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 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 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 MoreLog 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
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.
Read MoreSlack, and the new wave of enterprise chat applications like it, show their value through integration with other tools. One of the most popular integrations is with GitHub. The Github app for Slack documents select GitHub actions in a Slack channel. With the actions logged in a Slack channel teams don't have to jump between tools to look for for status updates. Moreover, teams can search through Slack's logs for history related to commits, issues, pulls, etc. for a project.
The instructions for installing the App are located at https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/232289568-GitHub-for-Slack . I have attempted to walk through those same instructions an log my notes along the way.
Read MoreSlack is a collaboration tool that's well known among the DevOps and developer communities. It has been widely embraced due to the extensible nature of the app. In fact, it's safe to say that Slack is more of a platform than just a chat tool. Slack supports "bots" which are apps that can do all sorts of things, from answering simple questions, to deploying software.
Slack is used primarily by private organizations, however, government agencies have begun to test the waters. Slack is actively pursuing wider use by government customers. They recently posted a position on popular job board LinkedIn for a "Manager, Government Strategy" to work in Washington, DC. Specifically, the role is to "manage relationships with government accounts and help develop our government program at Slack " The posting can be read at this link (https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/manager-government-strategy-at-slack-577290692/). If Slack has their way, more government agencies will adopt it.
Read MoreI recently had an experience which underscored for me the power of AWS CloudFormation. My test lab is almost exclusively run in the cloud now. So when I need to demo things before discussing them with a customer, I build environments in AWS. One such environment was for SQL Server 2016. The original idea was to use Windows Server 2012 as the OS with SQL Server 2016 as the database platform. The customer recently decided that we should look at Windows Server 2016 as the OS instead.
I was able to adjust to the customer's request by altering two lines of code - one per EC2 instance. That's it! Just two lines of code, and I could redeploy the whole setup. The only lines that needed to be updated were the ones referencing the ImageId property. Previously, I would have built these servers in VMware workstation or Hyper-V and it would have taken a few hours. Now, it's just minutes.
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