mistake. Sometimes it’s not even clear to them that they’ve created such a dependency. Microsoft ran into this very issue last week during an Azure outage situation. As Mary Jo Foley reported in her All About Microsoft Column, the dashboards used by Microsoft to alert customers about the outage were behind the same authentication system that was having issues. If a company with the size and resources of Microsoft can miss this, then so can the average operations, DevOps, and SRE Teams supporting applications.
Read MoreGitLab is a powerful, all-in-one package for use as a source code repository as well as a full continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD) suite. Using GitLab on AWS for implementing CI/CD tasks is made possible by using an EC2 Instance that’s allocated for use by GitLab as a “runner.” Runners execute the commands included in the pipeline definition. This document walks through the steps used to install the runner software. The software is installed on a typical AWS EC2 Instance running Amazon Linux 2 as an OS. If you’d like to follow along using this blog in a simple proof-of-concept (PoC), it’s acceptable to use choose a free tier option.
Read MoreIt’s been said that a craftsman is only as good as their tools. For developers, DevOps engineers, and SREs the most relied upon tool is the IDE. An IDE, or Integrated Development Environment , is an editor where code is written and sometimes executed. IDEs often include syntax checkers, testing and debugging features, and maybe even code formatting capabilities. Sometimes a specific programming language will ship with an IDE. This was the case back in the day with languages such as GW Basic, Borland’s Turbo Pascal, and Microsoft’s Visual Basic. AWS’s Cloud9 is an editor I thought I’d look into a little closer.
Read MoreAmbient computing is a concept where computing capability is nearly ubiquitous. Computers in an ambient computing paradigm answer responses and require very little in the way of traditional interfaces. I first heard this term coined by Paul Thurrott a few years ago. Examples of devices in this category are the Google hub and Amazon Alexa smart speakers. Asking for information via plain language via voice preceded by a wake word is all that’s needed. The computer is unobtrusive, yet powerful and integrated into a person’s life. That simple yet useful vision changed a bit today with the announcements of several new devices from Amazon. Amazon brought out devices that are in some cases, literally in your face. The days of a computer that vanishes into the the background may be numbered.
Read MoreAWS’ Textract is a service that does as the name suggests, extracts text from documents. The official description from the AWS site is “Textract is a managed machine learning service that automatically extracts text and structured data from virtually any document.” That’s a mouthful of buzzwords, but at it’s core, the service examines a graphical document, finds text in those graphics, then tries to make sense of it where possible, and return the results to an end user.
Read MoreDuring the pandemic a lot about our lives have changed, especially in how we work and communicate with our peers. I’ve especially noticed a rise in the use of video. It is more a part of our work than ever before. Customers too, have asked for more communication via video. This could be due to the fact that we’re all doing zoom / teams or similar such apps. But I’ve also noticed this impacting documentation. There seems to be an appetite for documentation to either be in the form of video or incorporate video in some way. Because of the desire to see more video documentation, I’ve had to expand my skillset beyond MS office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I’m trying to improve my proficiency in iMovie, SnagIt, and OBS.
Read MoreIgneous Systems had a lot to prove at Cloud Field Day 8. They had to show the delegates where they fit in the larger IT landscape now that they aren’t a traditional storage vendor. Participation in Cloud Field Day meant they saw themselves as a player in the cloud arena. Cloud can still be a term that’s hard to define especially for traditional enterprise customers. Vendors have been known to bend definitions to suit their needs. Igneous seems to fit somewhere in between traditional on-premises and cloud. Igneous enables enterprise backup on-premises file data to the cloud service provider (CSP) of their choice.
Read MoreCloud Field Day 8 has lots of familiar names, and a few not-so-familiar names. At least, not as familiar to me. While I know a bit about NetApp, Fortinet, and HashiCorp there’s a company on the list that I’m looking forward to because I don’t know a lot about them - Igneous Systems. While they started as a more traditional storage vendor with a pay-as-you-go as-a-service model, they seem to have pivoted to an unstructured data management / protection as-a-service vendor.
Read MoreThis blog post describes the steps used to install Ansible on Ubuntu for use with AWS.
Read MoreThe Cfn-Linter extension for the Microsoft Visual Studio Code (hereafter referred to as vscode) editor can be a major help to anyone asked to write AWS ClouidFormation Templates. Using a linter may be new to some. Linters are like Grammarly for your code. A good linter will alert you to mistakes before you attempt to compile or otherwise execute your code. Cfn-lint is like Grammarly for CloudFormation. This blog posts describes that install process.
Read MoreCFN-Python-Linter is a tool used to validate AWS CloudFormation templates before they are used. Having the ability to validate the code before finding errors at runtime is a crucial time-saving tool. This blog post details the installation of CFN-Python-Linter on Ubuntu Linux 19.10.
Read MoreQuick steps for installing Microsoft VSCode on Ubuntu Desktop 19.10 using the GUI Tools included in the OS.
Read MoreEarlier I wrote about my experience using the Apple Music beta website using the Tesla Model 3 browser. The website loaded, but there were problems. Login attempts failed with an error. But even worse, music wouldn’t play. I tried again with the browser on the new v10 Tesla software. The https://beta.apple.music.com website worked much better post v10 upgrade. Unfortunately, Tesla owners will have to wait a little longer for a complete solution as there are still problems.
Read MoreThis is Part 3 of a multi-part series. This article will dig deeper into adding tasks such as Product Backlog Items to the board. I’ll also describe a little more my approach to Scrum as I’m both the customer and the developer. In Scrum terms, I’m both the Product Owner and the Scrum Team.
Read MoreThe work for my Long Term app development and hosting project needs an effective method of tracking the work. I’m a single person, so I want something simple and light weight. Having studied Agile and SCRUM, that’s where I’m leaning. Give me a Kanban board where I can track a backlog, Work in progress, and done items, and I’ll be happy.
Read MoreI continue to be on the hunt for an easy to use web development language that talks to databases. I have a couple of ideas I’d like to work on, and I haven’t coded in a while. Moreover, I’d like to create some simple apps that use web code and databases to try different hosting methodologies. It also gives me an opportunity to experiment with various CI/CD tools and Agile tracking apps.
Read More