Thinking aloud: Azure, AWS, DevOps, cars and opinion from Alex Neihaus

  • How to use PowerShell in Chef to install Windows Server features

    Chef — the wildly popular configuration management system, whose motto is “infrastructure as code” — treats Windows as a second-class client, despite all protestations from from its creator, Opscode, to the contrary. Still, you can do some cool stuff with Windows and Chef in PowerShell, as long as you can stand the Ruby “domain specific language” that Opscode…

  • How to display a nicely formatted path in PowerShell

    I’m setting up a Chef environment on Windows, and like most devops/architect tools, you need to set the path environment variable to let the system know where all the good stuff is. (Path is one of those things that never dies.) Displaying that path is easy if you use the old Windows command prompt shell.…

  • How to use Route 53 private DNS with EFS mount targets

    How to use the Elastic File System with DNS

  • How to tag AWS EC2 AMI snapshots with a tag from the owning AMI

    Sync up Name tags between EC2 AMIs and EC2 snapshots

  • Time to pop some stuff off the stack

    It’s been a swirl lately. That means limited time to post here. It pains me when I don’t post here regularly. Mind you, I am always thinking about things to say. I’d rather just get it out there in short form than forget stuff. Herewith, a “short stack”. (How’s that for mixing pancake and computer…

  • When cryptographers say don’t, they really mean it

    Wow, what a week in the public debate on “exceptional” encryption! The OPM debacle, the MIT paper detailing why what the government wants can never be secure and the government’s odd admixture of fear-mongering mixed with hand-ringing all came together for me in the help text for iCloud Keychain (screenshot nearby). It simply says,”Your information…

  • AWS: Big? Check. Impenetrable? Nope.

    Support done right

  • Amazon: say what you think about Echo, as long as you like it

    Those of you who know me know that I abhor what I call “marketing in-authenticity”. You know what that is: the uncomfortable feeling you have when you suspect there’s daylight between some marketing claim and the reality of a product. Or the cheesy feeling — the inkling you are being manipulated — when people (today,…

  • You say PowerShell braces, I say PowerShell assignments

    I am very gratified with the increasing traffic this blog is receiving from a series of posts that describe how to automate tasks in EC2 in AWS with PowerShell. You can see them all here. As with any creative activity involving language, style is both personal and important. I’ve been getting the impression as I read others’…

  • How to manage EC2 EBS volume snapshots with PowerShell

    One of the best features of Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes in AWS is the capability to incrementally “snapshot” these volumes to more durable S3 storage. Everyone knows that if you don’t create these snapshots, one day your production EBS volume will go “poof” and disappear. Is that why the standard AWS icon, nearby, for a snapshot looks vaguely…

  • IRS tax scam calls: dangerous and laughable

    Just listen to the voicemail I received from a spoofed DC phone number today: Chilling, ain’t it? There are so many red flags in this message. Anyone who’s ever tried to contact the IRS knows it’s positively Kafkaesque trying to get someone on the phone. And even if you could get someone from the IRS…

  • I am not an attorney and I don’t play one on TV

    Patriot Act: BAD. Section 215 very bad. We’ve known this for a long time (thanks, Snowden). But now the appeals court for the Second Circuit has ruled that the bulk collection of phone metadata is illegal. Finally. I’m emotional about this because the executive branch has used a bad law to threaten dire consequences and force people and…