This is my blog, which I will be updating irregularly. Please remember to take everything I say with a pinch of salt. These are all ramblings of an old man who has nothing better to do.
- Technology Culture: The Sinking Car SyndromeThis is (hopefully) a short blog that will give you back a small piece of your life… In technology, we rightly spend hours pouring over failure in order that we might understand it and therefore fix it and avoid it in the future. This seems a reasonable approach, learn from … Continue reading “Technology Culture: The Sinking Car Syndrome”
- AWS: Install and configure the AWS CLI on a MacbookYou can absolutely get the following from the AWS help pages; but this is the lazy way to get everything you need for a simple single account setup. Run the two commands below to drop the package on your Mac. Then check the versions you have installed: Next you need … Continue reading “AWS: Install and configure the AWS CLI on a Macbook”
- AWS: Automatically Stop and Start your EC2 ServicesBelow is a quick (am busy) outline on how to automatically stop and start your EC2 instances. Step 1: Tag your resources In order to decide which instances stop and start you first need to add an auto-start-stop: Yes tag to all the instances you want to be affected by the start … Continue reading “AWS: Automatically Stop and Start your EC2 Services”
- How to Optimise your Technology Teams Structure to improve flowI have seen many organisations restructure their technology teams over and over, but whichever model they opt for – they never seem to be able to get the desired results with respect to speed, resilience and quality. For this reason organisations will tend to oscillate from centralised teams, which are … Continue reading “How to Optimise your Technology Teams Structure to improve flow”
- Macbook: Fixing the Wireshark Permissions bug “You don’t have permission to capture on that device”If you see the error “The capture session could not be initiated on the device “en0″ (You don’t have permission to capture on that device)” when trying to start a pcap on wireshare you can try installing ChmodBPF; but I suspect you will need to follow the steps below:
- Linux: Automatically renew your certs for a wordpress site using letsencryptIf you want to automatically renew your certs then the easiest way is to setup a cron just to call letsencrypt periodically. Below is an example cron job: First create the bash script to renew the certificate Now enter the script in the following format into nano: Now edit the … Continue reading “Linux: Automatically renew your certs for a wordpress site using letsencrypt”
- Technologists: Please Stop asking for requirements 😎I think you’re a genius! You found this blog and your reading it – what more evidence do I need?! So why do you keep asking others to think for you? There is a harmful bias built into most technology projects that assumes “the customer knows best” and this is … Continue reading “Technologists: Please Stop asking for requirements 😎”
- How to trigger Scaling Events using Stress-ng CommandIf you are testing how your autoscaling policies respond to CPU load then a really simple way to test this is using the “stress” command. Note: this is a very crude mechanism to test and wherever possible you should try and generate synthetic application load.
- How to Install Apps From Anywhere on Apple MacPreviously Macs would allow you to install software from anywhere. Now you will see the error message “NMAPxx.mpkg cannot be opened because its from an unidentified developer”. If you want to fix this and enable apps to be install from anywhere, you will need to run the following command line: … Continue reading “How to Install Apps From Anywhere on Apple Mac”
- Definition: Bonuscidebonuscide noun Definition of bonuscide: Bonuscide is a term used to describe incentive schemes that progressively poisons an organisation by ensuring the flow of discretionary pay is non does not serve the organisations goals. These schemes can be observed in two main ways, the loss of key staff or the … Continue reading “Definition: Bonuscide”
- Part 2: Increasing your Cloud consumption (the sane way)Introduction This article follows on from the “Cloud Migrations Crusade” blog post… A single tenancy datacenter is a fixed scale, fixed price service on a closed network. The costs of the resources in the datacenter are divided up and shared out to the enterprise constituents on a semi-random basis. If … Continue reading “Part 2: Increasing your Cloud consumption (the sane way)”
- The Least Privileged LieIn technology, there is a tendency to solve a problem badly by using gross simplification, then come up with a catchy one liner and then broadcast this as doctrine or a principle. Nothing ticks more boxes in this regard, than the principle of least privileges. The ensuing enterprise scale deadlocks … Continue reading “The Least Privileged Lie”
- AWS: Making use of S3s ETags to check if a file has been alteredI was playing with S3 the other day an I noticed that a file which I had uploaded twice, in two different locations had an identical ETag. This immediately made me think that this tag was some kind of hash. So I had a quick look AWS documentation and this … Continue reading “AWS: Making use of S3s ETags to check if a file has been altered”
- Using TPC-H tools to Create Test Data for AWS Redshift and AWS EMRIf you need to test out your big data tools below is a useful set of scripts that I have used in the past for aws emr and redshift the below might be helpful:
- AWS: Please Fix Poor Error Messages, API standards and Bad DefaultingThis is a short blog, and its actually just simple a plea to AWS. Please can you do three things? North Virginia appears to be the AWS master node. Having this region as a master region causes a large number of support issues (for example S3, KMS, Cloudfront, ACM all … Continue reading “AWS: Please Fix Poor Error Messages, API standards and Bad Defaulting”
- A simple DDOS SYN flood TestGetting an application knocked out with a simple SYN flood is both embarrassing and avoidable. Its also very easy to create a SYN flood and so its something you should design against. Below is the hping3 command line that I use to test my services against SYN floods. I have … Continue reading “A simple DDOS SYN flood Test”
- The Triplication ParadigmIntroduction In most large corporates technology will typically report into either finance or operations. This means that it will tend to be subject to cultural inheritance, which is not always a good thing. One example of where the cultural default should be challenged is when managing IP duplication. In finance or … Continue reading “The Triplication Paradigm”
- Part 1: The Great Public Cloud Crusade…The cloud is hot…. not just a little hot, but smokin hot!! Covid is messing with the economy, customers are battling financially, the macro economic outlook is problematic, vendor costs are high and climbing and security needs more investment every year. What on earth do we do??!! I know…. lets … Continue reading “Part 1: The Great Public Cloud Crusade…”
- External k8gb presentation to Kubernetes SIG multiclusterToday I am a happy bunny!!!! Yury Tsarev (a very clever dude) did a presentation to one of the Kubernetes co-founders Tim Hockin. The demo was one of absa banks opensource projects called K8GB (a cloud native GSLB for K8s): https://www.k8gb.io/ Why do I like K8GB? Because it uses a … Continue reading “External k8gb presentation to Kubernetes SIG multicluster”
- Running Corporate Technology: Smart vs TraditionalThere are two fundamental ways to run technology inside your company (and various states in-between)
- The DAO Ethereum Recursion Bug: El Gordo!If you found my article, I would consider it a reasonable assumption that you already understand the importance of this