Not Your Dad's IT

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.

Install CentOS 8 on VMware Fusion 11.5 Error - Pane is Dead

January 24, 2020 by Nathaniel Avery in Bugs

Problem:

Installing CentOS 8 on VMware Fusion 11.5 produces an error.

“Pane is dead” appears at the bottom of the screen. Rebooting doesn’t make the problem go away.

Solution:

The easiest solution I can find is to conduct a custom install selecting Red Hat 8 as the OS and set the BIOS type to UEFI. When the virtual machine boots, attach the CentOS 8 .iso file, reboot, and continue the install as normal.

Root Cause:

As best I can figure it, the root cause seems to be tied to how Fusion identifies CentOS 8. Fusion appears to identify it as “CentOS 5 or earlier 64-bit” which has either hardware settings, drivers, or both, that are incompatible with the CentOS 8 installer.

Edit:

While I used UEFI, the custom install option will also work with “Legacy BIOS” selected.

Tip - Find Jenkins Default Username and Password for AWS Bitnami EC2 AMI

December 18, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Tip, DevOps

Log onto the AMI via SSH
Go to the log folder: type: cd /opt/bitnami/var/log
Get the username . type : sudo more pre-start.log |grep user
Get the password . type: sudo more pre-start.log |grep password

AWS EC2 M6g Instance Types - What You Need to Know about New ARM CPUs

December 05, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Enterprise, Conferences

AWS caused quite a stir during this year’s annual re:Invent conference when they announced not only were they making their own ARM-based microprocessors called the Graviton 2, but also using those chips to power a new AWS instance type - the EC2 M6g. AWS claims the new instances not only provide several advantages over Intel based processors powering the large majority of the fleet (such as the m5), but that the instance types will also cost less. Truth be told, most customers will find that the of a vm is already pretty low, however, savings are savings. Out of curiosity, I decided to dig a little deeper into what that new instance is like during launch week.

Troubleshooting - AWS EC2 - "Load key '/documents/awskey.pem' : bad permissions

November 27, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Bugs, Tip

Problem:

This error is encountered when attempting to connect to an EC2 instance via SSH with a .pem file that doesn’t have the appropriate linux filesystem permissions in place.

Recommended Fix:

CD to the directory where the file exists
Type : sudo chmod 400 <filename>

The next time you run ssh it should work.

Background:

I ran into this issue on a Macbook Pro running OS X. My file permissions were “too open” for use. The file permissions before I made the change were set to 0644 which threw the error.

Weekend Distraction - Tesla Enhanced Summon

September 30, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Weekend Distraction

I tried out the enhanced summon feature of the Tesla this weekend. The feature was delivered as part of the massive version 10 software upgrade. I was pleasantly surprised by how well it works at this early stage. It’s clearly in beta, and it operates like a beta. It’s slow. It won’t cross a named street. It may be impractical to use in a number of real world situations. But why dwell on the negatives when we have the start of something that’s super cool?!

Cloud Field Day 6 Preview - Solo.Io

September 24, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Enterprise, Appearances

Solo.io is set to present to the Tech Field Day delegates and audience at the upcoming Cloud Field Day 6 event September 25-27 in Silicon Valley. Different events sometimes hit upon repeating themes. At Security Field Day 2, microsegmentation was the consistent theme. Cloud Field Day 6 is shaping up to be very much about kubernetes + service mesh. Solo.Io is a vendor in the service mesh business. Right now, that’s a good business to be in because it’s one of the hottest trends in the IT industry at the moment. Solo.io will tell us more about their offerings and what sets them apart from the numerous other companies operating in that space.

Cloud Field Day 6 Preview - HashiCorp

September 22, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in DevOps, Enterprise

Cloud Field Day 6 will take place in Silicon Valley September 25-27 2019. Cloud Field Day is a focused version of the Stephen Foskett’s Tech Field Day series of events. While Tech Field Day covers a broad array of IT topics, Cloud Field Day places the spotlight on cloud technology vendors. The events gather a group of independent delegates from the tech blogosphere to hear presentations from emerging and established technology vendors. The vendors often demonstrate either new products or features of existing offerings. The vendors I’m most interested in hearing from is HashiCorp. This could be a mini-recap of HashiCorp announcements made at their recent HashiConf conference, a deep dive on an existing product, or maybe an announcement of some sort. The beauty of Tech Field Day is that you never know.

Basics - Install Go on Mac OS X

September 17, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Install, Basics

The Go programming language has been popular for a few years now. Developers like Go because it’s modern and fits well with the types of architectures in use today. Some of the cool guy features developers gain when they use Go are around improved garbage collection and networking.

Like many other apps on Mac OS X, Go is easy to install via a package.

Download Go for Mac OS X via the website https://golang.org/dl/
Open the downloaded file
Follow the prompts through to completion

Weekend Distraction - Use Apple Music on Tesla Model 3

September 15, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Tip, Weekend Distraction

Many Tesla owners have expressed a desire to use Apple’s Music service in their cars. The preferred way to do this for most owners would be to use Apple Car Play. Car Play could be really amazing given the large amount of screen real estate to work with in Tesla vehicles. Ideally, it could be positioned in such a way that it doesn’t interfere with other screen activities. Unfortunately, we don’t have an officially supported method of Car Play. Recently, Tesla owners were given hope of access to at least the music portion of the Apple service via the newly released Apple Music Web App. It saddens me to report, however, that the Apple Music web app doesn’t work with the current browser version.

Installing Azure Data Studio on Mac OSX

August 30, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Install

In this blog post, I describe the installation process for Azure Data Studio on Mac OSX. I’ve decided to download and install the “insiders build” from GitHub.

How I Spent $1000 on Azure in 1 Month!

August 19, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Tip, POC

My most recent Azure cloud statement was shocking. In one month, I was able to run up a bill for close to $1000. Now, for a corporate account, that might not be much, but for a personal account, it’s a bit much. I’m just a regular guy with a wife and kids. I use Azure for learning and testing concepts that I pitch at work to customers. Proof of concept testing is usually quick and costs just a few dollars a month. I’ve never seen a personal account reach this number in a single month.

Banyan And Zero Trust in a Post VPN World

August 12, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Enterprise

“Zero Trust” is a big security concept / buzzword at the moment. When most people think Zero Trust, they often think policies around systems in the form of firewalls or enclaves. Banyan, however, sees it differently. Banyan brings the least privilege access model to remote access. Banyan positions their solution as a replacement to VPN spurred on by Security Teams and DevOps professionals.

DevOps Cram Sheet

July 02, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in DevOps

The DevOps movement is still very much alive and finding its way from the commercial world into the Government. Government adoption, like in other places tend to find themselves on a spectrum between setting up and managing a CI/CD pipeline to full on broken down silos and self-managing teams. It’s because of this range of experiences that I decided to compile a quick cheat sheet that help folks cram on the subject if they find that their traditional silo is being disrupted by a DevOps initiative.

Security Wasn't Always My Day Job

June 23, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Enterprise

Microsegmentation has changed my view of who should be on a security team. Security isn’t my day job. Well, that’s what I used to think before this week. After seeing many, many examples of security issues that can cripple a network or even leak data, my position as they say, has evolved. As a Solutions Architect, I need to find new ways to secure systems I design and products that I recommend.

Quick and Dirty - SQL Server 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2017 Migration

June 10, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Enterprise, Tip

SQL Server 2008 R2 is quickly approaching EOL. Some are still looking for ways to migrate their databases to newer releases of SQL Server such as SQL Server 2017. This blog post details a simple method for migrating simple databases using detach and attach. By simple, I mean databases without complicated transnational replication technologies such as mirroring. I imagine this method would used for databases supporting simple applications.