Bsics: Install HashiCorp Packer on Amazon Linux

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HashiCorp’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.

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Installation of Blazor on Mac OS X

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Blazor 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).

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Rules for SysAdmins - Keep Systems and Monitoring Seperate

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There 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.

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Transitioning to Video in the Time of Covid

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During 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.

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How To - Install the CFN-LINT CloudFormation Extension for Microsoft Visual Studio Code

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The 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.

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How To - Install CFN-Python-Linter on Ubuntu Linux 19.10 Desktop

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CFN-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.

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Basics - Install Go on Mac OS X

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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.

  1. Download Go for Mac OS X via the website https://golang.org/dl/

  2. Open the downloaded file

  3. Follow the prompts through to completion

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